Ghosts of the Past
by Nimbus Llewelyn
Summary: Sequel to Child of the Storm. Harry's life has changed a lot over the past year, what with the return of his father, Thor, murder attempts by everything from HYDRA assassins to Elder Gods keeping him on his toes and making a few new friends. But while Chthon and HYDRA are gone, all sorts of dark things have been stirred up, things thought long gone. And guess who they're after...
1. Chapter 1: A Light Beginning

**Told you there was going to be a sequel.**

 **Anyhow, before I say anything else, welcome, one and all, to the sequel of** _ **Child of the Storm**_ **. Which means that if you haven't read that yet, get your rear in gear and get over there before you even look at this chapter.**

 **You know, I was never sure if I was going to get to this point. But here I am, and I owe it to each and every one of you.**

 **Now, onto the chapter. It's a bit shorter than my usual, partly because it was stitched together from a couple of other scenes I'd written, partly because it was written in conjunction with the epic epilogue and in between all sorts of real life stuff, and partly because it's a teaser to whet your appetite. So, settle down and enjoy the ride.**

Carol sat bolt upright, gasping and drenched in sweat. After a few moments, she settled down somewhat and looked around. She was still in her room in what had quickly been dubbed Avengers Mansion. Her shield was propped up by the bed, within easy reach. It was the middle of the night. She was safe.

So why weren't the nightmares going away?

She took a deep breath and took stock, remembering what had led up to this. A year ago, her life had been normal, if fairly dull, a routine of school, football practise, home, interspersed with handling creeps. Then she had met and swiftly been befriended by Harry Thorson, demigod son of Thor, suicidally noble trouble magnet and adorable dork extraordinaire, and been sucked into his crazy world.

She'd met gods and monsters, heroes and villains, been caught up in all sorts of terrifying and exhilarating life or death fights on a literally epic scale, discovered that she was the great-granddaughter of Captain America and Peggy Carter and had the super soldier genes to match (once they'd been given a magical kick in the ass – also, magic was real, really real), been loaned the world's most terrifying mood ring and narrowly avoided dying in a battle for all reality in London.

The latter was the source of her nightmares – though that time when she was half frozen and nearly eaten by a giant demon werewolf in the Rockies at Easter (and would have been, were it not for the timely and extremely violent intervention of the Winter Soldier) almost made guest appearances.

After the various medals and awards presentations, the gift of her shield – which was now emitting a comforting glow. Go magic – and the haranguing from her uncle about putting herself in danger, which was followed by furtive enquiries about what it was like to fly outside of a plane and a grudging acceptance that he wouldn't mention it to her parents, ever, she'd felt knackered.

Not quite as much as Harry, who was quite obviously suffering a bit from post-briefly-dying (which she knew from personal experience, or near enough, sucked), post-almost-losing-his-dad, post-being-possessed-by-an-elder-god, post-getting-his-long-dead-mom-back-and-losing-her-again trauma. Also, putting the world back together, while it hadn't looked like much, had probably been ridiculously exhausting.

Even so, she was tired and had felt justified in following his lead and enjoying a good summer's rest, while the adults dealt with shenanigans like clearing up HYDRA and purging them from SHIELD and various government agencies worldwide, because apparently HYDRA was like locker room smell and got everywhere if you weren't careful.

Now if only her brain would get with the program and not make her nights into reruns of 'Carol Danvers Almost Dies Horribly: the Greatest Hits'.

She jumped as the door creaked open, every nerve twanging like a bow string.

"Carol?"

She relaxed again. It was Harry.

"Hey Harry," she said quietly. "You startled me."

"Sorry," he said, walking over and sitting down on the bed. It still surprised her how much he'd changed. When they'd first met, he'd been short, skinny and bespectacled. Cute in an adorable, hobbity sort of way. Now, he was almost as tall as she was – and she herself was nearly six feet tall – and growing still. Skinny had become lean, with muscle developing on bone. The glasses had disappeared thanks, apparently, to the Asgardian answer to laser eye surgery. He was still cute, but less Frodo, more Aragorn.

Of course, these changes were all physical, but they went beyond that. He was more confident now, more knowing and perceptive, traits that reminded her of Diana. Of course, this probably had something to do with the fact that he was a telepath.

As if to cement this resemblance, he abruptly reached out and hugged her. Carol stiffened and, noticing this, Harry leaned back. "Sorry," he repeated, self consciously running his hands through his eternally messy hair. "I... I wasn't trying to... I just wanted... blargh." He shook his head.

"I get your point," Carol said, smiling slightly and inwardly reflecting that one thing hadn't changed. He was still a complete dork. "It was just... a shock."

Harry nodded. "You've been having nightmares," he said. It wasn't a question.

"How did you guess?" Carol asked, forcing her tone to be light. "You use your mind mojo?"

"No," Harry said. "Though the nightmares and the psychic turmoil did wake me up."

"Oh. Sorry," she said.

"You have nothing to be sorry for," Harry said firmly. "And I've been where you are."

"You have?" Carol asked, eyebrow raised. Despite Harry's positive deluge of traumatic experiences, occasional outbursts of temper and nigh homicidal rage aside, he seemed to be remarkably well adjusted.

Harry nodded. "I ran into a Dementor about a year ago, a month before I met you – they're magical creatures that feed off emotion. Just being near them means that you relive the worst experiences of your life," he said.

Carol shuddered. "That's horrible," she said.

Harry nodded. "I remembered my mother's murder," he said, and smiled bitterly. "Thing is, I didn't entirely hate it – at the time, it was the only time I'd heard mum's voice. But... yeah. Nightmares. Been there. Not as badly, but I've been there."

"How did you deal with them?" Carol asked, hating the way her voice went.

"With time, support and a bit of magic," Harry said. "Professor Xavier and my grandma helped fix it. We can talk to the Professor about it in the morning."

"Yeah," Carol said. "In the morning." Between now and then, there were hours of sleep. Hours more of nightmares. Not something she was looking forward to.

Harry picked up on her tone – and perhaps her thoughts – and hesitated. "I," he began, then shook his head.

"What is it?"

"I... I could try and help," he said. "I am a telepath, after all. I couldn't fix all of it, but maybe I could take the edge off the worst of it – the nightmares, I mean." He looked up at her. "If you want me to."

Carol paused for a long moment, thinking this over. Then she nodded. "I do," she said quietly. "And I trust you."

Harry blinked, smiled, then shuffled onto his knees, facing her. Carol mirrored his position. "I'm going to need to focus," he said. "Which means that I can't just, you know, think at you, like Professor Xavier can. So..." He slowly raised his hands to her temples, gently brushing away strands of hair which had been stuck to her skin by sweat. "Just relax," he said distantly as he splayed his fingers out, thumbs resting on her cheekbones, index and middle fingers pressed to her temple while his ring and little fingers lay just below her ears, touch feather light and delicate at first, then settling into a gentle grip. "I'll be gentle."

Carol, having grown up with a serving soldier for an uncle and the ever dirty minded Jean-Paul for a friend, mentally jumped to the worst possible conclusion and Harry blushed, visible even in the moonlight, shifting awkwardly. "That _really_ doesn't help," he muttered.

"Then maybe you should have picked different words," Carol retorted.

"Fair point," Harry admitted, and took a deep breath, closing his eyes. Carol mimicked him on general principles. "Okay. Stay calm. If there's anything you don't want me to see, just imagine a locked door."

After a moment, Carol let out a soft gasp. "You're in me," she said. "I can feel you." Then she went bright red as she processed this, a crushing weight of embarrassment bearing down on her. "I mean, in my head."

"That _is_ how telepathy works," Harry murmured, going red himself, but maintaining his composure.

There was a long pause. "God, this is awkward."

Harry sighed. "Less of the running commentary, please?" he asked.

"Yeah, sorry. It's just a bit of a shock," Carol said. "And... I'm a bit nervous."

"I get that," Harry said, then grimaced as Carol twitched slightly. "Sorry. Old memories might be reawakened as part of the process. It's like stirring a cup of tea."

"For an Asgardian demigod Prince, you are impossibly British."

"That's not my fault. Just move past them," Harry retorted, then let out a little sigh. "Ah. Here we are." He hissed sympathetically. "Oh, Carol... you've had some cowboys in here."

"Yeah, no kidding," she muttered, and gulped. "It hurts," she said, voice uncharacteristically small and vulnerable, so out of place coming from her mouth that it was positively jarring. One side-effect of this kind of telepathic delving was that it tended to bring all kinds of emotions bubbling to the surface, in the face of which tough-guy/tough-girl façades tended to crumble.

"I know," Harry said gently. "My grandma said that this sort of thing is like a cut gone bad, but in your mind. So I need to clean it out."

"Okay."

"If at any point this hurts, or you feel like something is wrong, tell me, and I'll stop. It's your mind, after all."

"Just do it," Carol said, muscles tensing.

"Hey. Relax."

Carol let out an explosive breath, but did just that. And for a long time, there was silence. Any outward observer would have noticed a soft aura of golden-white light form around them. If they had looked closer, they might have seen an expression of worried concentration on one face and a forcing down of fear on the other. Looking even closer, they would have seen tears, sparkling like diamonds in the eldritch light surrounding them, rolling down both cheeks.

This continued for maybe an hour, before Harry let the long sigh of one whose complex and difficult labour has been completed to if not perfection, then moderate satisfaction. "Better?" he asked.

"Yeah," Carol said, a smile spreading across her face. Then the smile faded. "Such a lonely childhood."

"Ah, yeah, those are just old memories. They must not have settled yet," Harry said. "It'll pass. Stay with me."

"So very alone," Carol continued, her tone distant. Then she opened her eyes, fixing Harry with a look that seemed to go right through him. "Locked in a cupboard for years and years. You were so _lonely_."

Harry's eyes snapped open and he stared at her, wide eyed, shocked. "How the _hell_ are you doing that?" he hissed sharply.

"You were lonely then and... you're still lonely now, aren't you?" Carol said slowly, speaking as if she hadn't heard him. "Afraid that no one will listen, and even if they do, that they won't understand you. That they'll be afraid of you."

Harry didn't answer. What could he say? He could hardly say no, because, somehow or other, Carol was in _his_ head, reading _his_ mind. He couldn't say yes, because it was redundant. And asking how she'd got into his head would just be deflecting.

"You opened the door," Carol said. "And doors can be walked through in either direction." She paused. "Sorry. I didn't mean to, but… it happened."

Oh. So that was how, Harry thought. As he did, he vaguely noticed that fresh tears were rolling down his cheeks.

Any further thoughts were driven out of his head as Carol pounced on him, pulling him into a ferociously tight hug. This had the effect of breaking the psychic connection, but at this point words, whether conveyed verbally or psychically, were unnecessary. The hug carried both heartfelt thanks and an assurance that yes, she would understand. She wasn't afraid of him. And she trusted him.

OoOoO

In the morning, Carol and Harry didn't wake up with the others. Accordingly, Natasha went to check on them. After finding Harry's room empty, she half expected the scene she beheld when she quietly entered Carol's room.

The bed covers had been spread all over the bed in a tangled mess, one almost as complex as Harry and Carol. The two teens, still dressed in their pyjamas, were loosely entwined, half sprawled over the bed, half wrapped around each other. Harry had curled into a strange sort of ball, knees tucked up into his chest, with an arm around Carol and one of her legs squeezed between both of his, his face buried in her hair.

Correspondingly, one of her arms had slipped under his body and her hand had snaked its way around the pillow he was using, while her other leg trailed off loosely. And their free hands had, one way or another, drifted down into the space in between them, fingers interlacing.

Natasha watched them for a long moment, then carefully closed the door and let them be.

OoOoO

"Natasha, are my son and Carol well?" Thor asked.

"They seem to be, since they're sleeping together," Natasha said calmly.

This comment provoked a number of reactions.

Thor's eyes nearly popped out. Jane choked on her water. Steve one-upped her by performing a spectacular spit-take right into Tony's face. Sirius let out a loud 'Ha!' Loki and Pepper's eyebrows both shot straight upwards. Bruce paused and scrutinised Natasha's expression carefully, as did Remus. Fandral, smug smile upon his face, accepted a jingling purse from Volstagg. Hogun simply raised an eyebrow. And Darcy, needless to say, let out a piercing wolf-whistle.

Clint and Bucky, meanwhile, both recognising Natasha's tone, smiled identical small smiles.

"Well, Thor, he certainly takes after you," Fandral said, counting his winnings, smug smile still in pride of place. "Bed hopping at such a young age."

"Not surprised," Darcy commented. "I'm guessing that Thor didn't spend many nights in the same bed at that age."

"It took a little time to pick up speed, but yes, you guess correctly, Lady Darcy," Fandral said.

"I don't know," Jane said, shooting a look at Thor. "I think that it's a little young."

"I wasn't aware that there was an age limit on platonically sharing a bed," Bruce said quietly, still eyeing Natasha. "Which is what I'm pretty sure they were doing."

Natasha smirked. "It is," she said, and shrugged at the resultant mass change in expression. "It's not my fault that you all jumped to the wrong conclusion."

"I don't care," Tony said, wiping his dripping face clean and ignoring Steve's mortified apologies. "I'm still blaming you."

Natasha shrugged again, as if to say that he could do so if he wished, it was no concern of hers.

"Perhaps not quite so prodigious after all," Fandral said sourly, returning the purse to a grinning Volstagg, his smile having turned upside down in a fashion usually only seen in cartoons.

Thor shrugged. "I cannot say that I am bothered," he said, and smirked. "But then again, I am not the one who has just lost money."

Fandral glowered at him.

"What interests me is why they were sharing a bed in the first place," Steve said sternly, having given up on getting Tony to accept his apologies and instead neatly seguing into an almost fatherly protectiveness.

"Carol's not been sleeping well, probably because she's been having nightmares," Pepper said. "She hasn't been talking about it, but I can read between the lines. If I had to guess, Harry sensed her having the nightmare and went in to check on her. After that, he ended up staying to help her sleep."

Thor nodded. "I am of a like mind," he said.

"Then why hasn't she talked about it?" Jane asked.

"Warriors do not like to speak of such things, when they happen," Volstagg said. "Take Hogun, for example."

"Yeah, but Hogun barely speaks at all," Darcy pointed out. "Though you do have a point. Carol's the stubborn type."

"I wonder, where could she possibly have got that from?" Bucky muttered sarcastically.

"Do you mean me?" Steve asked, sounding half surprised, half offended.

"Well, Peggy was almost as bad, but face it, Steve: you don't know the meaning of the words 'give up'," Bucky said dryly.

"I take it that you decided to let them sleep?" Loki asked, and Natasha nodded.

"Damn right," Tony said and when everyone turned to him, he shrugged. "Hey, they're in the arms of someone that they love and trust. Let 'em have their moment."

Everyone started at him in stunned silence. Whether this was at the fact that he'd passed up the opportunity to make an inappropriate joke or at the 'love' comment remained to be seen.

"Love?" Steve asked.

"Well, yeah, in the 'I love you guys', sense," Tony said casually. "Also," he added. "It'll be hilarious when they wake up and try and explain it."

And just like that, normal service was restored.

" _Agape,_ " Bruce said thoughtfully. "It fits."

"Actually, I think that _philia_ would be more accurate," Natasha said, and Bruce inclined his head.

"Uh, translation for those of us who do not speak ancient gibberish?" Darcy asked.

" _Agape_ is Ancient Greek for unconditional love, like between parents and children," Sirius said. " _Philia_ is platonic, friendly love." He shrugged at the surprised expressions. "My family insisted that I learn ancient languages. It might have been something about understanding spells better, which makes no sense since almost all of the European and American ones are in Latin – bad Latin at that. I didn't pay that much attention, but some things stuck."

"Actually, _Storge_ is a more direct translation for familial love," Natasha remarked. _"Agape_ can mean familial love, but it often means more religious love, like loving God."

"Why did you peg Harry and Carol as the first, then?" Clint asked, turning to Bruce.

Bruce shrugged. "They're not romantic, but I figured that they'd gone through too much to be just friends," he said.

"You think they'll end up in love?" Darcy said, eyebrow raised. "Even though it's a total cliché?"

"Clichés are clichés for a reason, Darcy," Loki pointed out. "There is an element of truth to them."

"Good point," Darcy conceded.

"Trust me," Sirius said authoritatively. "Harry's just like his dad. If he ends up in love, we'll all know." He leaned back. "He could be forming his own Marauders, you know."

"That would make sense," Thor said.

"Wait, do you mean that you guys _snuggled_?" Darcy asked, incredulous and delighted.

"I wouldn't say that," Thor said. "Instead, I would say that amongst ourselves, we were less bothered than most by personal boundaries, a product of our time as animagi and, in Remus' case, a werewolf." He eyed Sirius. "Some more than others."

"I did nothing untoward."

"You used my _face_ as a _pillow_ ," Thor said, sounding aggrieved.

"And that is how I know that, god powers or not, you have a very hard head," Sirius said casually.

"Please tell me that there are photos of this."

"I don't think that there are," Remus said, then smiled slightly. "But I do remember it quite well and I believe that the best pensieves were made from Asgardian design."

"Laying hands on one should not be difficult," Loki confirmed, with a smirk of his own.

Thor sighed.

Everything was, as these things went, as normal. And when Harry and Carol awoke, there was indeed much teasing and both blushed so red that they could have quite easily stood in for traffic lights, stammering, hesitating and mumbling incoherently on a prize winning scale when they tried and failed miserably to explain it.

OoOoO

The normality continued, as the excellent summer weather went on. A number of the Avengers, however, were off-site and not present to take advantage of it. Natasha was on a mission, Clint was off doing something vague and personal, while Bruce was off on academic business having been approached for a collaboration by a Doctor Maya Hansen. Tony had pouted for a week and would have done so for longer if his attention had not been occupied by Pepper's oncoming due date.

Pepper herself drifted around gracefully in billowy long dresses, being one of those women who positively glowed while pregnant. Indeed, at one point, Harry could have sworn that she actually was glowing. In any case, she seemed to be practising for imminent motherhood by ensuring that everyone who went outside was suitably covered in suntan lotion. And by everyone, this meant everyone, from Harry to Tony to, at one point, an absolutely baffled Volstagg.

Sirius and Remus had vanished to who knew where, a holiday trip to really catch-up and to cheer-up, because Remus had lost his job. This was not because he had been fired, but because rumours of his lycanthropy almost certainly started by a certain Professor Snape had found their way around the parents of Hogwarts students and, with that group rather on edge following the death of Luna Lovegood, meant that the governors had voted to politely ask him to resign. In other words, jump rather than be pushed.

Under the circumstances, he was holding up well, possibly because of the news that Thor's patience with Snape had evaporated thanks to this latest incident and the potions master now had a small cloud following him around wherever he went, periodically drenching him with rain, sleet, snow and hail, with the occasional miniature lightning bolt thrown in for good measure. However, Sirius had decided that Remus was in need of cheering up and equally decided that neither hell nor high water nor Remus himself was going to prevent him from doing so.

Steve and Bucky had spent some time touring New York and dealing with the inevitable media attention that came with the fact that another previously long lost war hero had popped up out of nowhere. The cover story was pretty close to the truth – HYDRA had found Bucky after his fall, experimented on him and frozen him, keeping him as a souvenir. He had been recovered by the Avengers during the Battle of London. His robotic arm, otherwise something of a giveaway, had been replaced by Tony with one that near perfectly mimicked a human arm while retaining the striking power of the old one and adding all sorts of bells and whistles. For instance, it could shift to being more obviously armoured and greatly resembling his previous arm, red star and all, for combat situations or - and this went unspoken - for occasions when it might be useful to conjure up the ghost of the Winter Soldier.

Steve had also spent much of that time avoiding Carol, whose reluctant patience and desire to earn his respect had steadily begun curdling into hurt and resentment. As a result, Harry wasn't especially pleased with Steve either, and a number of the other Avengers had taken to giving him pointed looks and attempted to draw him into conversation on the subject. Steve, however, had had years of experience with the media in both the forties and the present and was therefore surprisingly adept at slipping sideways or, incorporating his considerable skills as a commando, vanishing entirely when the subject came up.

Jane, meanwhile, had gone off with Doctor Selvig to give a talk at an astrophysics conference about the implications of what was quickly becoming known as 'Red Sky Day'.

The Warriors Three and Sif dropped in and out, with latter and Loki going on a number of cautious dates, in between he and Thor travelling to meet with various pantheons and groups of supernatural beings to tamp down remaining anxiety over Red Sky Day and explain just what happened.

This left Harry and the other kids largely at liberty to take advantage of the excellent summer weather, which ensured by Thor, meant that most of those present congregated by the convenient large swimming pool.

On the first day of this informal pool party/hanging out/whatever, which included most of his friends but for Ron and Hermione. In the former case, it seemed that Mrs Weasley unsurprisingly wanted to keep her children as close to her as possible. In the latter… well, Harry didn't know, but he imagined it was broadly the same thing.

Also present were his cousin Jean, her friend Scott (at first because he had a car, though Harry quickly found himself warming to the older boy) and Bobby, all of which Harry wanted to get to know without impending death breathing down their necks or just after impending death had spent some time breathing down their necks.

The only real downside to all this, Harry felt, as he changed into a pair of green swimming trunks, was that Jean was telepathic and almost certainly looked incredible in a swimsuit. Certainly, his future self's written remark that she was 'disconcertingly attractive', definitely fit the bill, especially since she treated much like a baby brother.

And, you know, if someone actually tried to get him to swim. That would be a definite problem.

"Hey, Harry, you ready?"

Harry turned, opening the door with a wave of his hand. And his eyes nearly popped out.

Carol was standing in the doorway, wearing a swimsuit. It was one of a kind that he would later be informed was known as a tankini. It was black, with a yellow lightning bolt criss-crossing the front. It was also tight and there was a thin gap of exposed skin between top and bottom. This was something Harry noticed, in such a way that his own swimsuit felt tight and he was profoundly grateful for his capacity to conceal this fact with his telekinesis.

Carol raised an eyebrow. "Earth to Harry," she said, tone superficially amused. But even at its most passive, Harry's telepathy could pick up the worry, defensiveness, irritation, all mixed in with something he couldn't quite identify, but it intensified as her eyes travelled over him. It felt… reluctantly pleased? This in itself was something of a surprise, since he was very conscious of the pale but very visible scars on his chest, courtesy of Daken's claws. And then there was the thick lock of white hair he'd developed following Chthon's possession, which all evidence seemed to indicate was here to stay. While Darcy had informed him that it looked 'wicked' and 'dangerous', Wanda had said that it made him look rather dashing, he wasn't quite so convinced. In any case, this wasn't most prominent among Carol's feelings.

No, most prominent among those emotions was a sinking feeling, a sense best translated 'oh god please tell me he isn't going to turn into another drooling moron'. The last was surprisingly distinctive and helped prevent Harry's brain from melting and dribbling out of his ears.

"Nice, um, lightning bolt," he ventured, subtly shaking his head to dispel a line of mental inquiry that wondered how Carol would look if a pair of long, tight boots were added to the ensemble.

Carol smirked, and underneath the smirk, Harry could feel relief. On impulse as they descended the stairs, he added telepathically, _I'm your friend first. Everything else comes second._

This earned him a brilliant smile that did not help the tightness in the trunks whatsoever. _Guess I was a tad obvious, huh_ , came the reply.

 _Only to me,_ Harry replied. _Well, only to a telepath. Which around here basically means me. And Jean._

 _You sure about that?_ Carol asked as they reached the grass outside, and when Harry looked puzzled, she flicked her gaze over to the sun loungers and their occupants, Lex and Darcy, both of whom were watching closely. The former looked as if he'd been awarding marks for Harry's performance and flashed Harry a smile that was probably meant to be reassuring, but, and it might just have been his imagination, carried maybe one or two too many teeth for his comfort.

The latter merely smirked a knowing smirk that made Harry flush bright red. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed Carol blushing too. He could also sense a significant build up of amusement behind him and turned to what he knew he would see – Uhtred, Diana, Jean-Paul and his cousin Jean all wearing some form of grin. To make matters worse, Jean he noticed with a gulp, was also wearing a tight grass green bikini that suited her very well indeed. Disconcertingly attractive undersold it significantly. Were it not for the fact that his basic psychic training had come from the similarly very attractive Betsy Braddock and he had therefore been able to improvise both mental discipline and fairly impressive mental shields, things would have got rather embarrassing. Bobby, for his part, merely looked puzzled and Scott Summers was wearing a fairly sympathetic expression.

Inwardly, he sighed. Teasing central, here he came.

Especially if he had to get in the pool.

OoOoO

As it turned out, he didn't, and after the initial teasing, most of those present were more concerned with enjoying the contrast of cool water and scorching sun, starting up an impromptu game of pool volleyball. Eventually, however, one did and swum over. In retrospect, it wasn't all that difficult to figure out who that one was.

"Aren't you going to come in?" Carol asked, resting her folded arms on the side of the pool and her chin on them, looking up at Harry.

"I'm fine out here," Harry said, dangling legs floating around willy-nilly, eyes determinedly not looking at how the wet swimsuit clung to certain bits of her, something that Carol very much appreciated.

Carol raised a sceptical eyebrow as he cast a longing expression towards the volleyball game. "Uh-huh," she said.

"I am," Harry insisted.

"Really."

"Yes."

"Because it doesn't look like it," Carol said. "Come on, don't tell me that you're afraid of the water."

Harry glared at her. "No," he snapped. "I'm not." Then, he jerked his feet out of the pool and stalked off.

Carol stared after him, then sighed. "Nice going, Danvers," she muttered, before hoisting herself out of the pool and following Harry as he stalked across the garden. "Hey, Harry, wait up!"

Harry stopped. He hadn't got very far from the pool, since his strides had been shortened in favour of what in a younger child would have been stamping. He'd also hunched in on himself ever so slightly, lean muscles taught with tension and his expression, when she saw it, was defensive, sullen and angrily embarrassed.

"What?" he growled, glaring and folding his arms. It would have been a more effective intimidation tactic if he was talking to someone who didn't remember when he was a bespectacled and bony little kid and thus over half a foot shorter than her. Even now, after most of a year and a truly epic growth spurt, he was still a couple of inches shy of her almost six feet.

Plus, they'd been through a lot together to put it mildly, and to say that they knew each other inside out wasn't much of an exaggeration. So instead of glaring, Carol gently grabbed his dry shoulders, leaving wet handprints, and looked him in the eye.

"Harry," she said, gently but firmly. "I'm your friend. You can tell me. What's got you?"

"I didn't want to swim," he said.

"I have heard more convincing lies from my baby brothers," Carol said. "You wanted to join the volleyball game. But something was stopping you. What was it?"

Harry mumbled something.

"What?"

"I can't swim, okay!"

There was a stunned silence. Harry had been rather louder than he'd expected and everyone had heard. Consequently, he seemed to shrivel in embarrassment.

"Why not?" Carol asked, puzzled. "I mean, didn't you learn at school?"

"There were lessons," Harry said bitterly. "But Dudley and his friends would hold me under, get water in my eyes, make me swallow water or try to pull down my trunks, that sort of thing. And afterwards they hid my glasses. All I really learned was how to hold my breath and that in the pool, I couldn't run away."

There was a long moment of silence. "Say the word, my lord," Uhtred said eventually, tone grim, slipping into formality in his anger. "And –"

"Uhtred," Darcy said. "Much as I like the idea right now, do we need to have another talk about how violence is not the best way of solving problems on Midgard?"

Uhtred glowered.

Lex opened his mouth. "Well," he began.

"Lex," Carol said warningly, having slipped a supportive arm around Harry's shoulders. "Don't start with your one-way-to-Guantanamo crap. Now is so not the time."

"Actually," Lex said, somewhat aggrieved. "I was going to offer the services of my lawyers."

That broke the tension and everyone, even Harry, started laughing. Soon, they were all sitting by the pool.

"So… you can't swim," Darcy said.

"Not really," Harry said.

"Then we can teach you," Jean said gently.

"We would be honoured," Uhtred concurred.

Harry blinked in total surprise, and it did not take a psychic to see what he was thinking.

"Oh Harry," Jean said, hugging him.

"You complete dork," Carol said, tone softening the words. "Did you seriously think we'd make fun of you?"

Harry bit his lip, then gave the sort of awkward half-shrug that made it hard to remember that he wasn't just your average awkward teenager. "I'm used to it," he said quietly. "Where most sports are involved, anyway."

"Well, get unused to it," Carol said firmly, cracking her knuckles. "You've got learning to do."

OoOoO

Harry was feeling a little bit at sea – and not just because he was surrounded by water. While he knew on an intellectual level that everyone present cared for him (or at least in the case of Scott Summers who he didn't know so well, was a nice person and inclined to be sympathetic to people who couldn't do things thanks to his own eye related issues), certain preconceptions were hard to shift. So the instant offer by pretty much all present to make teaching him to swim a group project rather took him off-guard.

At first, he was somewhat wary, but as with most things he picked it up quickly and, amazingly, quickly found that he was enjoying himself. Within half an hour, he'd done his first full length of front crawl, to cheers from within and around the pool, and by the end of the afternoon he was comfortably doing lengths and joining in the pool volleyball.

 _You shouldn't be surprised, you know,_ Jean said. When Harry winced, she added apologetically, _Sorry, I wasn't telling you off. What I meant was that you don't have to worry about that sort of thing, us making fun of you._

 _Easier said than done,_ Harry replied. _I mean, I don't want to worry about it… but I do._

 _Considering what you went through with the Dursleys, I can't blame you,_ Jean said, and through the connection, Harry felt a stifled flare of rage. As he remembered only too well, Jean had very much inherited the same temper that he had, something that he found perversely comforting – perhaps because it was something that they had in common, or perhaps because when it came from her, he was used to it being directed at people hurting him. _God, I'm so sorry that I, we, weren't there, Harry. That we forgot._

 _Well, you didn't exactly have a choice in that,_ Harry noted. _You were only nine, and there was that other telepath, who wanted to keep me there. And Professor X couldn't do anything about it because of a predestination paradox, which is about as fun as it sounds._

 _Maybe,_ Jean said unhappily.

Harry swum over, cheating a little with his telekinesis, and somewhat hesitantly hugged her. _It's okay,_ he said.

Jean smiled and hugged him back, something that was very pleasant for reasons that had very little to do with his libido. _Thanks,_ she replied.

"Jean? Harry?" Bobby asked, puzzled.

"They're having a moment," Scott said, with the air of one who had seen many of such things. "Probably a psychic one. I'm guessing it's a bit personal – they are cousins, after all. Let's leave them to it, okay?"

Bobby frowned slightly, then shrugged. "Sure," he said.

 _Harry,_ Jean said after a moment. _One thing._

 _Yeah?_

 _You've picked your friends well,_ Jean said. _And they, we, want to do is help. And we aren't going to think any less of you just because you can't do something. No one who cares for you will, you can count on that. You don't need to be ashamed or afraid. I know it's hard to shake off a lifetime of habit, but… think about it, okay?_

 _I will,_ Harry said. "Thanks, Jean," he said aloud.

"No problem, Harry," Jean said, leaning in and giving him a sisterly kiss on the cheek, before leaving him to his thoughts.

OoOoO

After several hours more of swimming and pool volleyball – this time with powers allowed, an experiment that ended when Bobby's enthusiasm led to the pool freezing over. Thankfully, Jean-Paul had quite literally fished everyone out in the blink of an eye and the ice melted quickly, with a little pyrokinetic encouragement, but it was generally agreed that that little experiment was over. If nothing else, as Darcy put it, "I am _not_ explaining to all of your parents why you guys got turned into popsicles on my watch."

One of those parents turned up not long afterwards, dropping out of the sky and landing with commendable care on the newly mown lawn.

"Hey dad," Harry said, floating out of the pool to his father's eye height and wrapping him in a damp hug.

His father chuckled and hugged him back. "Having fun?" he asked.

"Lots," Harry said. "I," he began, then paused. What would his dad think if he realised that Harry had only just learnt how to swim?

"Harry?" Thor asked, worried.

Harry grimaced and steeled himself, remembering what Jean had said earlier and praying that she was right. "I learned to swim," he said, positively gabbling.

His father didn't even bat an eyelid, grinning and hugging him even tighter. "Well done," he said proudly.

Harry smiled and enjoyed the hug for a moment, before breaking away. "What have you been up to?" he asked.

"Among other things," Thor said. "Getting these." He pulled out a sheaf of tickets. "Tickets to the Quidditch World Cup, for us and whoever else you want to bring."

Harry's eyes widened and on impulse, he hugged his dad again. "Thank you," he whispered.

This summer, he thought, was going to be great. In this moment, this shining moment, he was sure that nothing could go wrong.

Really, you'd think that he'd know better by now.

 **Well, that's the teaser chapter, full of sweetness and fluffy stuff. However, as the last line and the title of the story implies, there's a lot of things, a lot of dark things, that are going to crawl out of the shadows sooner rather than later.**


	2. Chapter 2: The First Test

**Well, I've been away for a while. Nearly three months, actually. Sorry about that – though as my entirely-unconnected-to-this Dresden/MCU oneshot** _ **A Patchwork Knight**_ **shows, I haven't exactly been idle on the writing front. As it happens, I've mostly been writing a mix of later stuff and sorting out real life commitments. I am in my final year of my undergraduate degree, I have quite a lot of them. Also, I'll admit, I procrastinated a little on this chapter.**

 **But now I'm here, and the chapter should hopefully make up for absence, in length if nothing else. Enjoy.**

 _ **Before we get going and before I forget, I have commissioned AMAZING couple of pieces of art by the brilliant HelenaMarkos, in return for reading and reviewing her Lord of the Rings fic**_ **Splint** _ **, which I heartily recommend. One of them is now my desktop background. You can find them on her Deviantart profile under the name of Helena-Markos, or there are links in the 'Fanworks' section of COS' tropes page.**_

 _ **Lotusblossom:**_ **You were pretty sure that it would be Harry/Diana? Huh. What made you think that?**

 **As for your question – whether Harry/Carol is going to be the main ship for Harry, well. That would require me to give a straight answer, which I almost never do. I will say that their brand of chemistry and 'will they, won't they' will be a running thread throughout the story for a very long time.**

 **As for Harry/Diana, in all seriousness, I am very fond of Diana and did at one-point try shipping them. Weirdly though as I've carried on writing, I've found that Diana's someone with whom Harry has no romantic chemistry. As he gets older he won't be blind to how she looks, but there's no romantic spark. So it is vanishingly unlikely.**

 _ **White Emperor:**_ **Your question is a fair one. And I am, by the way, 22 as of this September, in my final year of my undergraduate degree. However, I have considered this in the past and the simple answers are that in the short term, I am trying to streamline the story, shorten chapters, with mixed success. In the long term, if I ever lose inspiration or am unable to carry on, well, I have hundreds of thousands of words of work that is as yet unpublished and a fairly clear plan. I will either hand them over to a writer who I trust to do justice to the work, or I will post sections on the net in combination with a synopsis of what would have happened. Rest assured, one way or another, there will be a resolution to this 'verse.**

Deciding the composition of those who were to go to the World Cup was, Harry found, a somewhat difficult one. Ron and Hermione's invitations had been politely but firmly rebuffed by their respective parents; in the latter case, the Grangers were on holiday in Australia and apparently intended on enjoying a holiday without magic, though Harry had no doubt that Hermione would have stuffed her bags with as many magic books as she could fit.

As for Ron, that had hurt at first, until Thor had gently pointed out that as he had not especially wanted Harry to leave his sight for any length of time, so Mrs Weasley did not want her two youngest leaving hers. Indeed, the Weasley clan had been gathered, rallying at the Burrow, excepting only the Twins, who were apparently interning at Stark Industries over the summer, and Mrs Weasley had been assured that they would be kept well away from any Avengers business.

Jean-Paul had politely turned his down as well, gravely explaining that his sister was having a difficult period – and while sessions with Professor Xavier, recommended months before, were doing her considerable good (apparently her imaginary friend, Eva, wasn't quite as imaginary as first thought), it was a long road, and sometimes she needed her brother's help traversing it.

Jean had also turned down the offer, on account of a sudden and virulent Summer cold. While it was hardly a recurrence of the Spanish Flu, it left her in quite a miserably stuffed up state, subsisting on a diet of honey and lemon tea, chicken soup and, after Loki had heard about it, a potion that smoked alarmingly, but significantly alleviated the symptoms.

However, Jean had insisted that she not get near to Pepper while she was ill on account of the possibility of transmitting her cold to both mother and baby, and after he visited her had extracted solemn promises from Harry to do everything but burn his clothing and put himself through nuclear grade decontamination. While Harry was spared a fair amount of worry, the possibility that the Avengers, Earth's foremost defenders, and among them the baby's father, might also be at risk of infection was treated as a mere footnote. But anyone who suggested risking the infection of the heavily pregnant Pepper confronted Jean's previously demonstrated mile wide maternal streak, thereby arousing a fury of such a scale that it would have had the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse taking notes.

Who would be so foolish to do such a thing? Scott Summers would, with the unwise remark, "Go on Jean, you're doing much better today: it'll be fine."

Needless to say, he regretted it.

Wanda had regretfully declined, saying that this year's Halloween and Winter Solstice were likely to be especially turbulent and she had to give her apprentice some intense training to catch him up in time. Harry, most of a year of the Avengers' influence and puberty making themselves known, had failed to conceal his snickers at the double entendre. Wanda had simply smirked and said, "Yes, that too. Your godmother might be an old lady, but unlike some in this room, she's getting some." At this point, with the tables turned, Harry had blushed horribly while Darcy, who had been around, had let out a piercing wolf-whistle. With that, Wanda had ruffled Harry's hair, given him a kiss on the cheek and departed.

As for Darcy, she and Bucky had also said that they were staying, at least nominally so Darcy could give Bucky the parts of the guided tour of New York that Steve either didn't know about or didn't want to know about. Unspoken, however, was his desire to avoid coming into contact with those whose relatives he might have killed or, at least, failed to save. And considering the multinational nature of the World Cup, there was a very slim chance that someone might recognise him from some of his earlier exploits. What exactly he was doing was unclear, but Harry noticed that he spent a fair amount of time with Natasha's friend, Ivan – whose ever twitching moustache, dry sense of humour and palpable fondness for Natasha had all immediately endeared him to Harry. While Harry couldn't be certain, he suspected very strongly that it had something to do with his time with the organisation known only as the Red Room.

Carol, Uhtred, Diana and the Twins, however, all accepted happily and everything went smoothly. Up, naturally, to a point. Because never mind the Avengers, when Harry was involved, nothing went smoothly for all that long.

OoOoO

Nevertheless, setting up camp went fairly easily, especially since Tony had reacted to the information that magical tents were less tents, more small portable palaces by getting the most luxurious one he could find – it had eleven bedrooms, each with a square footage more appropriate to a small apartment, a Jacuzzi, a bath the size of a small swimming pool with hot taps, cold taps and scented bubble taps, a large dining room, a larger living room, a kitchen fit for a five star restaurant, a sauna, a lab, an armoury containing two Iron Man armours, spare arc reactors and everything required to make repairs, as well as the full combat gear for the rest of the Avengers and fully stocked medical facilities, just in case Pepper happened to suddenly give birth. The gentle explanation that women didn't give birth within five minutes of going into labour like on television seemed to cut no ice. There wasn't, however, any remark on the armoury. The Avengers knew better than most how quickly even the most innocuous situation could go pear shaped.

For the time being, though, those still present were mostly concerned with cooking up sausages, eggs and bacon on a fire outside, this being the traditional way to do things, and utterly ignoring the five star kitchen inside. Those present consisted of Thor and the kids, Pepper having a bit of a lie down, Tony, Jane and Bruce doing what was ostensibly lab work which was actually, in Tony's case, an excuse to hover protectively, while Clint, Natasha and Steve went to explore – or, most likely, scout for trouble.

"Ludo!" Thor said cheerfully, standing up to greet a large man in Quidditch robes who had come bouncing over like an excited Labrador. "How are you?"

The man, Ludo, enthusiastically shook Thor's hand, and said, "Excellently, James, Excellently!" He grinned. "Or is it Thor these days?"

"I answer to both," Thor said. "Have you met my son?"

"No, I can't say that I have," Ludo said, bright blue eyes swinging to Harry and performing the usual flick to the fringe and Harry's scar. "But I've heard of him, of course - I don't think there's anyone who hasn't."

"I live in hope," Harry mumbled, earning a snort of amusement from Carol and sniggering from the Twins.

"I never heard about the white hair, though," Ludo added, curious gaze rising to Harry's hair, and the thick white lock at the front.

"It's a recent development, Mister…" Harry said, trailing off.

"Harry," Thor said. "This is Ludo Bagman, current head of the Department of Magical Games and Sports at the Ministry of Magic. He was also once the best beater the Wimbourne Wasps ever had."

Bagman laughed and shook Harry's hand. "Pleased to meet you, Harry," he said. His gaze shifted to Carol. "And is this charming young lady your sister or a cousin? Or maybe," and here his tone turned conspiratorial and he nudged Harry. "A lady friend? If so, you're doing well there!" His gaze flicked to Diana. "Two, even," hadded, grinning.

Harry flushed, embarrassed, but before he could say anything, Carol, with a hard smile that did not reach her eyes, reached out and took Bagman's hand. Then, she squeezed, hard enough that bones were visibly being ground. "Hi," she said sweetly. "I'm Carol. I'm a friend of Harry's. _Just_ a friend."

Bagman, no stranger to bone crunching handshakes, first chuckled and tried to match grips with her. As Carol tightened her grip, however, his eyes widened and he began to subtly try and pull away from the handshake as he went white with pain. After a long moment, Carol, looking deep into his eyes, very deliberately let his hand go. Eyeing her warily, he forced a laugh and said, "Pleased to meet you," before shaking out his slightly mangled hand. When he looked at Diana, he simply got a cool, regal stare and a raised eyebrow that Loki would have been proud of, before lowering the eyebrow and looking away as if he was now simply beneath her notice. This was all the more impressive since she was simultaneously keeping Uhtred from standing up and making his displeasure definitively known by pinning his nearest hand to the floor. Coughing awkwardly, Bagman turned back to Harry. "You're a pretty useful Seeker from what I hear, aren't you?"

"I play for Gryffindor," Harry said, a little embarrassed.

"Don't be modest, Harry," Fred said boisterously, clapping Harry on the back.

"He's the best seeker Gryffindor's ever had," George said.

"The youngest in a century," Fred added.

"An accolade indeed," Bagman said, impressed, and Harry flushed somewhat. "And you two, you're Arthur Weasley's boys, aren't you?"

The mood darkened somewhat.

"Yeah," George said.

Bagman nodded, some of his air of jollity deserting him. "A good man, Arthur was," he said. "Hardworking, honest... brave." He was silent for a long moment, then clapped his hands together. "But I'm sure that he wouldn't want us wallowing in misery," he said bracingly. "You haven't seen Barty Crouch anywhere, have you James?"

"No," Thor said. "I think he's been avoiding me. Why do you ask?"

Bagman waved a hand. "Oh, nothing serious," he said. "The Bulgarians are getting on at me about something and languages are Barty's thing, so I really need him to translate."

"I can help with that," Thor said.

"You speak Bulgarian?" Bagman asked, surprised.

"I am Asgardian," Thor said. "We speak every language."

"Sounds dashed convenient," Bagman said. "Oh, and James, you know the muggle security services, right?"

"Some of them," Thor said. "Though that is more Clint and Natasha's department. Why?"

Bagman sighed. "Oh, Peter Wisdom is triple checking security for the fifteenth time or something like that and he keeps demanding I give him another full run-down of security measures, personnel and things like that. I told him, 'ask the DMLE, ask Barty, ask Cornelius, anyone who's not me - I just do the commentating!'" He paused. "He didn't like that very much. And he keeps bending my ear about Bertha."

"Bertha?" Thor asked.

"Oh, you know, Bertha Jorkins," Bagman said.

Thor nodded. "A few years ahead of me at Hogwarts," he said. "Ravenclaw. Not all that bright, but very nosy."

"That's her," Bagman chortled. "Forgetful too. You see, she went on holiday to Albania and isn't back yet. Now me, I think she's just forgotten, lost track of time, or got lost - she's probably in Australia instead! She'll turn up sooner or later, probably in October, still thinking it's July." He shook his head. "But Wisdom's got a bee in his bonnet over the matter and he keeps hounding me about it."

"He may be right to be worried," Thor said, frowning. He was not the only one. Harry and Carol were both discomforted, with Carol outright glaring at Bagman. The Twins, for their part, looked more pensive than worried, taking Bagman's words at face value.

Bagman sighed. "Not you too," he said. "Ah well. Come on, let's figure what the Bulgarians are trying to say."

As the two left, Carol glowered at Bagman's back, and said, "Okay, I'm filing him under asshole."

Uhtred let out an inarticulate growl that nevertheless suggested that he very much agreed with this assessment.

"Don't be so hard on him, Carol," Fred said. "He's right about Jorkins. Dad said she'd been shuffled from department to department for years, no one wanted her because she was so absent minded."

"And she always turned up fine," George said. "Sort of like Harry does."

"I've actually died once and been on the edge of dying at least twice," Harry said. "And I doubt Ms Jorkins has the advantages I do."

"Yeah, speaking as another member of the should-be-dead club," Carol said. "It only takes once." She frowned. "Besides: if she's just some nosy dumbass, why is the head of Britain's SHIELD so interested in her?"

"He wouldn't be," Harry said, sharing a look with her. They had met Wisdom during the debriefing following the Battle of London, and aside from an astounding resemblance to Sirius (which happened to be because he was Sirius' brother) and what seemed to be a perpetually foul mood, the impression they had got was that he wasn't the sort to head on a wild goose chase. "Not if there wasn't more - a lot more - to this than meets the eye..."

OoOoO

What that was, however, was not immediately discovered. Instead, in fairly short order, they demolished the food and found themselves wandering through the camps of supporters. Carol, what with her Irish ancestry being one of the few things that she actually didn't mind about her father's side of the family (and since it was something that was also present on her mother's side of the family, she felt that she had plausible deniability) and being an enthusiastic sports fan, soon wound up festooned in Irish rosettes. She was also, thanks to Harry's basic explanation and the Twins' supplementary commentary, familiar with the basics of Quidditch and therefore well able to have many an enthusiastic conversation on the subject, ably supported in this by the Twins.

While neither Uhtred nor Diana was especially knowledgeable about the sport and both found it somewhat puzzling, Beating was essentially constructively applied violence and thus a subject Uhtred could happily discuss at length. For Diana's part, she seemed mostly content to listen and talk to those few who weren't interested in Quidditch.

This in turn meant that the attention was mostly off Harry, thanks to his token Irish rosette, and since his fringe covered his forehead, all that really happened was that his white forelocks got a few curious glances. As a result, he could look around the camps in peace. He was actually rather curious – for the first time in his life, he was seeing witches and wizards at leisure, not heading to school or at school, not doing the back to school shopping in Diagon Alley, just relaxing and having fun.

And these witches and wizards came, apparently, from all over the world and in more than one variety – a few wandless practitioners from Spain were demonstrating colourful illusions for some stoic looking Nordic witches, while two large Russian wizards who were wearing furs despite the warmth were playing a game that looked like table tennis without the table, with wands taking the place of bats and rocks the size of two clenched fists taking the place of balls, and two wandless practitioners, one an African woman of regal bearing in late middle age who was wearing colourful clothing that a keen eye would recognise as Ghanaian and the other a young Chinese man in Western style muggle clothing, examined a set of equipment that was variously made of glass that looked like it had come from a factory struck by simultaneous bouts of coughs, hiccups and sneezes, carefully carved and perfectly clear crystal and gold gilded copper piping, all with strangely coloured liquids bubbling away inside and having an extremely technical debate in what sounded like Latin.

Looking around, Harry could see witches and wizards from Africa, China, Japan, India, Australia, North America, South America and all over Europe, some distinguished by styles of dress, others by flags and banners, many of which Harry didn't recognise, and still more by the distinctive smells of national specialities cooking inside or outside tents. The former carried notable risks, as was demonstrated when a tent caught fire.

Harry, quite without thinking, ripped the fire away from the burning tent and lacking anything better to do with it, blasted it upwards, resulting in a pillar of flame most of sixty feet high. If nothing else, this got quite a lot of attention, since in the grand lexicon of attention-grabbing tricks, blasting pillars of flame into the sky is a mere one step below using that same fire to write ominous or rude messages in the sky.

As the crowds gasped and gathered at this astounding feat, and it was astounding. Generating fire wandlessly was held to be relatively easy. Oxygen, after all, is flammable and so are most materials in the natural world, once given ample persuasion. Controlling fire, however, is not easy at all and it only becomes more difficult when you are controlling fire you did not conjure. Deftly controlling and redirecting fire in a specific direction, without the use of a focus or a standard wand, and with apparent ease at that, is extremely impressive.

This led to a lot of excited enquiry, enquiry that got a lot more excited when Uhtred made a loud proclamation of Harry's identity, which, while made with the intention of gaining some respectful space, achieved the exact opposite.

Once they finally managed to extricate themselves from the crowd, Harry having reluctantly answered some of the less technical questions, he complained about this. "Surely they would understand that my lord would wish for space?" he asked.

Harry sighed and the Twins grinned briefly, before turning to Uhtred.

"Well, you see, Uhtred," Fred began. "Us mere mortals don't see gods very often."

"Or demigods," George added. "They're something of a rarity."

"So?" Uhtred asked, frowning.

"So this is probably the only time that they have ever seen, or will ever see, one of Harry's birth," Diana said thoughtfully. "Remember when Lady Jane first came to Asgard? The reactions were not so different."

Uhtred frowned, then nodded grudgingly. "I suppose so," he said.

"And Harry's some kind of folk hero around here," Carol added. "Right?"

"The Boy Who Lived," Harry said sourly.

"Survived a killing curse and sent Voldemort packing at the grand old age of a year old," Fred said.

"That wasn't me," Harry said. "That was mum. She…" He trailed off. He hadn't really brought up his discovery of his mum's post-mortem merging with the entity known as the Phoenix, nor really the Phoenix itself. It wasn't exactly something he wanted to discuss. "Remember when HYDRA attacked Hogwarts?" he asked.

The Twins nodded.

"Remember when I… when I died?" Harry asked. "And came back? When a giant bird of fire appeared around me?"

They nodded again, the words 'and it obliterated the HYDRA Agents, destroying about half the castle in the process' hanging unspoken in the air.

"That was mum too," Harry said. "She invoked something. Something old and powerful. That reflected Voldemort's curse back on him and protects me." He shook his head. "So it wasn't really anything to do with me."

"That makes sense," George said, after a long moment. "Even if it does feel like it's missing a few bits."

"Which," Fred added hastily, as his twin was fried in several glares. "We won't ask for until they're offered."

"But good luck explaining that to the Wizarding public."

Harry sighed. "You mean that I've got no chance whatsoever of doing so," he said.

"Pretty much, yeah," Fred said. "Sorry about that."

OoOoO

Harry's mood, however, perked up when they returned to the tent and everyone made their way to the stadium. Once again, he was just another face in the crowd, another spectator in the crowd, part of the excited hubbub that juggled tickets, omnioculars and favours of all kinds as they made their meandering way into the vast stadium that had been erected for the occasion. This last was something Carol remarked on.

"This stadium was made for the match, right?" she said, gaze tracking over the velvet smooth oval field that rested in the heart of the layered stadium, every bit of which was infused with a soft golden light, like an emerald in a gold ring.

"Indeed it was, built from the ground up," Thor said. "It took most of a year and it is the largest stadium in the world."

This drew several low, impressed whistles.

"When magic goes out to impress, it doesn't hold back, huh," Carol said.

"Indeed not," Uhtred said, sounding reluctantly impressed. "I did not think that mortal magic was capable of such things."

"It is," Loki said. "And it would be capable of much more if only its practitioners realised it."

Any further philosophical discussion was halted, however, by the emergence of the teams, both flying in arrow head formations to colossal roars from the fans and veritable torrents of green and red sparks.

"How don't people notice all this?" Steve wondered.

"You'd be amazed at what people will and won't believe, Steve," Tony said. "I bet you dollars to dimes that Britain's defence department or MI13 have put out some excuse about a night exercise, testing out new flares, that sort of thing."

Steve frowned, but didn't dispute this.

The next piece of excitement was generated by the mascots, first the leprechauns who soared overhead like a green and gold comet, leaving a rain of gold coins in their wake. "Don't bother," Thor said, pitching his voice to cut through the cheers, whoops and inevitable arguments as spectators tried to catch as much of the apparently free gold as possible. "It is only an illusion."

"Feels real enough to me," Clint said, inspecting one coin with a critical eye.

"They are constructs," Loki explained. "Which vanish or transform back into leaves, twigs and other debris after a few hours."

Carol and the Twins, who had formed a kind of partnership, one that consisted of the Twins using their magic to guide as many coins into Carol's upturned shield as possible and then dividing the spoils, shared looks. "So," Carol said. "What I'm hearing is that we need to spend this quickly."

"And carefully," George added.

"Spread the spending around so it won't be so noticeable or easily traceable," Fred continued.

"You guys have an idea about where to start?" Carol asked, shooting a wicked smile at Steve. While she was, at heart, too honest to really start scamming people like that, she took a certain glee in shocking her great-grandfather. As for the Twins, they were practically the living incarnations of the Artful Dodger and so, presuming they found deserving victims, what they would do was anyone's guess.

The Twins shared an almost offended look. "My dear Miss Danvers, we don't have _an_ idea."

"Perish the thought: we have _several_."

Steve looked absolutely horrified, while Tony seemed to be on the verge of hysterics, in large part at Steve's expression. Natasha looked amused, Jane looked mildly scandalised, Pepper was rolling her eyes and keeping half an eye on Tony to make sure that he was still breathing and Clint looked like he was considering adding a few suggestions of his own. Of the divine contingent, Thor let out a thunderous roll of laughter, Diana looked amused, Uhtred raised a puzzled eyebrow, Loki looked suspiciously innocent and Harry introduced the flat of his palm to his forehead with some force and sighed.

"And now the Bulgarian mascots," Bagman boomed.

"This could present a problem," Natasha remarked.

"Consider it a problem that is catered for," Loki said calmly, weaving a series of gossamer thin spells that fell around the box like mosquito net, before apparently fading away – though Harry could, when he reach out, still feel their subtle power.

"What problem?" he asked, puzzled.

"Veela," Thor said. "They are a variety of magical being that…" He trailed off and coughed uncomfortably.

"That what?" Harry asked.

Loki rolled his eyes. "Veela are related to Sirens, the Sidhe and most closely to the Rusalka. They are found throughout Europe and, to be frank, the entirety of Midgard, though they prefer temperate climates. They are almost invariably female, astoundingly beautiful and incredibly beautiful, capable of entrancing men and women alike via their glamour – though usually only women of a certain persuasion, and men of a certain persuasion are largely immune. They mostly breed true with humans, and part Veela retain a significant amount their ancestral allure." He paused, then added, as if an after-thought, "Oh, and when angry or feeling threatened, full blooded Veela tend to transform into bird like forms and throw fireballs."

Tony looked interested. "Tell me more," he said, earning an unamused look from Pepper. He kissed her on the cheek. "I just want to know so that I can program JARVIS to identify their… allure."

"I'm sure," Pepper said dryly.

"Indeed," Loki said, just as dryly. "It is simple enough to filter out once you know how, but it is also excellent at catching people off-guard and it tends to make them want to do something impressive – sometimes something terminally impressive, if you follow me." He glanced at Harry, expression amused. "I can think of more than a few people here who I would rather didn't try to show off for them."

Harry flushed. _I wouldn't_ , he complained inwardly.

 _I believe you, millions wouldn't,_ Carol replied matter-of-factly, before both blinked in surprise.

 _You heard that?_ Harry asked.

 _Well, yeah._

 _Okay, that's strange,_ Harry said slowly, then raised an eyebrow. _Wait, you believe me?_

Carol's reply was wry. _When I was in my swimsuit, you spent over 90% of the time looking at my face. Considering how most guys our age and older, most straight guys anyway – and a few girls too. I'm pretty sure that Diana's got an eyeful a couple of times – usually react when I'm in that kind of gear, and the fact you're a telepath, I think I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt as and when some hot bird lady gives you the magic equivalent of fuck me eyes._

Harry, who had been in the process of swallowing a mouthful of butterbeer, promptly choked on it. Uhtred gave him a borderline rib-cracking thump on the back as Harry wheezed, "Thanks."

"It was not a problem, my," Uhtred began, then on seeing Harry's expression, changed tack with visible difficulty. "Harry."

 _No problem,_ Carol added, and Harry could tell she was smirking without even looking round. _Hey, who's the Bulgarian guy who everyone's focusing on?_

 _That would be Viktor Krum._

 _The wonder-kid? Best Seeker in the world, all that jazz?_

 _Pretty much,_ Harry replied.

 _Okay,_ Carol said, and paused thoughtfully. _He's kind of hot. You know, in a weird, kind of stringy sort of way._

Harry rolled his eyes.

"Uh, Harry?" Fred said. "The match has started."

"What?" Harry asked, then flushed again and focused on the play.

"He was having a chat with Carol," Diana explained, and Fred's puzzlement evaporated, to be replaced by a dirty grin. "Not that kind of conversation," she added perfectly calmly. "And I can't read your mind, but I can read your emotions, which is close enough."

Fred stared at her for a long moment, then shared a look with his brother. "You know, Miss Herculeis," he said. "It strikes me that that could be a very useful gift."

"When properly applied," George added. "With infinite possibilities in the realms of opportunity."

Worryingly, Diana looked thoughtful.

Thor turned to Loki and Tony. "I'm not sure which one of you is responsible, but you are a bad influence on them," he said.

Loki and Tony shared a look. "Sixty forty," Tony said.

"Considering the time they've spent with you over these last months? Fifty fifty," Loki said.

"Fifty five, forty five," Tony said.

Loki considered this, then conceded with a nod. "Fifty five percent of it is my fault," he said to his brother. "The rest is Tony's." He eyed the Twins. "Though to be honest, all we really did was encourage their natural inclinations."

"I know," Thor said. "That is what worries me."

OoOoO

The match was, Harry felt, exciting, no, enthralling, and it only got more so as time went on. While he was nominally supporting Ireland, as a seeker himself, he was in awe of Krum's skill. The Irish seeker was good, very good, but Krum was something else, gracefully through the air like the broom was an extension of himself rather than the other way around.

"He's good," Diana agreed, having apparently picked up what he was thinking. "Especially for someone not flying under their own power."

Harry nodded. "I've never even seen a seeker half as good," he said. "No wonder everyone says he's the best in the world."

"Some people are gifted," Diana remarked. "I think that he is one of them."

Harry watched Krum weave past both bludgers, then suddenly drop into a stooping dive, the Irish seeker belatedly following him, drawing neck and neck, before Krum suddenly pulled up and away. The Irish seeker, however, didn't pull up in time and ploughed into the ground with horrible force and a loud, "Oooh," and a collective wince from the Irish end.

"Holy shit!" Carol said. "What the hell was that?"

"Krum sold him," Clint said, as medics poured onto the pitch to tend to the bleary Irish seeker. "There was no sign of the snitch, but Krum tricked him into thinking it was there."

"It's called the Wronski Feint," George said. "Standard seeker move."

"Well, standard if you're completely mad," Fred said. "But if it works, well, look at Krum."

Krum was circling high above, eyes sweeping the stadium.

"There aren't many seekers who can pull off a Feint that well," Thor said. "But I have seen one seeker who's his match."

"Who?" Harry asked, curiosity piqued.

Thor smiled at him and raised his eyebrows, and Harry got it, flushing.

"Dad! Don't be daft!"

"He's right, Harry," Fred said. "Our brother Charlie could have played for England."

"And trust us," George said. "You're definitely better than Charlie."

"Not like I could now, even if I wanted to," Harry said.

"Why not?" Carol asked.

"I see the snitch, my first instinct is going to be to grab it," Harry said. "Which, since I'm a telekinetic…"

"Oh. Yeah, that could be a problem."

"You feel it would be dishonourable," Uhtred said.

"Just a bit," Harry sighed.

"There'll be a way around it, Harry," Fred said breezily. "There always is."

Harry, for his part, wasn't quite so sure about that.

OoOoO

The game went on, the pattern of the past continuing – the Irish Chasers were making their Bulgarian counterparts look about as effective as the spectators, the Bulgarian Beaters were apparently trying to kill the Irish Chasers and Krum was undoubtedly the best player on the pitch.

There were interruptions as the Leprechauns and the Veela got into a standoff and the aforementioned fireballs made an appearance, as well as the allure, rather distracting the Egyptian referee, to an amused declaration of, "Somebody slap the referee!" from the commentating Bagman.

Then, all of a sudden, it was all over. Krum made another dive, and once again, the Irish seeker ploughed into the ground, but this time, Krum emerged with the snitch. The final score: Ireland, 170, Bulgaria, 160.

"Wait, hang on, I thought catching the snitch meant you won, instantly," Carol said, startled.

"That was what I was given to understand as well," Uhtred said, frowning.

"Usually it does," Thor said. "Catching the snitch both ends the game and earns 150 points. But the Irish were far enough ahead that it didn't matter. The Bulgarians were never going to catch up, the Irish Chasers were too good. Krum knew that, so he chose to end it on his own terms."

"He wanted to retain some of his people's pride," Diana remarked.

"Exactly," Thor said, then smiled. "Though having played Quidditch myself, I think at least a small part of him was acting out of personal pride. He does, after all, have a reputation as the best seeker in the world to protect."

The debate this sparked carried them all the way back to the camp.

And that, naturally, was when it all went pear-shaped.

OoOoO

It started with fire later that night, and terrified screams that were chased by the flames across the camp.

Harry, naturally, immediately bounced out of bed, grabbing a pair of jeans which he pulled on over the boxers he was sleeping in and, considerin that this with a t-shirt constituted suitable attire, dashed outside.

The Avengers, in varying states of dress, were already there, and his father's grim expression was lit up in the glow of the burning tents.

"Death Eaters?" Loki asked.

"Aye," Thor spat. "Most likely drunk and out for a little _fun_."

"We need to stop this," Steve said. "Tony, armour up. Clint, Natasha, get ready." Tony nodded, slipping back into the tent, the two assassins following close behind.

"I can help," Harry said determinedly.

Carol and the Twins both coughed in unison. Uhtred simply nudged Harry, while Diana gave him a pointed look.

"We can help," he amended.

"No," Thor said.

"But -"

"I doubt neither your power nor your skill, Harry," Thor said. "And your courage goes without saying. That goes for all of you. But for all your power, you are _not_ an experienced duellist. You do _not_ know how to fight wizards. Any one of you would be vulnerable to a killing curse."

"I feel that I would be able to withstand such a curse, my lord," Uhtred said. "And in any case, I would be glad to lay down my life in protection of my prince."

Harry let out a strangled noise. "Don't you fucking dare," he managed, tone furiously.

"I am your sworn man, my lord," Uhtred replied calmly. "It is my duty."

Before Harry could reply, Loki cut in. "If cast by a sufficiently powerful wizard, a killing curse could leave you in a death like state at least, young Uhtred," he said. "In which you would be no use to anyone, least of all your liege. Indeed, you would be a dead weight and an unneccesary distraction." He shook his head as Uhtred sagged. "Wanded practitioners may lack your power, Harry, but each and every Death Eater, even drunk and out of practice, will be an experienced fighter and a sadistic killer."

"I've fought them before," Harry said somewhat mutinously. "At Hogwarts."

"And you were _killed_ ," Thor said, voice intense and full of a mixture of grief, anger, frustration and pain, clamping his hands on his son's shoulders as he stared into his son's eyes. While he still looked down to do so, he no longer had to bend down as well. Harry, meanwhile, flinched and Thor sighed, loosening his grip. "I am sorry," he said gently. "For bringing it up. But I nearly lost you once, and it only takes one spell."

Harry looked away and said nothing.

"You can best help by staying here," Thor said. "If Death Eaters do make it this far – and in the darkness, if they split up, they may well do – you will be needed to protect your friends, Jane and Pepper too. You are the only one here with any experience of facing this brand of magic in battle."

Harry frowned, then nodded reluctantly. "Fine," he said.

Thor nodded in reply. "Good," he said. "Steve…"

"You take the lead on this one, Thor," Steve said. By his somewhat martyred expression and Carol's sour one, they'd been having a similar, less cordial, version of Harry and Thor's discussion. "You know how the Death Eaters fight."

"Aye," Thor said, whipping his hammer in preparation to take off. "And sometimes I wish I did not."

OoOoO

When he bore down on the Death Eaters, however, Thor felt a surge of furious delight run through his veins. While a considerable portion of him was enraged by the fact that scum such as this had walked free to torment ordinary mortals, to torment _children_ , once more, a portion that was just as large thought, _'good. Now I can show them what it truly means to be afraid.'_

He announced his presence with a vast crack of lightning and a rumble of thunder that knocked over a few of the remaining tents. A moment later, that was followed by a sudden downpour of rain, each drop of which pelted downwards like a bullet, drowning the flames of burning tents in clouds of steam and momentarily blinding and disorienting the vast majority of the Death Eaters, who had been foolish enough to look upwards in response to the thunder and lightning.

Some, crying out in shock and fear, began to disapparate, but a number of those who tried were laid low mid-spin by unerringly accurate arrows – not all of which were tipped with tasers – or, in a few cases, a well thrown shield. As for the Death Eaters' captives – though as Thor thought with distaste, toys might be a better description – they did not go unattended. Flashes of emerald green light severed the strands of magic that kept them bobbing around in the air, while bubbles of that same emerald light encased each, carrying them off to one side. In no time at all, the Death Eaters had gone from marching forward unopposed to penned up in an ever tighter mass on slippery ground, ground made even more slippery by Loki's enchantments – which made it that much harder for them to disapparate.

Then, a few moments later, a quinjet erupted from the rainy darkness with a colossal roar, its flashlights blinding the assembled Death Eaters and neatly distracting them, as four thick poles, tapering at one end and surrounded by a nimbus of purple energy, slammed themselves into the ground around the somewhat dishevelled Death Eaters, who were by now in complete disarray. The poles themselves hummed with power and blue light, and when one Death Eater managed to break away and attempt to disapparate, once, then twice. Both times, nothing happened. A third attempt also came to naught.

Effectively relegated to a spectator, Thor watched as in frustration, the wizard ripped off his mask, revealing himself to be a certain William Mulciber, and aimed a powerful blasting curse at the Quinjet, hitting the wing and visibly damaging it – not critically, insofar as Thor could tell, but badly enough that another hit could cause serious problems. Just as the other Death Eaters looked like following his example, the Quinjet responded by swerving away with astonishing grace for something so large, regaining its metaphorical balance and revealing an underslung machine cannon, of the sort that was somewhat disingenuously known as a minigun. The gun let out a brief buzzing roar that seemed to fill the air even though it lasted no more than a fraction of a second and as it did, William Mulciber practically vanished into a cloud of blood, bone and pieces of black cloth. Everyone stared, stunned, for a moment. MI13, it seemed, were done playing nice. Then, the Death Eaters as one threw down their wands, attitudes shifting from a mixture of fear, anger and confusion to craven submission.

And Thor, for his part, was very glad that Harry had not been present to see it. While he did not question that Mulciber deserved death, nor that the Quinjet and its pilots had had every right to defend themselves, the way it was done… well, there was something about it, something beyond the gore, something about the way the Death Eaters were being herded and slaughtered like animals, that stuck in his throat. He was no stranger to gore, to blood and death; he had known the sight of death from childhood and he had not turned away in fear. But a cold-blooded execution such as this, where a superior power crushed an inferior like a boot crushing an ant, had never sat well with him. The Death Eaters deserved much, but, he felt, even scum such as they did not quite deserve that. And sometimes, he felt, just sometimes, the sight of virtue triumphant could be worse than that of villainy ascendant.

It was then he noticed that, not counting the late Mulciber, there were rather fewer Death Eaters than there had been to start with.

OoOoO

Harry sighed as rain started pouring down.

"You know," Carol said. "I was wondering. You got the telekinesis and telepathy from your mom, and probably a fair bit of the fire stuff too. Did you get some weather manipulation or rain stopping powers from your dad?"

"Uncle Loki says that that's a combination of wind and water magic," Harry said. "Which I've only just started on."

"Ah," Carol said. "Maybe a psychic, you know, umbrella might be an idea?" she ventured, as Pepper, Jane, the Twins and Diana prudently retreated inside the tent. Uhtred, meanwhile, seemed to regard the rain with supreme indifference, as if it was only worthy of notice due to the fact that it signified his crown prince being in a fight. Since he was from the mountains of Asgard, which Harry gathered were host to some of the most fearsome monsters in Asgard and the weather to match, this wasn't entirely surprising. Indeed, his only concession to the rain was to swiftly and briskly braid his hair back. While he did this, his eyes continued scanning the surroundings, and his axe remained in easy reach. This was not his only weapon, however.

Jean-Paul had previously made mention of Uhtred's proclivity for carrying a truly alarming number of knives, some for throwing, others for close combat, in some truly improbable places. The tone in which he had said it had been casually artless and thus been designed to draw Harry into asking exactly how Jean-Paul knew this. A year or so ago, Harry would have been baffled and done exactly that. Now, the older, wiser Harry had simply said, "good to know," and left it at that.

Harry himself did not carry weapons, unless one counted his wand, which he only tended to use for precision work these days. Indeed, it could be argued that he _was_ a weapon.

As for Carol, she had her shield, Bucky and Natasha had been teaching her how to fight, and Clint had been teaching how to throw the shield, being the only person other than Steve who had figured out exactly how. Said shield, however, was now serving as an ad hoc umbrella, and its owner gave a meaningful cough.

Harry, who had been extending his psychic senses, looking for trouble, jumped slightly, then created a thin bubble of psychic force, sufficient to stop raindrops.

"Thanks," Carol said. There was a long moment of silence. "So," she asked. "Do you think that those wizards are going to come this way?"

Harry shrugged. "I've never really dealt with Death Eaters before," he said. "Except for Quirrell."

"Who?"

"Evil teacher being possessed by Voldemort in my first year," Harry said. "He was trying to get the Philosopher's Stone for Voldemort."

"The what? And why?"

"It turns anything into gold and produces the elixir of life, apparently," Harry said.

"Oh. What happened to him?"

"He tried to kill me. Mum, and the protection she put on me, didn't approve," Harry said.

"Ah," Carol said, and while she didn't say it, the question 'and what did she do to him?' floated at the top of her mind.

"I'm not sure," Harry said, replying out loud. "I collapsed halfway through. But by that time he was a bit… crispy. And though Dumbledore said that Voldemort leaving his body killed him…"

"Oh. Yeah. Also, ew."

"Yeah," Harry said. He was silent for a moment. "Apart from when he tried to kill me as a baby, I've run across Voldemort twice. Well, technically once, I suppose. I'm not exactly sure what Riddle's diary really was."

"You mentioned that," Carol said. "Something about an evil book that tried to eat that Ginny girl's lifeforce."

Harry nodded. "She's Fred and George's little sister," he added. "And the book was alive. It had Tom Riddle, Voldemort as a teenager or a copy of him anyway, stuck inside it. He tried to get out."

"What happened?"

"I stabbed the book with a basilisk fang, Riddle sort of melted and Ginny was fine," Harry said, then paused, and added, "physically, anyway. She's still working on the mentally."

"No wonder," Carol muttered. "So, you've faced the big bad, but not many of his minions."

"Aside from Lucius Malfoy and maybe one or two who wound up working for HYDRA, no," Harry said.

Carol nodded. "If they come this way… you think they'll be tough?" she asked.

"If they come this way and try to hurt any of you, I'll melt their brains," Harry said flatly. "So you probably won't find out."

Carol gave him a long look. "Okay," she said carefully. "But maybe knocking them out instead might be a better idea? Because even if these people are as awful as I'm guessing they are, based on what I've heard and the way you and your dad have been acting, brain melting shouldn't be step one."

Harry turned to her, then went somewhat pink and grimaced. "Right," he said. "Sorry."

Carol shrugged. "You've got reason to hate these guys," she said.

Harry eyed her and caught a little flash of insight, one that didn't have much, if anything, to do with telepathy. "When I get like that," he said. "It scares you."

Carol opened her mouth to instantly deny it, but caught Harry's expression and sighed. "Honestly?" she said. "Yeah, a little bit. One of the reasons that I respect, not just like, but really, honestly respect you is the way you are with your powers. Even without your mom's help, you are insanely powerful, like, top ten in the world powerful. And going by Jean, your dad and your uncle, plus the whole thing in the Rockies at Easter, you're going to get one hell of a lot stronger and you know that much better than I do. But it doesn't -go to your head. You control your power, you don't let it control you, even though it's literally based on what you're thinkin so you have to second guess everything. I had that kind of power dropped on me when Doc Strange's super mood ring, the Green Lantern Ring, powered up and it was… scary. Really, really scary. And even then, I actually had to consciously will something for the ring to do it, plus, I only had it for a few hours. I'm not even sure if you have that safety net and you have to live with it every single hour of every single day. I don't think I could live with that - I have enough trouble just remembering not to break stuff."

"But?" Harry asked, having sensed the coming caveat.

"But…" Carol said, and sighed. "You are capable of being a very, very scary person Harry. At the start of the Battle of London and before, what you nearly did to those HYDRA Agents in New York, what you did to Daken, Gravemoss… it scared me. I mean, you had every reason in the universe to hate them, god knows. No one would blame you if you'd done way worse. Each and every one of them, they more than had it coming. But it, it and the way you were when you did it, all cold, was still scary." She chewed her lip. "You're my friend. Maybe my best friend. God knows, you probably know me better than practically anyone else. Which means that I reserve the right to be worried. To be scared of you becoming something you're not."

Harry couldn't hide the spasm of pain that flashed across his face, but nodded. She wasn't exactly wrong. "I know," he said. "It scares me too. It's why I don't use my telepathy much – I know what I could use it for and…" He shivered. Nothing more needed to be said.

"Well," Carol said after a moment. "Isn't this cheerful?"

"Not especially," Uhtred said dryly, and both Carol and Harry jumped. It was easy to forget that Uhtred was, as an Asgardian, not just strong and tough, but had pretty sharp senses too.

"You were listening?" Harry asked, surprised.

Uhtred nodded.

"And you didn't say anything?"

"It seemed like the sort of discussion that you needed to have between yourselves, my lord," Uhtred said calmly, forcibly reminding them both that for all that Uhtred came off as simply a bluff, boisterous – and increasingly in recent months, professional and patient - warrior in waiting, he was considerably more perceptive than most gave him credit for. This was something that Harry partially credited to his oath-man's growing maturity and Jean-Paul and Diana's influence, the two being practical prize winners for observational skills.

"For my part," he said. "I would merely say that there is some truth to what Carol says: your powers are considerable and grow with each and every day and considering their nature, your control over them is remarkable indeed. As for the part about battle?" He shrugged. "In Asgard, coolness in battle, the ability to control and direct rage, is considered the mark of a great warrior. And in each case mentioned, you dealt with each as they deserved, and with rather more mercy." His expression grew a little troubled. "I did not receive a full account of what happened after your father, Prince Thor, was shot – I presume that that is the incident to which you refer?" At Carol's nod, he continued. "But I believe that you had them at your mercy?"

Harry nodded tightly. "I wanted to kill them," he said quietly. "With their own weapons. And when their leader took a child hostage, I wanted to make him kill himself." He looked away. "If Jane hadn't been there, I'd have done it."

There was an uncomfortable silence as Carol and Uhtred shared an uneasy look. One of the ethical commonalities between Earth and Asgard was that you simply did not execute those who you had defeated and had at your mercy. Interrogation in all its many and varied forms was a different matter, a more flexible one, especially where Loki was concerned, but execution in cold blood…

"I can hear you think, guys," Harry said quietly. "You're right. It was wrong to want it."

"You desired vengeance, my lord," Uhtred said uncomfortably. "And rightly so."

"I've told you a hundred times, Uhtred, stop the my lord business," Harry said. "And what you're not saying is that if I wanted that, I should have killed them in a fight. Not tried to execute them afterwards."

"Maybe it was wrong," Carol said, after another long moment. "But…"

"I didn't do it, even though I wanted to," Harry said, finishing her sentence for her, and smiling wanly.

"But you should have done. There is no good or evil, only power and those too weak to seek it," Carol said calmly. She turned to look at him, expression calm and… faintly amused? "It's simple, Harry: you had the power to act, to destroy your enemies, and you were too weak to do so."

Harry stared at her in incomprehension.

"You could have wiped those who offended you from the face of the Earth," Uhtred said, in that same calm tone, with that same expression. "But you did not. You held back. You even refused to destroy your murderer when you had the chance. You are weak, my lord."

Harry's gaze darted from one to the other, utterly baffled, spears of pain and fear lancing through him at the calm condemnations from the mouths of his friends, fear that this day would always come, when his friends would laugh at him, would treat him like everyone had before the discovery that he had magic. Then, his brain clicked back into gear and his eyes narrowed as fear turned to blazing rage. These weren't his friends' words, he thought through a torrential flood of fury, fury that ignited his clenched fists and replaced the bubble of psychic force with a heat so intense that raindrops turned to steam before they even touched him, fury that set his eyes blazing with a golden fury. No, Harry thought, he'd heard words like these before.

" _Voldemort_ ," he snarled.

A figure materialised from the shadows, almost as if he was forming his very body from their darkness, a figure that Harry had seen just over a year before in the Chamber of Secrets. "Hello, Harry," Lord Voldemort said. "I think that it's time we had a little chat."

OoOoO

Harry's instant response was to unleash a blast of flame and telekinetic force that would have simultaneously cooked and pulverised a moderately sized elephant, something which would faze most people. Voldemort, however, merely flicked his wand, redirecting fire and force alike off to one side, letting it soar off into the forest where it promptly obliterated several large trees.

"Now, Harry, is that any way to behave?" Voldemort asked, a kind of mock disappointment in his voice, as his cold, cruel eyes danced with vicious amusement.

Harry summoned more power and levelled his by now incandescent right fist like a cannon. "Is that a trick question?" he asked coldly.

"No," Voldemort said. "I would instead call it rhetorical. And really, Harry, you should remember your manners. Because if you don't…"

Harry felt a surge of cold, ugly power, Voldemort's power, and despite himself turned his head to see Pepper, Jane, the Twins and Diana walking out of the tent in perfect unison, their expressions blank, their eyes empty.

"… I might have to start making a few changes," Voldemort said. As he spoke, Uhtred drew his axe and, expression as blank as the rest, laid its razor sharp blade against his own that. "Like giving this young servant of yours an irrepressible desire to remove his own head." He looked thoughtful. "Or perhaps everyone else's. After that, considering his fairly simply mind set, I wouldn't even have to persuade him to remove his own."

Harry felt bile rise, burning his throat, and rage with it. But as they did, a small voice in the back of his head said, _you're a telepath, you idiot!_

With that thought in mind, he attacked Voldemort with everything he had, looking to overwhelm the Dark Lord before he could get his wits about him. From the outside, it merely looked as if Harry's eyes had flashed gold and Voldemort's a cold, deathly green while the latter staggered, blood running from his nose. To those with even the most rudimentary psychic senses, it was a vast clash of forces that sent waves of disruption through the Astral Plane. To those who could access that plane and view the battle in full, it was like a raging sea storm that tore at the very fabric of the psychic realm, while also being like a raging conflagration of golden flame that attacked choking sickly green mists and a vast golden white bird of prey that struck at an emerald serpent that swayed, evaded and struck in turn.

It was all of these things and more, a battle that took place on multiple levels in the blink of an eye.

But while Harry had the immediate advantage, owing to the speed of his strike, the raw overwhelming power and the fact that Phoenix infused as his mind was, as well as now lacking the accidental horcrux that Voldemort had unwittingly placed there all those years ago during his failed murder attempt, Voldemort swiftly gained the upper hand. For while he was less powerful, he was far more skilled in the arts of mental combat, and while the accidental horcrux was a long gone, it and Chthon's possession had left psychic scars vulnerable to attack. Moreover, he had other sources of energy.

 _Perhaps I underestimated you. Perhaps there is strength in you after all, Harry,_ Voldemort whispered.

 _Strength enough to see you burn!_ Harry replied viciously.

 _Perhaps,_ Voldemort said. _But that is not what I was referring to. It seems that you are now ready to make the necessary sacrifices to achieve victory._

Harry was confused for a moment, then cast about with his psychic senses, before breaking off in horror as he beheld the connections between Voldemort and Harry's friends, even family, whose minds he had dominated. Normally gossamer thin, yet strong as steel cables, they now bulged obscenely as power, as life, flowed from them into Voldemort. As he broke off, they thinned once more and Voldemort let out a pleased sigh, as if he'd just eaten a rather good meal.

"It seems that my initial assessment was correct," he murmured. "You are too weak to do what must be done."

Harry ignored him, frantically rattling through his options. Voldemort had forced connections with Carol, Uhtred, Diana, Jane, Pepper and the Twins, connections like the one he'd had with Harry, the one he'd used to drain power not six months before. Betsy had cut that connection with her psi-blade. He'd never tried to summon one, but while he was pretty sure he could do it, he had no idea what kind of effects breaking that kind of connection in that way could have – he'd been fine, but Betsy had planned her actions, had carefully prepared, presumably taking some precautions in the process. And Voldemort wasn't stupid, he wouldn't fall for the same trick twice. He'd have some thing planned.

Maybe he could go into each of their minds and push Voldemort out by force? He could do it, but even if he did two at a time, that left the others vulnerable as Voldemort would draw strength from them to prevent Harry from driving him out. And even without that, it would be like that footage he'd seen from the Battle of New York, or indeed the Battle of London – the battle might be won, the monster driven out, but the mental collateral damage… well. His father had told him about what had happened to the Longbottoms.

No, this was one fight that power wouldn't win. Indeed, it was one fight he couldn't win alone. But he could leverage his extra power to give him an advantage…

Slowly and carefully, he sent out a mental tendril towards the pulsing purple source of psychic power that he identified as his erstwhile teacher, Betsy Braddock.

OoOoO

Wisdom's introduction was abrupt. "We're missing a few, aren't we?" he said grimly, looking at the forlorn and frightened looking Death Eaters, above whom hovered the still smoking quinjet like a vulture that was on the point of losing patience with the death-watch and cutting out the middleman. Their former victims had been hustled away by miscellaneous MI13 personnel for debriefing.

"Five or six," Steve confirmed. "They successfully disapparated."

Wisdom swore viciously. "They'll be long gone, then. Bastards. I was hoping to round up the lot of them tonight," he said, before shooting a sour look at his captives. "Looks like there'll be an extended spell in the interrogation rooms for this lot."

"Actually," Betsy Braddock said, at Wisdom's left hand. "I'm not sure they have." She was frowning in concentration, her index and middle fingers at her temple, almost a combination of trying to hear a very faint sound and serving as a radio antenna. Suddenly, her eyes widened and she staggered, blood running from her nose and her expression contorted in agony as her signature purple butterfly markings flared on her face.

"Braddock!" Wisdom barked, his perpetually angry tones modulated with genuine worry. He went to help her, but Loki, there in the blink of an eye, stopped him.

"She's under psychic attack; if you touch her unprepared, you could be drawn in," he snapped curtly. Kneeling down in the mud beside her, he gently but firmly grasped her head, closing his eyes. There was silence for a few moments, then he broke away, cursing foully and clutching his head as Betsy keeled over, unconscious and bleeding from the ears and eyes too.

"What the bloody hell have you done to my Agent?" Wisdom demanded, frustrated and even angrier than usual.

"It wasn't me," Loki spat, massaging his temples and grimacing. "There was another presence in her mind that had forced its way in. As soon as it detected my presence, it detonated the psychic equivalent of an electromagnetic pulse." He eyed Betsy. "I will have to check later to be sure, but she's strong, she should be fine."

"Should," Wisdom said sourly. "Who was it? The only psychic in this camp with that kind of wattage is your nephew."

"You dare accuse my son," Thor demanded furiously.

Wisdom eyeballed him and said curtly, "I don't think he did it. Or at least, if he did, I don't think he did it of his own will."

"It wasn't him," Loki said, defusing the situation. "I recognise Harry's touch – in any case, he doesn't have the finesse or the knowledge to act as this presence did."

"Which means we might have an answer for what happened to those five or six Death Eaters," Steve said grimly, as this sank in. "Someone, or something, has got control of them."

"Yeah," Tony said, turning back to where their tent was, voice sick with horror. "And three guesses where they've been sent."

OoOoO

"There," Voldemort said casually. "Now we won't have any interruptions." He gave Harry a condescending look. "Really, Harry, did you think I would suffer interruptions? Did you think that after how she most cunningly cut my connection to you all those months ago, causing me no little agony, that I had not prepared a suitable means of paying her back?" His expression darkened. "And do you think that if you try to interrupt me again, I won't make your friends pay for it?" He gestured at Pepper. "I could cut that woman's spawn out of her belly and make her devour it alive and wriggling, make her enjoy every bite. I could set them to killing each other. I could do anything to them that I please, because I hold their lives in my hands and if you make one move that displeases me, I will snuff. Them. Out."

Harry, for his part, was now a roiling mixture of shock, horror, fury, guilt and revulsion. He'd got Betsy involved, and now Voldemort had done who knew what to her. He should have gone straight to his uncle. As it was, Voldemort had detected his most subtle attempts to get help and made one of his friends suffer for it.

"What do you want?" he asked in a low voice.

"Well done, Harry," Voldemort murmured. "That is more like it." He flicked his wand idly, watching green sparks fall from it. "As to what I want, the answer is simple: you. Dead."

"Get in line," Harry said flatly. "It's grown a bit since we last ran into each other."

Voldemort chuckled softly, and began to prowl around Harry. "Come now, Harry," he said. "If a prophecy binding our fates together doesn't qualify as reason to jump the queue, what does?"

"Then why not have a go, here and now? Leave everyone else out of it. Let's have it out, just you and me," Harry said.

"You would like that, wouldn't you?" Voldemort said mildly. "No need to hold back, no need to use finesse of any sort, you could simply overwhelm me with your raw power, which has grown exponentially and indeed, grows by the hour. But neither of us is bound to the ordinary cycle of life and death as other men, even other gods, are. We are immortals."

"Would you like me to test that?" Harry asked coldly, restraining the urge to char-broil Voldemort. Best case scenario, he'd simply deflect it. Worst case, it would go through and he'd suck some life to heal himself and serve as punishment. How had he learned to do that, anyway? Through draining Harry's own power?

Voldemort merely laughed. "Perhaps another time," he said. "You see, tonight will not be our final encounter, oh no. The mistake I made last time when I came after you was that I did not know everything I needed to know. I rushed in like an arrogant fool and paid the price." He shook his head. "No, I need to know more. I need to know what makes you tick, Harry. I need to know where you are strong, where you are weak, and most of all…" He leaned in by Harry's ear, hissing his next words. "I need to know how that protection your mudblood mother put on you _works_."

Then, he drew away. "And once I know that… then our last meeting will come," he said.

"So now what?" Harry asked.

Voldemort smiled a crocodile's smile. "Now, Harry, there will be a race."

And he waved his wand. Pepper, Jane, Uhtred, Diana, Carol and the Twins all vanished.

"Where did you send them?" Harry demanded.

"I sent them all across the camp," Voldemort said. "And I sent a few of my _loyal_ Death Eaters with them, close enough to hunt them down and… well, I left that part up to them." The remark about loyalty decidedly ironic and Harry was in no doubt that that loyalty had not been secured by fine speeches and personal charm. The latter part, though, chilled his blood. "Now, Harry, all you have to do is find them first. Good luck." And with that, he disapparated with a crack.

Harry glared at the spot where he'd been then, desperately attempting to tamp down the rising panic, took off as fast as he could.

OoOoO

Meanwhile, far across the camp, Carol blinked awake and looked around. "Where… what… how?"

Then, she shut her mouth as the hairs rose on the back of her neck and her instincts screamed.

She wasn't alone. And if she had to put money on it, she'd say that her companion very definitely not friendly. Resisting the urge to scrabble around for a weapon, or indeed to get up and run, she instead looked about carefully, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. Spotting a rock about the size of her fist, she reach out and picked it up.

She moved carefully, trying to find a position that combined stealthiness with clear lines of sight, and noticed that her body felt strange and decidedly ungainly.

She looked down, worried. There wasn't much in the way of light in the forest, especially not in the ditch she was now lying in, so she carefully reached out with strange feeling hands to confirm the evidence of her eyes, eyes which widened like saucers.

And while she didn't say anything, three words paraded across her mind.

'What. The. _Fuck_.'

OoOoO

Only moments after Harry left, Thor landed by the tents with an earth shaking thump, followed almost immediately by Tony and Loki, who was flying because someone had to bus over the non flight capable members of the Avengers, save Bruce, who had sensibly pointed out that if he went near a psychic powerful enough to fry Betsy's brain, they could have an out of control Hulk on their hands. Instead, he had elected to remain with Betsy and offer MI13 the benefit of his experience with psychic abilities and psychic attacks, accrued primarily through work with Harry and sharing research with Charles Xavier, Hank McCoy and, of course, Tony.

A quick search revealed that no one was present, but they had been not moments ago.

"Where are they?" Tony demanded without preamble.

"They are still in the camp," Loki said. "Spread all across it. Harry himself is on the move, and fast."

"Where?" Tony reiterated

"I don't know," Loki said tensely. "This area is so saturated with magic and, at the moment, panicking mages, that it's like trying to pick out individual flares during a simultaneous wildfire, fireworks display and meteor shower. All I know is that they are alive and, for the moment, unharmed."

"Whatever," Tony snapped, turning to speak into his armour. "JARVIS, retask every satellite we have and every single one we can hack into finding Pepper, Jane and the kids."

"I already have, sir."

"For the moment?" Steve asked.

"I recognise the magical signatures around here," Loki said grimly. "Harry's – he attacked someone." He nodded at the still burning trees. "Someone strong enough to deflect one of his better shots and encourage him not to throw any – well, many, where we are standing is practically glowing with the residue of psychic power. Clearly whoever it was, they were not only enough of a telepath to disable Agent Braddock, but to face down Harry, something very worrying indeed. And they are someone whose signature is very familiar…" He trailed off and went white, eyes flashing with fear and rage.

"Brother," Thor said. "Who is it?"

"Voldemort," Loki said grimly. "Voldemort is alive and he was here and I believe, he is playing some kind of twisted game with our loved ones."

"What kind of game?" Thor asked. "And can you follow him?"

"It's not him we need to worry about," Clint said. "Voldemort was here, strong enough to shrug off Harry's shots, magical and mental. That means he's got psychic power, and lots of it. And I don't know if you noticed, but when we jumped the Death Eaters, about six of them got away."

"Good," Loki said.

"Good?" Tony demanded, enraged. "Pepper, Jane, the kids – among them your _nephew_ – are out there being hunted by a bona fide Dark Lord and his pet magical psychopaths, while all we're doing is explaining to each other while we can't even _find_ them and you think that's _good?!"_

Loki, however, did not rise to it. "It is good, Tony," he said. "Because the Death Eaters are all connected by the Dark Mark. And with one Death Eater…"

"You can track the rest," Steve said, nodding. "Thor, Tony, rendezvous with Bruce and MI13, explain what's happening and what we need. In the meantime, Loki, Clint, Natasha and I will stay here and search for more clues. Go."

This was a good plan. Unfortunately, in the oft-misquoted words of German Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, "No operation extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main body of the enemy." Or, in the pithier words of Mike Tyson, "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

OoOoO

Harry tore through the sky, the wind whipping through his hair like it was trying to tear it out. He was going far faster than he ever had on a broom and on another occasion, he might have savoured it. But now, the only reason he wasn't in a blind panic or a blind fury was because the two emotions seemed to have set to fighting it out amongst themselves. His last bit of rationality had suggested he go after Pepper first, on the grounds that she was the most vulnerable, followed by Jane, Carol, the Twins, Uhtred and Diana.

It was, as with the Avengers plan, a good one. Unfortunately, he was flying right into the punch.

Homing in on Pepper's mind, which was growing steadily more panicked and – strangely – profoundly confused by the moment, he zeroed in on the clearing she was in, spotting flashes of light and a figure scrambling away from them, before dropped like a stooping falcon. He landed between the figure and the flashes of light, the impact shaking the earth and as a flash of red light soared towards him, he instinctively swatted it away with his telekinesis, at the same time as he hammered a piledriver of force where it had come from. The Death Eater tried to disapparate, but was just a microsecond too slow. The blast slammed into him with a series of crunching sounds like footsteps on dry Autumn leaves and hurled him at least thirty feet through the air like a ragdoll. He landed, bounced, and rolled, before coming to a stop at the base of a tree, where he lay still.

Under other circumstances, Harry might have felt worried, horrified at what he might have done on pure reflex, but right now, he felt a mixture of relief and vicious satisfaction. Then, he turned to Pepper. And so came the sucker punch.

Because it wasn't Pepper.

To be specific, his mental senses were telling him that this was Pepper Potts, CEO of Stark Industries, girlfriend of Tony Stark and soon-to-be mother of his child, but his eyes were telling him that this was Carol.

"Harry?" she said, and it was Carol's voice… but not. It wasn't her accent or intonation. Indeed, if he had to guess, he'd say it was Pepper's.

"Pepper?" he guessed.

Pepper nodded. "I… I don't know what happened," she said, breathing fast, still clearly frightened. "One moment, I was in the tent, the next, I'm in this clearing, in Carol's body and being chased by him." She waved over at the at-best-comatose Death Eater to illustrate her point.

Harry closed his eyes against a surge of rage, one that threatened to explode outwards in a howl of fury and vast eruption of flame. Voldemort hadn't just banished his friends across the camp, he'd forcibly swapped their minds, making them even more vulnerable – and it even harder to find those who were in the most danger before something terrible happened. Taking a couple of deep breaths, remembering that Pepper and the others needed him to sort this out, he centred himself and opened his mouth to explain, grimaced, and said, "It's a long story, there's no time. You're not the only one this has happened to."

"The others?" Pepper asked.

Harry nodded.

"Let's go then," she said.

Harry, wisely, did not argue, simply grabbing her around her waist – or more accurately, Carol's waist – and saying, "Hold on tight," before shooting upwards.

OoOoO

"Impressive," Voldemort murmured, releasing the half-dead Death Eater, allowing him to slip into blissful oblivion. "Still blunt as his father's hammer, but impressive. Now, though, I want to see him _angry_." He turned to the figure beside him. "I think it is time that the world was reminded that even in this changed world, my name is one to fear." He smiled. "Make them afraid, afraid and angry, so much so that they won't even be able to _think_."

Bartemius Crouch Junior bowed low. "As you will it, my Lord," he said.

OoOoO

Thor and Tony landed by the MI13 prisoner transport just as it was about to take-off.

"What are you two doing back here?" Wisdom asked.

"Jane, Pepper, my son and his friends, they are all gone from our encampment," Thor said curtly. "There were signs of a fight, with a sorcerer and psychic strong enough to stop Harry's best blows." He glanced over at Betsy, who was being tended to by Bruce and a bevy of MI13 medics. She did not look good. "And disable Agent Braddock."

"Not many of those around," Wisdom said. He glanced at the Death Eaters, then swore softly. "They were just a distraction, weren't they? For what? A kidnapping?"

"Yes," Thor said. "And not quite. They were banished all over the encampment, with Death Eaters sent after them. Harry gave chase. My brother has been unable to pinpoint them, but he did identify who was behind it: Voldemort."

Wisdom stared at him for a long moment, then went white and began to swear furiously.

"Yeah, we feel that way too," Tony said. "Give us one of your magical Klan wannabes, Loki thinks he can track them through their body art."

Wisdom paused, then turned to the guards and snapped some curt orders. With quick, efficient efforts, they grabbed one of the Death Eaters – a man who looked like nothing more than a middle aged bank clerk – and dragged him roughly over to Thor and Tony. He looked up at them briefly, expression terrified, before cowering before them.

"Up, wretch," Thor said coldly. "Call my brother, Tony. We have our Death Eater."

Then all thoughts were stopped in their tracks. Because there was a distant, echoing and exultant cry.

" _MORSMORDE!"_

A bolt of green light shot up into the night and exploded into a vast cloud of green stars that lit up the sky, one that swiftly coalesced into a colossal skull out of which a serpent emerged, questing and displaying its fangs like some sort of perversion of a tongue. And Thor stared in horror as for the first time in nearly a dozen years, the Dark Mark hung in the skies over Britain.

"Thor," Tony asked carefully. "What the hell is that? Thor!" This last was yelled as Thor, gaze fixed on the mark, launched himself into the sky, still holding the Death Eater by the collar.

"It's the Dark Mark," Wisdom said, in a flat voice. He was pale, but it was hard to tell with he was pale with fear or fury. "Voldemort's symbol, the Death Eaters' signature. It was fired into the sky whenever and wherever they'd made a kill."

Tony's expression was one of pure horror. Then, without a word, his visor slammed down and he shot off after Thor like a bat out of hell.

OoOoO

Harry paused in flight, staring at the Dark Mark. It had flown up practically right in front of him.

"What the hell is that?" Pepper asked.

"I don't know," Harry said, frowning, then closed his eyes, sending out his mind, picking up a sudden spike of terror across the camp and plenty of overflowing information about the Mark. "No," he whispered.

"Harry?" Pepper asked, before swallowing a scream as he dived towards the clearing where the mark had come from.

OoOoO

And then things turned to chaos. Because as he landed, so did his father, his landing shaking the Earth as Mjolnir trailed lightning and a storm built in the skies above. Moments later, so did Tony, his own landing hardly less impressive, repulsors, eye lights and arc reactor flaring, red and gold armour reflecting the flashes of light. At the same time, a haphazard series of cracks indicated the arrival of witches and wizards, but friend or foe no-one knew.

There was a frozen moment, then a wizard, blinded by the flashes of light and lightning, panicked by the Dark Mark and the earlier Death Eater rampage, fired a spell, starting a cross-fire of spells, lightning and repulsors.

Harry instantly dropped to one knee and covered Pepper, throwing up a telekinetic shield that immediately came under fire from all angles. While no one spell came close to piercing it, dozens put it under strain. Then it got worse.

Because Thor, with spells bouncing off him by the dozen, already had horrors played out across his mind from the mere sight of the Dark Mark, horrors of what he might see, of Jane or Harry dead at Voldemort's hands, or tortured into insanity by the Death Eaters as part of their grotesque amusements.

So it did not require anything more than a mental nudge from Voldemort to drive away any real semblance of rational thought.

And as a result, when he saw a dome of power appear not twenty feet away from him, he did not consider who it might be. He did not listen as Tony spun, seeing the dome, seeing Thor and shouting at him not to attack, that it was a friendly. Instead, he acted, driven by wild, unreasoning fear, crossing the distance in a blur, raising Mjolnir.

Harry saw the descending hammer and somehow knew that his shield wouldn't hold up.

But then, something deep down flickered. The instants of the hammer's descent stretched into an eternity as embers within Harry began to burn, three words searing themselves across his mind.

 _Life._

 _Fire._

 _ **Phoenix**_ _._

In the moment before impact, those watching saw the pale golden barrier suddenly ignite, blazing red, orange and gold.

And when Mjolnir collided with it, everything turned to incandescent white.

OoOoO

Tony was one of the first to regain his bearings, sitting up and looking around. There was a conspicuous lack of spellfire. There was also a conspicuous lack of standing trees, in a way he hadn't seen for the best part of four years.

"Jesus," he muttered. "What did Thor hit this time?"

Then, the memory came back and the horror he had felt since he had returned to the camp to find Pepper and the others gone and a Big Bad who was apparently a lot more big and bad and alive than he was supposed to be behind their disappearance returned with interest, leaving him near retching as he frantically cast about the clearing. Then, he sagged in utter relief as he saw Thor slowly getting to his feet, blinking blearily, and the intact dome, which remained the shimmering colours it had turned just before Mjolnir had hit. Even the Death Eater Thor had dragged along was still alive, if possibly not for long, judging by the way he was bleeding from the ears, nose and eyes. But he was still bleeding, and the suit's sensors said he was still alive.

Slowly, the dome faded and Harry stood up, trembling ever so slightly with what looked like exhaustion and next to him was Carol - which made sense, Tony supposed. If the kid was going to find anyone, it was going to be the person with whom he had an actual psychic rapport.

"You okay, kids?" he asked.

"Tony!" Carol said, and ran over to hug him tightly.

"Uh, hey," he said, puzzled, patting her on the back.

"Oh, right," Carol said. "It's me, Pepper."

Tony stared at her. "What," he said flatly.

"I don't know the details, but according to Harry, this happened to the others too," Carol – or rather, Pepper – said.

Tony felt a headache coming on, and a craving for a bottle of scotch. Then a horrific thought struck him. "Your body," he said. "The baby."

"I don't know," Pepper said, panic now edging her voice in earnest. Now that he listened, Tony could identify it as Pepper's voice, her phrasing, accent and intonation, albeit filtered through Carol's vocal chords. "Oh god, Tony, I have no idea what's happening! One moment everything's normal and I'm in the tent, the next I'm in a clearing in Carol's body being hunted by a madman with magic, then Harry came in and flattened him, then picked me up and flew off, then he saw that mark, found out what it was from other people's minds, freaked out and flew in, then everyone attacked us and Thor attacked us and Tony I have no idea what is happening-"

"Pepper," Tony said. "Breathe. You got whammied by Voldemort, the guy who killed Harry's mom. And Thor. Sort of. I think he got Thor too." He looked up at the sign. "As for that, according to Fury junior, it means that those Death Eater freaks have killed someone."

Pepper paled even further. "Oh god," she repeated. She looked like she was in shock, and no wonder.

"Yeah," Tony said, then looked over at Thor and Harry, the latter, though he looked like he could barely stand, reassuring the distraught former. "Come on."

As they reached the father and son, Thor seemed to have gathered himself, though he still looked haunted at what had nearly happened. Harry, for his part, was clad in dark, leathery clothing which was, if you looked closely, visible as being dark red. Emblazoned on his chest was a golden image that Tony recognised from the summer, the sign emblazoned on Harry's mother's dress. The sign of the Phoenix. It seemed to be glowing faintly. As he watched, it faded away and vanished, his clothes changed back to the t-shirt and jeans he'd been wearing before, complete with Ireland rosettes.

Well that, he guessed, explained why Harry's shield had changed colour and shrugged off a blow in earnest from Mjolnir.

"They haven't killed anyone here," Harry said, as Tony and Pepper arrived. "And everyone else is still alive." The words 'for now' hung in the air, unspoken but ominous. "I can find them, but not fast enough, the Death Eaters are already after them. I…" He stopped. "Dad," he said, voice suddenly careful and distant. "The Dark Mark. It links the Death Eaters to Voldemort? All of them?"

"Yes," Thor said. "He used it to summon them and they to summon him."

"They're all connected," Harry whispered, tiredness apparently forgotten. "That's how he's controlling them." Then, he gestured at the Death Eater Thor had dragged with him, the man flying arm first to him, sleeve yanking itself up, revealing the Dark Mark.

"All right Voldemort," he said. "If this is the way you want it… Time for Round Two."

And before anyone could say anything, his expression cold and eyes literally blazing with rage, he took the outstretched arm in a vicegrip and drove his thumb into the very heart of the Dark Mark.

And it and every single one of its brothers began to burn gold.

OoOoO

Peter Wisdom, across the camp supervising the prisoners, nearly collapsed, staggering against the side of a quinjet clutching his left arm and was only prevented from cursing up a storm by the fact that his teeth had snapped together hard enough to chip, all while those self-same prisoners screamed.

Severus Snape, in Hogwarts doing his inventory for the coming school year, swallowed a scream of pain and staggered to the floor.

Barty Crouch Junior, halfway across the country on his master's orders, fell to his knees and let out a mad, bubbling laugh at what he deemed to be proof of his master's success.

Lucius Malfoy, on the other side of the world, cursed horribly and wondered what the hell his former master was doing.

Even the Death Eater that Harry had left broken in a clearing let out a renewed howl of pain, the agony such that it jarred him back into consciousness.

Everyone with a Dark Mark felt their arms burn, burn like never before.

But for a select five Death Eaters, puppets on Voldemort's strings, that was not all that burned.

OoOoO

Voldemort looked around the mindscape that was composed of the five minds of the Death Eaters he had under his control, then across at Harry, and smiled. "Ah, Harry. So glad you could join me. Do you like the décor?"

The mindscape resembled the entrance hall of Hogwarts, but Hogwarts as seen through a broken mirror. This Hogwarts was larger, darker, not bright and welcoming, but squat and dark, a brooding, sullen place of shadows and serpertine statuary.

Harry, however, did not reply. Instead, he strode forwards towards Voldemort, who narrowed his eyes and lashed out with mental blast designed to drive Harry's mental self to his knees. The blast struck, apparently flaying the skin off Harry's mental self, revealing a figure sculpted of golden-white flames, one that drew a sword of even brighter flames from the firmament around them. Voldemort, unnerved, prepared to defend himself, but Harry didn't attack him. Instead, he took one great stride, swinging the sword up high, then driving it down into the rock, which cracked into lines of white light, lines that spread like lightning bolts throughout the mindscape, fracturing it and then spreading, consuming the twisted replica of Hogwarts like fire consuming tinder.

As Voldemort snatched at the firmament of the mindscape, looking to take back control, to reform it into something that would serve his interests. But as he did, Harry advanced on him, that sword coming around in a slash that looked to bisect him, and when he threw up a defence of deathly green power, it carved straight through it, and the follow-up nearly cut his astral self in half, leaving a thick slash across his chest, only failing to do so because at that instant, Voldemort abandoned the fight.

Back in the real world, he clutched at his chest and gritted his teeth against the phantom pain.

"So," he said to himself. "There is more strength to you, Harry, than I had thought. You acted as a man, worthy to wield power. But now, I think, I may have your measure. And I have work to do."

And with that, he vanished.

OoOoO

Harry, meanwhile, looked around the abandoned and blank white mindscape and waved a hand. A series of holographic computer screen constructs appeared, each showing the view through each of the Death Eater's eyes. To his relief, visual evidence and a quick scan of their fragmented memories showed that Carol, the Twins, Jane, Uhtred and Diana all seemed fine, whichever bodies they were in. Indeed, the Death Eater that had faced the Twins' bodies was tied up and rather badly burnt. The others, it seemed, had sensibly kept down and remained in hiding. Clearly Voldemort's attempts to put five individuals under his direct command, quite literally micro-managing, had not yielded much success.

As for the Death Eaters themselves, minds were shattered, but enough remained to serve a purpose. Robotically, the four that were able to looked up and pointed their wands at the sky, firing off fountains of red sparks, before systematically snapping their wands – just, it seemed, in case.

Once they had done that, they were released, collapsing like puppets whose strings had been cut. Which was exactly what they were.

Then, Harry reached out. _Hey, it's me, Harry,_ he said. _It's okay. It's over._

 _Harry?_ Jane asked. _I'm in Uhtred's body, I've been stalked by a dark wizard for a while now, even hit with a couple of curses that I'm pretty sure would have killed me if I was in my own body and I have no idea how it happened._

Harry gave a succinct summary of events.

 _How can we know it's you?_ One of the Twins asked.

 _Yeah,_ the other Twin added. They were even more identical in mind than they were in body, if that was even possible. _I mean, if Voldemort has powers like yours, then couldn't he just pretend to be you in our heads?_

 _It's him,_ Carol interjected. _Trust me, I've had him in my head before, I remember how it feels. And before we start on anything else, my body is fine, right? Pepper too?_

 _Yes,_ Harry said.

 _Right, great. I need to get back in it, pronto. Like, five minutes ago._

 _What's wrong?_ Jane asked, concerned.

The reply was manically cheerful. _Because I, or rather Pepper's body, is having contractions. In fact, I'm pretty sure her waters just broke. While I know that this doesn't mean instant baby, I want out._ _ **Now.**_

 _Got it,_ Harry replied numbly. _Fred, George, send up spark so everyone knows where you are. I'd have had your Death Eater do it, but he can't, he's tied up._ Then he stepped back into his body, dropping the Death Eater whose arm he'd been holding.

"Harry?" his father said anxiously.

"They're all fine," Harry said, feeling as if his voice was coming from a long way away. "I scared Voldemort off." He looked up at Pepper and Tony. "Pepper, Pepper's body – which Carol is in, by the way – is fine. Red sparks mark where they are."

Tony gave him a long look, then without a word pulled him into a tight hug. It was, by his standards, a momentous gesture.

Harry, though, didn't react or resist. He just felt numb, numb and knackered. Voldemort was back. Voldemort was back and in one fell swoop, he'd nearly killed a number of people who were friends, friends and more. He'd nearly got Harry himself killed. And Voldemort had done all that while simply playing with them, demonstrating his power and, apparently, to test Harry.

If he had wanted to kill them, he could have done so, easily. Why hadn't he? Wariness? The last time he'd tried to kill Harry had ended badly for him, after all, and he'd practically said as much. But perhaps there was more. Perhaps… perhaps he had been testing himself, testing what he could do against Harry, against the Avengers, but not testing too hard – he had not attacked until he was sure the Avengers were elsewhere, and fled as soon as he realised that Harry overmatched him, in power at least.

"Oh," he added, as sleep began to claim him. "Pepper, Carol… Pepper's body. Carol says that it's having the baby. Now."

And as chaos erupted once more, he slipped into darkness and dreams.

OoOoO

This was not the end of events, however. As Harry slipped out of consciousness, the majority of the Ministry Witches and Wizards who had been surrounding the clearing and been knocked out by the side effects of the impact of Mjolnir on Harry's Phoenix enhanced shield, were slipping back in and looking to establish what had happened – or more accurately, who to blame.

This was something not helped by the fact that more than few had caught repulsor blasts and a few had been electrocuted to various degrees in the chaos, nor that neither Thor nor Tony had especially appreciated being bombarded with curses, especially since one or two of those curses had very nearly opened Tony's armour like a can opener, and even less appreciated being impeded in their retrieval of their companions, especially since they were all in the wrong bodies and one of those bodies was in labour.

Then Amos Diggory, one of the most senior officials present and otherwise a decent, kind and largely blameless man, had found a stunned house elf called Winky, with a lost wand in her hand. It was the end of a long night in which a lot of things that he would rather have stayed buried had been dredged up, including supposedly Voldemort himself, and he felt that she was a softer target than an angry Thunder God, an even angrier genius, billionaire, philanthropist and expectant father and a yet still angrier genius (of a different kind), billionaire, philanthropist and expectant mother, who, to complicate matters, was very much not in the body that was doing the expecting. The unconscious Harry Potter, Boy Who Lived, Demigod and Who Knew What Else, only made matters worse. So he felt that he could blame the whole Dark Mark mess on the House Elf (somehow) and let the rest off to sort themselves out. However, the instinctive sense of justice in all of the conscious three of the Avengers contingent complicated this, as did the fact that it was Barty Crouch's house elf and Barty Crouch was very much here. And then things got complicated further still.

"Don't be stupid, Diggory," a harsh London accented voice said in caustic tones.

"Who -" Amos Diggory began, before his expression darkened. "Wisdom."

"Speak of the devil and he shall appear," Wisdom said with dark humour, as he strode into the clearing, flanked by Sean and Warren, the former of whom gave Thor a nod and Harry a worried look. Thor contrived to indicate by expression that Harry was fine, simply exhausted – which he largely did by not obviously panicking. "The poor bloody house elf didn't do it," Wisdom continued, glancing at the trembling Winky.

"It is being true, Mister Diggory, I is not using a wand!" she cried.

"She was found -" Diggory began.

"She could have picked it up anywhere, you fucking moron," Wisdom said scathingly.

"Excuse me," Diggory said angrily.

"No, you are not bloody excused," Wisdom snapped. "You were the one who was suggesting that it was more likely that a clearly terrified House Elf cast the Dark Mark instead of simply being unlucky enough to find the damn thing after the perpetrator got scared when the whole bloody flying circus dropped in and left it behind while running for the hills! There have Death Eaters running around all over the place tonight!"

"You are right about that much, Director," Crouch said. "I will take Winky and find out what has gone on tonight. I will expect the captives that your operatives have so effectively taken to be yielded into my custody."

"No."

"No?" Crouch asked, as the atmosphere in the clearing grew tense, a thick silence falling on proceedings. "You are outnumbered, Wisdom, and outmatched."

"Outnumbered, maybe, but do you really want to try me, Crouch, with only a bunch of half-concussed Ministry functionaries at your back?" Wisdom said softly. "Go right ahead. But remember, you're not head of the DMLE any more and the Ministry doesn't have the power it once did. So when my agents roll you and whoever's stupid enough to follow you up into a big ball and put you in a cell next to the bunch of drunken Death Eaters I've already got locked up, all the bleating in the world from Cornelius Fudge won't make a damned bit of difference."

"Bloody cheek," one witch muttered.

"And fuck you too, ma'am," Wisdom snapped, without turning round. It did not go unnoticed that his eyes kept darting to the Dark Mark. "This is my fucking investigation, those are my fucking prisoners and that House Elf is coming with me, as are you Barty. You both have some explaining to do."

"You can't do this," Diggory expostulated.

Wisdom whirled on him, eyes suddenly wild and furious, red hot blades of energy igniting on his fingertips, casting harsh, dancing shadows and causing the Ministry wizards to shrink back as he advanced on Diggory.

"The Dark Mark is in the sky. The Death Eaters are up to their old tricks. The security of Britain is threatened. All because you _stupid_ bastards didn't do your job at the end of the fucking War! You just let them all slip away, didn't you, with excuses like 'a big Death Eater made me do it and ran away'!" he snarled. "And now they're _back_. Maybe not organised, maybe nothing but drunks out for a bit of fun, but now all the cockroaches are scuttling out of the shadows and that's a problem because you know what? Voldemort's back too! He's back and he's using them as fucking _puppets!_ "

He drew his wand a fired a silver burst up into the sky. Almost immediately, there was a huge roar as not one, not two, but three quinjets, bulkier and more heavily armed than the usual examples of their kind, took up station around the clearing, floodlights lighting it up like the noonday sun.

"I am the Director of MI13 and because you lot are incapable of policing yourselves, it is now _my_ job. If the cockroaches are going to crawl out of the shadows, I'm the one who's going to turn on the lights," Wisdom growled. "I have the authority of the Crown behind me on this, so I assure you, Diggory, that right now I can do whatever the hell I like, and _god help whoever gets in my way!"_

This echoed around the clearing, then Wisdom turned to Crouch. "Are you coming, or do I have to cuff you?" he asked coldly.

Crouch's eyes narrowed as he met Wisdom's gaze. For a long moment, there was a battle of wills, then Crouch looked away. "Come, Winky," he said curtly, falling in with Wisdom's group.

Wisdom's gaze the fell upon the Avengers. "Cassidy, see the trouble magnets home via the on-site base, would you? We spotted the red sparks and sent out people to bring in the rest of your lost little lambs, and the Death Eaters sent after them too."

"Aye, sir," Sean said. "Sirs, ma'am, if ye'd come with me."

Thor carefully arranged the sleeping Harry, then followed his son's former teacher out of the clearing. As he left.

"You're going too far, Wisdom," Diggory said.

Wisdom gave him a dark, humourless smile. "Oh, believe me, Diggory - I'm just getting started."

This would have been an excellently dark and creepy line to exit with, if Harry hadn't then decided to act. Because as Thor looked down at him, he saw that his eyes were open and he was staring at the Dark Mark, expression hard.

"Harry?" he asked.

Everyone stopped as Harry wordlessly slipped out of his father's arms and raised a fist, watching an indistinct shape of bright light grow on his wrist. Then, he jerked it upwards, launching the shape upwards and watched as it grew in size and brightness until it was like an incandescent comet that rocketed past the Dark Mark, turning night to day as it performed a long, slow loop into the clouds, burning droplets of water to steam.

At the loop's zenith, Harry – whose gaze was tracking the ball of light even when everyone else had to look away, his expression almost hawklike in its sharpness – made a sharp, slashing gesture.

Wings erupted from the ball of light, which streamlined itself into a giant bird of prey, letting out an unearthly scream of challenge as it stooped towards the Dark Mark. Then, with a dazzling flash and a vast explosion of green and white-gold sparks that lit up the sky for miles around, it struck, shattering the skull of the Dark Mark and tearing the serpent that emerged from it to shreds, before letting out another unearthly scream, this one of triumph and defiance, performing a long victory lap before fading away.

Then, Harry turned away and was heartily sick. Thor glanced at Pepper and Tony. "You two go with Agent Cassidy," he said. "Ensure that the others are safe. I will look after Harry."

Pepper nodded.

"But, the mind-swap thing," Tony began.

"That will not be a problem," a mild voice said.

Everyone jumped as Doctor Strange emerged out of the shadows.

"Where have you been?" Thor growled in a voice that promised pulverisation if the wrong answer was given.

"Persuading the Dread Dormammu that contrary to his previous inclinations, he did not want to conquer the Earth and enslave all the mortal souls upon it," Strange said, and indeed, he looked rather badly scorched, with bits of his clothing still smoking. "And," he said, lifting up a suitcase. "Collecting my things. I believe that there is a baby to be delivered." He looked at Harry, who was still being sick. "And to forestall your question, Harry is not ill. What he has done is merely sinking in."

Tony flicked a glance at Thor, who nodded minutely. If there was one area in which Strange could be trusted without reserve, it was in the execution of his duties as a medical doctor. If, after all, he did not want to treat someone to the best of his abilities, he simply wouldn't be there.

"Let's go, then," he said. "And fast."

"Yeah," Pepper said, with a wan smile on her face. "I don't think Carol would appreciate having to give birth to our baby."

"Indeed not," Strange said, and snapped his fingers. And just like that, they were gone.

OoOoO

Harry, for his part, didn't have much to throw up past the immediate semi-digested sausage. He did, however, go on retching for some time.

Ever since he had discovered that he was a telepath and realised exactly what could be done with that kind of power, remembered what he had seen done to Ginny with that kind of power, he had kept it inside his own head wherever possible. Betsy had had to use practically every method she had of cajoling and persuading him to learn a new technique, and he'd only started learning at all because he'd found out the hard way that it was considerably more dangerous if left uncontrolled.

Since then, the most he had done was communicate with friends and family, and one or two occasions, knock out HYDRA troopers and help Carol with her nightmares. As far as he was concerned, there was a line you simply did not cross, things you did not do, not even to your worst enemies. And he had done several of them.

He had used the Dark Mark to attack the minds of Death Eaters, like Voldemort. In fighting Voldemort, he had practically destroyed the minds of five Death Eaters as mere collateral damage. They were alive, but he didn't need to be an experienced psychic to know that that was a mere technicality. And he hadn't cared. He hadn't even blinked. He had just pulled the bits together and turned them into his puppets, instruments of his will. He had smashed his way into their minds, violated them, _used_ them, and left them as little more than ruins when he was finished.

To say he felt sick was an understatement. Repulsed, perhaps, revolted, as if he had done something that was fundamentally Wrong.

How was that any better than what Voldemort had done? How was that any better than what Riddle's diary had tried to do little more than a year before? How was he any better?

"Because you had no choice," Thor said gently, and Harry realised that he had said the last aloud. "You did not choose this fight. You did not choose to involve those Death Eaters, to make their minds a battlefield. And because you did it for the others, not for yourself."

"I found Pepper," Harry said. "I could have found the others."

"But not in time," Thor said. "And there was no guarantee that Voldemort would not have tried something else."

Harry shook his head. "You don't know that," he said.

Thor opened his mouth, and Harry could just feel the words of his father's denial lining up. But they did not come. Instead, there was a long pause.

"You are a warrior," Thor said. "None in the Nine Realms would deny that, not after the Battle of London. Your name is sung in halls across the Nine Realms, as tales of your mighty deeds echo across the stars."

"I know," Harry said somewhat grumpily. "I wish they wouldn't, it's embarrassing."

Thor burst into laughter. "Well, maybe you should perform fewer mighty deeds then," he said, tone teasing. Then, he sobered. "But you still have much to learn of war. In many ways, so do I – war is a harsh teacher and always has new lessons to hand out. And one of the earliest lessons is that when you are forced into a corner, it often comes down to a matter of choosing to protect those you love by harming those you do not. It is true, you could have chosen to take the morally unimpeachable path of finding each of those you love individually, defeating their attackers without violating their minds, but in doing so, you risked their deaths or worse, especially once Voldemort realised what you were doing. So you chose to make the harder choice, to exchange the risk of those you love being hurt for the certain suffering of those who would have hurt them."

"It wasn't the harder choice," Harry said quietly. "That's the worst part, dad. It was _easy_."

"No," Thor said. "It was the harder choice. Do you know why?"

"Why?"

"Because you took a burden onto yourself that may never grow any lighter," he said. "A burden that you will carry with you for ages to come. You sacrificed your principles for their safety. You did not have to, but you did so anyway."

"Of course I had to," Harry said, indignant at the very concept that he would put his principles above those he loved, then stopped and frowned, before meeting his father's knowing smile. It was in that moment that he was forcibly reminded that his father was much cleverer and much wiser than he generally let on.

It was also in that moment that he realised that while the thought of what he had done sickened him, he had indeed had to do it. Because he had done it, those he loved, family and friends, were safe now. And he could live with that.

"Better?" Thor asked.

"Better," Harry said, wiping his mouth. "Can we go and see the others now? I know that they're okay, but I want to…" He fumbled for the word or phrase.

"You want to be sure," Thor said, nodding. "As I want to be sure.

"Right. And, um, dad?"

"Yes?"

"Is there anything to eat? I'm hungry."

Thor chuckled. "I'm sure we can find something," he said.

 **And that rounds off the first real chapter of Book II. Rather quick mood-swing, wasn't it? Now we've seen Voldemort, who's testing Harry, looking to get his measure, to see what he can and can't do and more importantly what he will and won't do when his back is against the wall. We'll see more of him, but not directly confronting Harry like this – he's learned just how outmatched he is in a contest of power he is and he won't risk another until he's sure he can match Harry, outmatch him, or walk him straight into a trap. He needs to find out more and that's what he'll spend this year doing.**

 **I hope I got the balance right – namely, enough to show that wanded practitioners aren't completely useless, especially when they trouble to use their powers sensibly. I think I was leaning the other way a bit in Book I.**

 **As an organisation, though, the Ministry is going to continue to be all at sea, for a number of reasons, not least that Wisdom is no longer in any mood to speak softly and has a stick of increasing size, so to speak.**


	3. Chapter 3: The First Shoe Drops

**Sorry this one took a while, I've been busy, I got a little bit stuck on the last bit and I'm not sure how good it is - it may need a bit of editing. Whatever. It's a lighter, softer chapter, albeit with a bit of ominous stuff in there. Indeed, the next few will be lighter and softer for the most part, focusing a bit more on character development, because as has been pointed out, I've had Harry pinballing from crisis to crisis for some time. A little relaxation does no harm. And besides, I have much else to explore…**

 **In any case, here is the chapter, a bit shorter than previously – I am serious about trying to cut them down.**

 _ **BrandNuKing:**_ **Yes, it was, wasn't it? And maybe, later on. As for your question, no idea. Sorry.**

The first thing that had happened after the various Avengers associates had been rounded up was, predictably, lots of anxious hugging and reassurance that the other party was indeed fine, while the Twins predictably lightened the atmosphere by asserting that they looked even more handsome from the outside and starting a light argument over which one had been better looking.

At that point, Carol had unwisely asserted that it was a pointless assertion, because "You're both practically identical and kind of hot." This had led to mock flirting from the Twins, teasing from everyone else and half-hearted assertions by Carol that she was going to feed them their own kidneys if they kept it up.

The second and infinitely more surprising thing, however, was that Steve had waited until those who were not in the know had gone, then strode over and pulled Carol into the sort of tight, desperate, eyes tight shut hug usually given by parents to children that they have almost lost. Being a super soldier, that hug would also have broken an ordinary person's ribs. It certainly drew a loud, surprised squeak and a pair of very wide eyes from Carol, plus some squirming, but after a moment, expression caught somewhere between surprise, happiness and a bone deep relief that Steve was finally acknowledging her in more than just the technical sense, that he was actually treating her like family rather than some inconvenience of the 21st century that he couldn't ignore and would rather avoid, she relaxed into the hug.

After several long moments, the two separated, Steve faintly embarrassed, then he started peppering her with worried questions about how she was. Since she'd already been asked many of these questions, Carol answered them with the exasperated eyeroll that seemed to come with puberty, along with things like acne and pubic hair. But the eyeroll and her other responses, while entirely in-keeping for a teenager, lacked the resentful bite that they'd carried over the last couple of months.

In its place, there was the sort of back-handed affection that teenagers showed towards elders that they actually liked – elders in this context being absolutely everyone over the age of 25. Steve, who was better at reading people than most thought, and had experience of that kind of back-handed affection from dealing with Tony, took it as such.

OoOoO

Regrettably, not every piece of fallout was quite so heartwarming, as the Avengers convened once the younger generation had been put to bed.

"So," Bruce said quietly. "That's what wizards gone bad looks like."

"No," Thor said grimly. "That was a few Death Eaters who had slipped through the cracks after the war and had a drink before deciding to remind the rest of us that they are still around looks like." His expression darkened further. "And Voldemort revealing his continued existence and having fun."

"That was mild?" Tony asked, eyebrow raised at the implication. His tone was superficially calm, but he hadn't let go of Pepper's hand. The contractions had slowed somewhat and Doctor Strange had judged that she was, for the moment, fine, but said that they would gather pace again within a couple of hours.

"Back during the war, that family, Pepper, Jane and Harry's friends too, would have been tortured and killed the same way a child would pull the wings off a fly," Thor said flatly, though not without gently squeezing Jane's hand by way of reassurance. "With what Voldemort is capable of now, there would have been no limit to their torments. No one died and everyone is still sane. So yes. It was mild."

"MI13 have all the Death Eaters locked up, though," Steve said. "Voldemort can't do anything with them."

"No," Thor said. "He cannot. MI13 know, it seems, how to trap and contain wizards."

"You're not pleased about this?" Natasha asked, catching his tone.

"I am glad that the Death Eaters are locked away where they can do no harm," Thor said. "And I am glad that the non-magical security forces have the means to face the likes of the Death Eaters on even ground."

"Yeah," Clint said dryly. "Less work for us."

"Yes," Thor said.

"Thor?" Steve asked.

"Wisdom worries me," Thor said eventually. "I look at him and I see a man with a burning ambition."

"What kind of ambition?" Tony asked, eyebrow raised. "To be Prime Minister?"

"Hardly," Loki said. "Any government that is elected will govern at Wisdom's sufferance alone. And day to day politics do not interest him." He shook his head. "No, he is beginning to make his move."

"So I believe," Thor said. "Could he do it?"

"Do what?" Jane asked, bemused. Thor turned to answer, but Natasha beat him to it.

"Marginalise the Ministry and reduce it to an irrelevance, then take it over, lock, stock and barrel," she said.

"Perhaps," Loki said. "There is little enough appetite at the Ministry at the moment for any kind of confrontation, least of all with MI13, and they have not even come close to making up their losses, which were grievous."

"As were MI13's last year," Steve pointed out. "And as have SHIELD's been over the last year, from HYDRA's depredations and the purge."

"SHIELD is a massive organisation capable of withstanding such losses, if not without difficulty," Loki said. "It is wracked by vast convulsions, a battle for its future, its very soul, but under Fury's influence, if not direct stewardship, it will survive. And MI13's destiny was taken in hand in a time of confusion by a single, formidable man with a very clear purpose and both the ambition and charisma to bring it about. The Ministry was far smaller than SHIELD; Malfoy took the trouble to effectively decapitate it by removing most of its leading figures, losses they could ill-afford. They also lack the leadership that MI13 have enjoyed. And as for rebuilding, Wisdom has had a headstart of months. He has also been drawing on the mutant, wandless and Squib communities, as well as poaching the Muggleborn Auror applicants and a good number of the Half Bloods too, as well as any number of specialist graduates."

"What kinds?"

"Oh, any number – those who show especial talent in Runes and other ancient writings, talented Transfiguration and Potions students with an eye for alchemy, Charms students who show promise as enchanters, that sort of thing. With his budget, he can afford to pay them and pay them well. Even so, that could be managed with good leadership," Loki said. "But to be frank, the Ministry is still in shock. It has been a long time since they faced a threat capable of wiping them out like HYDRA did, a very long time indeed. It has been even longer since they faced one like MI13, which does not so much seek to destroy them as supplant them. More to the point, Fudge is dithering. He is only still in post because none of his potential replacements want to be the one to take the brunt of the clearing up job or to confront MI13. The latter factor is especially significant: Wisdom terrifies them."

"Oh, I don't know about that," Thor said. "Crouch would do it. He would not back down to Wisdom."

"No," Loki agreed. "However, the Ministry is also conscious of your fully justified and publicly demonstrated dislike of Crouch and considering his past, would be reluctant in the extreme to let him take post. The position, I believe, is that they do not need any more enemies at the moment."

"Dumbledore could do it," Thor said, albeit somewhat dubiously. Albus had explained to him at some length why he chose to remain a headmaster and nothing more, because he feared what he was capable of in power.

"He could do it, but you know as well as I do that Dumbledore will not be pried out of Hogwarts," Loki said. "And he is in sympathy in Wisdom's aims and motives, if not with his methods."

"So," Tony said, after a pause. "What you're saying, Thor, is that Wisdom gives you the creeps, and what you're saying, Loki, is that he looks like he's about to takeover the Ministry?" His tone was deceptively calm, but with a manic edge. "Because I've got to say, going by tonight, I don't mind that idea. I don't mind it all. Because while Voldemort made us all look like dumbasses, MI13 were, as far as I can tell, the only ones who at least got something done. Them and Harry. Voldemort caught these incompetent Ministry people sitting on their asses and had no fucking clue what was going on, while MI13 were on their toes. They took those creeps down. So what if Wisdom's scary? Maybe scary is what's needed right now. Maybe it doesn't matter, because he actually did something approximating his job!"

"Tony," Pepper said, squeezing his hand and giving him a reproving look as his words rang around the tent. Tony met her gaze and deflated.

"No one denies that the Ministry were ineffective, Tony," Thor said gently. "Indeed, incompetent might be a better word. As an institution, it needs to be either reformed or replaced. What worries me is what Wisdom might do to achieve that goal, and what he might replace it with."

"That's a matter for another day," Steve said.

"I am not sure that it is," Loki said. "Or rather, addressing it individually is a matter for another day, but this new and assertive, even dictatorial, MI13, one that fuses high technology and high magic is part of a bigger picture that needs to be addressed now."

"What do you mean?" Clint asked, frowning.

"The old certainties are fading away," Loki said. "A thousand years ago, it was decreed that the gods would no longer interfere on Earth as they once had, to let humanity make their own way, so that they would no longer be simple pawns in battles between one Power and another. Visits here and there, actions here and there, those could be accepted so long as they did not alter humanity's destiny. The Council of Skyfathers agreed upon this, while the Unseelie Accords were established by Queen Mab to encompass those Powers who inhabited the mortal world, or had closer ties to it, and achieve much the same. In addition, Mab and Titania commanded their folk to withdraw from the world – not entirely, mark you, and slowly, but to withdraw nevertheless. Not all did, some choosing to reside in the mortal world, but enough did that appearances of the Fae dwindled. Books like the tales of the Brothers Grimm kept their memory alive, but relegated them to the position of mere tales. Gods and monsters, heroes and villains; for the most part it was now up to humanity to create their own. Magic remained of course, and magical beings, but not in the numbers they once were. In time, even those of magical blood retreated from the mundane world, living in secrecy, allowing things that were once common knowledge to slip into memory, in the West in particular. Now…"

"Now?" Steve asked, prompting him.

"Now, a new millennium has dawned. The supernatural was already making a resurgence, in time with a rise in mutant births. Gods acted once more in the world of men, for good or ill. Heroes arose to fight darknesses ancient and new, their numbers added to daily. Mundane organisations were increasingly getting to grips with the technology of other worlds and the powers of other realms, studying them, looking to turn them to their own purpose. But it was a relatively slow progression, for all the chaos that was caused. Now, it has become a much swifter progression for precisely that reason: chaos."

"Chthon," Thor said grimly.

"I thought that Harry put the world back together," Bruce said.

"Even the finest stitching leaves the thinnest of gaps, the finest healing the memory of a scar," Loki said. "And both leave residual weakness. The fabric of reality is thin on Midgard at the best of times, my friends. Last summer's events have only made it that much thinner." He waved a hand. "And even if that were not the case, where my actions in New York were confined to the inner city, the war that HYDRA waged this past year and its culmination have affected the entire world. As a result, the world is responding. Governments are diverting billions in funding into super soldier programs and other superhuman countermeasures, suits of armour, that sort of thing – you can be very sure that nations across the world will be looking at what Director Wisdom is doing, what Director Fury did to an extent in North America, and taking copious notes. Terrorists, criminals and others of that ilk are searching for superhuman soldiers and enforcers, while vampires of all breeds do much the same, seeking to ensnare and twist potential threats to their purpose. Further to that, any number of monsters have taken Lucius Malfoy's exhortation at the UN to make their presence known, and the incursion of millions upon millions of vile creatures during the Battle of London as all the encouragement they need to crawl out of the shadows and make mischief. And if there were not enough upheaval to deal with, the energy and technological revolution that Tony's arc reactor and Iron Man technology sparked is building to a fever pitch. And it gets worse."

"Becauset here's always room for it to get worse," Clint said sagely.

"Because it always does," Natasha said, poker faced.

"Save the comedy act for the road," Tony said flatly, uncharacteristically focused. "Worse how, Loki?"

"Have you been watching the news?" Loki asked. "Religious belief across the world has experienced a _vast_ resurgence."

He waved a hand at Thor. "My brother and I caused something of a resurgence, especially among the self-proclaimed 'heathens', but this is on a whole new level. Each group is claiming the triumph of ending Chthon's terror for their deity of choice. Footage of the battle – because apparently the last thing a mortal will relinquish is their camera phone - has only complicated things. Jews, Christians and Muslims alike have claimed the Knights of the Cross for their own, for instance, and if one group is feeling charitable towards the others, proof not only that they know the truth but that the other groups, while wrong, are broadly speaking on the right track." He sighed. "And usually they miss the point of the Knights in the first place, but that is another matter. Then you have appearances made by a few members of other pantheons worldwide – Hercules, to take one, generated enough attention, especially when he was seen fighting alongside Thor. Elsewhere, to take another example, Hanuman was sighted fighting demons in India. Humanity now knows for certain that their gods are real."

"Is that necessarily a bad thing?" Steve asked. "I mean, speaking from personal experience, faith can help you through bad times."

"I am aware, Steve," Loki sighed. "However, I think that I speak for most sane divinities when I say that faith in yourself, or in those around you, would be greatly preferred."

"And that kind of faith isn't exactly the kind of faith that plays well with others," Natasha said.

Steve frowned, but didn't disagree.

"And then," Loki said. "There is the matter of the prophecy. Which, unfortunately, seems to have started coming true."

This caused a stirring amongst the Avengers. The news of Trewlawney's second prophecy hadn't caused great worry initially on the grounds that while it was ominous, it was also rather vague on matters like time scale and the identities of the threats it listed, beyond those that the Avengers knew about already.

"You're sure about that?" Clint asked. "What am I saying, of course you're sure."

Loki smiled faintly, with not much humour. "I am," he said. "Unfortunately. It is quite clear that Voldemort is returned, 'greater and more terrible than ever before'. It is also clear from the fact that he seemed to be merely testing himself against Harry and was overwhelmed when Harry forced him into a trial of strength that he will be seeking more power. 'Now he seeks the means to become greater and more terrible still'."

"Anything beyond the obvious?" Tony asked, voice edged, earning him a sharp look each from Pepper, Steve and Thor.

Loki nodded and all of a sudden, he looked very tired. "'And beyond them all, something ancient beyond telling awakens'," he said softly. "'Embers long banked now burn again. Welcomed by fools, the twisted flame spreads unchecked once more, consuming all.'"

There was a long silence. Then, Natasha broke it. "The Phoenix," she said. "You think it's the Phoenix."

"Lily would never," Thor began.

"Lily is not the woman you were wed to," Loki said flatly. "She is no longer human, nor even divine, she is the primary aspect of one of the Endless. One of the Endless, who I might remind you, is not exactly renowned for Her concept of restraint or understanding of collateral damage. And even though she is benevolently inclined and, taking into account what we have seen and the testimony of Albus Dumbledore, a moderating influence, though she is the first aspect among many, she is still an aspect – and that is a mantle which she took on a split millisecond ago, in cosmic terms."

"I was under the impression that the Phoenix was a force for good," Steve said.

"In the grand scheme of things, yes," Loki said. "She heals what can be healed and sows the seeds of cosmic rebirth, but She also burns away what is deemed not to work. She might cause life to rise from the ashes, but She is usually the reason that there are ashes in the first place. The Endless tend to have distinct personalities, ones that make them almost human. The Phoenix, however, is the odd one out in that She is more of a force of nature, impersonal and non-malicious. The same hurricane that tears apart cities, destroys livelihoods and ruins lives is also the one that provides life giving rain across a significant slice of a continent. Mostly."

"Mostly?" Steve asked.

"I must stress that even I do not know all that much about the Phoenix," Loki said. "And believe me, I have spent every spare moment over the last few months looking. But the Phoenix is… well. She is Fire and Life incarnate. She is unbridled joy and untold sorrow, cosmic compassion and burning, blinding, uncontrollable and unimaginable _rage_." He sighed. "For want of a better way of putting it, we are talking about an entity with absolutely no concept of middle gears, damage limitation or forgiveness. That is why She takes hosts. So far as I can tell, the host acts as a restraint, a guide and a conscience for that part of the Phoenix's power that they are granted, effectively becoming an aspect of the Phoenix herself. The Phoenix does not usually reside in them for long, possibly to avoid the threat of power corrupting, but this is not foolproof. In the past, Phoenix hosts have gone bad."

"Harry," Thor said, tone deceptively calm. "You fear what it will do to Harry." There was a dangerous gleam in his eye as he skewered his brother with a stare. "Tell me, Loki, was his refusal to give in to Chthon's blandishments not proof enough to you of good intent? Should I arrange another test to prove his good character, against his very life?"

Loki's eyes flashed and he looked about to snap a harsh retort when Pepper cut across him. "Thor, Loki, enough," she snapped, in tones that tapped into every person's inner child and made it sit up and behave or there would be _trouble_ , before grimacing at another contraction.

The entire tent tensed, before the tones of Doctor Strange wafted in. He had been politely arranging the medical quarters of the magical tent to his satisfaction and keeping up the pretense that he wasn't eavesdropping. "Three hours and five minutes," he said.

This interruption cooled the temperature of the conversation, and Clint interjected. "You know," he said thoughtfully. "We've got the guy who knows everything in the next room. Couldn't we just turn him upside down and shake him until all the secrets fall out?"

"No point," Natasha said, entirely deadpan. "It would take weeks to find anything useful."

That got a round of soft laughter.

"You know," Bruce said, and everyone turned to him. Bruce didn't talk much, but when spoke, it was unanimously agreed that he was well worth listening to. He had also been entirely silent up to now, something taken as a sign that he'd been doing some thinking. "I don't know much about prophecies, but I'm a scientist. I know a couple of things about jumping to conclusions. This prophecy, it's kind of like an equation, right? And the Phoenix fits the variable on one part of it, right?"

Loki nodded.

"But that passage, it's vague as hell," Bruce said. "I mean, all the mythology I've ever read presents any number of candidates for that same part of the prophecy. Take Satan, for instance. Loki, you mentioned ages ago that Archangels were really powerful. And he's a fallen Archangel who's heavily associated with fire, making deals and, if the Book of Revelations is anything to go by, out to end the world. So he fits the bill too. Even with my limited knowledge, I'm willing to bet that that's just the tip of the iceberg." He looked at Loki. "And frankly, Loki, I think you've got some confirmation bias going."

"Confirmation bias?" Loki asked, tone a little dangerous.

Bruce was unfazed. "Every time the Phoenix has been mentioned, you've been scared of Her," he said calmly. "Excepting only when Lily appeared. You know better than any of us how powerful and how dangerous She is, the horror stories about hosts gone bad. So you see something that fits the bill for the Phoenix gone bad and the alarm bells start ringing. Not only that, but you look at Harry and you see someone not a million miles from who you used to be, before you discovered your past and, well. I know that because I do the same thing. Both of us have got a monster inside of us, a monster that got loose and hurt a lot of people before we learned how to control it. Harry's got real rage in him, especially after all that's happened to him and people around him, and we've all seen how he's trod the line in the past. What you're afraid of is that his own darkness might mix with the Phoenix fragment and create a monster, some kind of Dark Phoenix, that will kill him and everyone around him."

All of this was said in a very calm, practical tone, like a teacher discussing a project with a student, but the content left everyone stunned into silence. And Bruce was not finished.

"What you've missed, though," he continued. "Is a couple of other things. First, going by what you've said about the first prophecy involving Harry, it was self-fulfilling. This could go the same way: if you treat Harry like a ticking time bomb, that's what he'll turn into. He will be the thing mentioned in the prophecy because you've turned him into it. Second…" He turned to look at the door to the other room, where Strange was still preparing and most likely eavesdropping. "Strange knows everything, or close enough. His job is protecting the Earth not matter what. He's the one who arranged for Harry to have some of the Phoenix's power, he was counting on it to beat Chthon. Why would he do that if Harry was just going to snap a year or so later and turn into something nearly as bad as Chthon was? If he was actually worried about it, he'd have said something. But he hasn't said a thing. And that's because he's not worried about it, because he knows what the real threat is."

"Full marks, Doctor Banner," Strange said, emerging from behind the shadows behind them, causing most everyone to at least twitch. Apparently, like the Laws of Nature, doors and the linear progression from point A to point B in general were something Strange considered to be beneath his dignity.

"Then what is that threat?" Thor asked, voice viciously edged. "And what plan does the great Stephen Strange have to deal with it?"

"My plan is for you all to be yourselves," Strange said calmly, arranging himself in a free chair, long legs crossing over one another. "And to do what you would anyway. It is, for instance, patently obvious that Harry needs to learn to control his anger." His gaze drifted to Bruce. "And fortuitously, here we have the grand master of the art."

"Why did you not suggest this before?" Loki asked quietly. "Harry controlling his temper could have saved us all a lot of grief."

"And caused yet more," Strange said. "Up until now, Harry has been forced to play the role of a survivor, an experience that has been testing enough. Harry learning to control his anger before now would simply have had much the same effect as him repressing it, and would probably taken the same form – it would certainly have been difficult to tell the difference. And over this last year, I needed him to cut loose in every respect both to survive and to comprehend the extent of his powers." He steepled his fingers. "But now, now it is a very different story, a new kind of test. As Lincoln had it, 'Nearly all men can stand adversity. If you really want to test a man, give him power.'"

"You're _testing_ him?" Pepper asked, voice quiet and dangerous.

"Partly," Strange said calmly. "What I am mostly doing, however, is preparing him. Or rather, making it easier for you to prepare him. One way or another, he would face the monsters that have and have yet to come for him. He has the power and you have the opportunity to teach him to control it."

"You make it sound so simple," Clint said. It was meant to be wry, but it come out flat and dead.

"Very few things in life are simple," Strange said. "And those that are simple are rarely easy."

"You hold so little worry about the Phoenix?" Loki asked. "About what could happen? I have every faith in my nephew, but as you say, it will be neither simple nor easy."

"Well, he could transform into the Dark Phoenix and become a horror beyond words," Strange said. "That is always a possibility. But, if he is properly taught, not a likely one. However, I would recommend that he calls on the Phoenix as little as possible. The risks of his ultimately being consumed by the fragment within pale in comparison to the risks of overusing that power."

"What do you mean?" Thor asked.

"I mean that every time he uses the Phoenix within him, he sends ripples, waves, through the Astral Plane. I mean that he is at risk of treating it as a crutch, rather than a last resort. And above all, I mean that power has a price, and one so vast has a greater price than most," Strange said. "A power like that of the Phoenix is one that is only meant to touch the universe briefly in any one place at any one time. If it presses too closely and too hard for too long, with reality in its still weakened state… well. Let us merely say that it is bad enough that a Phoenix fragment in a young man already naturally gifted with such tantalising and unrealised power is a beacon to many an unsavoury being. It would be better if he did not inadvertently make them a door."

These words were digested.

"So, what you're saying is that Harry shouldn't use his bit of the Phoenix unless he really, really has to," Tony said. "You know, it would make life so much easier if you kept it short and simple."

Everyone gave him disbelieving looks. There was almost no one in the Nine Relams who loved the sound of their own voice as much as Tony. Seeing those looks, his own expression turned defensive. "What? This is important, and there's no point dancing around the point."

"Very true," Thor said quietly. "Bruce…"

"I'll teach him everything I know," Bruce said. "But bear in mind, I had to adjust a lot of what I was learning to fit my circumstances. He'll have to do the same."

"It will be a start, at least," Thor said. "And Professor Xavier…"

"Charles will have his hands full," Strange said.

"Will?" Steve asked.

Strange smiled his most enigmatic smile.

"And of course he chooses now to clam up," Clint muttered.

"The why is not important," Loki said. "Another facet to preventing Harry from over-relying on the Phoenix is to discuss this with him openly, to explain the situation."

"All of it?" Natasha asked, eyebrow raised.

Loki did not miss the implication and sighed. "All of it," he said.

Natasha nodded.

"There's something else that might help," Pepper said. "Harry can fight – he shouldn't have to, but the fact is, he's learned how to. But what happened to him when Hogwarts was attacked, when he was –" She paused briefly, hands unconsciously going to her stomach and took a deep breath. "Killed. That showed that while he's strong enough to hurt anyone, he's still vulnerable."

Tony nodded. "He's all offence," he said. "A stray bullet could take him out if his guard is down, let alone some kind of Big Bad. I was thinking about making him an armour, actually, maybe a tweaked R.E.S.C.U.E. suit." His gaze darted to Pepper's stomach, drawing a wry look from Pepper herself. During more than one fit of over-protectiveness, Tony had feverishly started designing what was possibly the heavily armed and protected cradle in the known universe for their offspring, before Pepper had firmly stepped on it. She was all in favour of precautions, but drew the line at a cradle that could take on a tank brigade and win.

"What are you suggesting?" Thor asked.

"Well, maybe he could learn to protect himself," Pepper said. "And by that I mean learn to avoid fights in the first place. Learn when someone's after him, for instance, and to take evasive action. "

"Which could be a problem since the answer to those two is probably going to be 'impossible' and 'always'," Tony said, but more curious than anything else.

Pepper gave him a pointed look. "What I mean is that he's been learning how to fight," she said. "But fighting," she continued, her gaze lingering on Loki, Clint and Natasha. "Is not the be all and end all."

Loki stared at her for a long moment, then a wide smile spread across his face like the rising sun. "Pepper Potts, you are a genius," he said.

"Brother," Thor said pointedly.

"Harry is in a position where it would not be unreasonable for him to have a bodyguard," Loki said. "One who could watch his back and teach him to do so more effectively. One who could teach him the art of self-control and detachment. One who –"

" _Loki."_

"Fine," Loki said, somewhat sulkily. "Bucky. Who better to protect Harry from would-be assassins and spies and teach him how protect himself than _the_ grand master of both arts, who taught the person who is next best in both categories?"

Natasha's lips twitched into a wry smile, but she said nothing.

Thor opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again, thinking it through. "Pepper, you are indeed a genius," he said.

Pepper simply blushed slightly and smiled, before her eyes widened at another contraction.

"And on that note," Strange said, standing up. "I think that Miss Potts should be conveyed to the medical theatre."

OoOoO

Meanwhile, the kids were in one of the larger bedrooms and had at first been inclined to stay up to wait for Pepper to give birth. However, they had been told that it would take a while, assured that they would be woken when the baby was born and told that they _would_ be getting some sleep and no amount of pouting, glaring or generalised sulking was going to change that.

In any event, they were all mentally tired, if not physically. Having your mind switched with someone elses, running/fighting for your life and the resultant existential crisis while dealing with someone elses combat high tended to have that effect. And while Harry hadn't had his mind switched, two rounds of the psychic equivalent of bare knuckle brawling with a powerful, skilled and unbelievably vicious psychic, getting caught in the crossfire of a couple of dozen wizards and Mjolnir and melting the brains of five Death Eaters had resulted in his mental and emotional batteries running out. As a result, he'd made only token protests and conked out as soon as he'd hit the bed.

By unspoken agreement, the Twins were sharing their own bed, though only after attempts at eavesdropping by all means mystical and mundane had been thwarted, Loki being nobody's fool. Equally, Harry had immediately flopped out on the bed, Carol had clambered in next to him, before Diana made her way in between the two, her recent growth spurt increasingly meaning that she wasn't quite as teddy bear sized as she had once been and her increasingly long legs tended to get tangled, while Uhtred, tallest of them all and getting still taller, curled around them in a protective sort of way.

The hours ticked by, then Thor made his way in, a wide smile on his face and gently shook Harry. When Harry stirred, blinking into wakefulness and thereby waking the rest, Thor said three words.

"It's a girl."

Less than ten minutes later, the bleary group of teenagers followed Thor into the medical room, where an exhausted but happy Pepper was watching as Tony, eyes wide as saucers, was cradling a tiny bundle with the sort of exquisite care that he usually only showed when handling his most fragile designs, while Doctor Strange was smiling his slight smile – though this time it looked warmer and more genuinely happy than usual – as he stripped off his scrubs. The rest of the Avengers were mixed between giving Tony fond looks and staring at the bundle, the baby, like she was the most incredible thing they had ever seen. And in one or two cases, with just a little regret.

"Harry, guys," Pepper said. "Meet Ada Maria Potts-Stark. She's having a little daddy time at the moment." Her voice turned dry. "After he learned how to hold her the right way up."

"Whuh?" Tony said, then mock frowned. "That was a perfectly valid way to hold a child."

"If you were holding an infant sloth, certainly," Loki said, just as dryly. "Though you took your correction well – it only required a little adjustment."

There were undertones in his speech that Harry didn't have to be a telepath to read, not with how he knew his uncle and the look of regret he could see hidden deep in his uncle's eyes. Looking at Loki now, Harry was sure that he was seeing Ada and remembering his own daughter, Hela.

Tony stuck out his tongue, then, perhaps remembering that he was supposed to be setting an example for his daughter, hurriedly sucked it back in.

That, it seemed, was the rock that started the landslide, breaking the evening's tension once and for all, setting everyone off. The laughter continued until, inevitably, baby Ada woke up and registered her displeasure at her rest being disturbed. Loudly.

Tony looked moderately panicked and froze, until Thor said in gentle, patient tones, "Rock her, Tony."

Tony seemed to blink, but started, slowly, carefully, rocking his daughter. Slowly, she settled back down. "Don't these things come with an instruction manual?" he asked, tone intended to come off as light, but instead sounding genuinely bemused.

"No," Thor said. "Each one is unique. You have to find your own way. Though," he added. "There are a few basic commonalities."

"Could you make a list?" Tony asked hopefully, then frowned at Pepper's snort of laughter. "What?"

Thor chuckled. "I will indeed make you a list, Tony, if it makes you feel better," he said. "I will even teach you a few lullabies." Tony's expression at this point was priceless. "But fear not," Thor continued. "We are not going to abandon you and Pepper to the mercy of your infant daughter."

Tony blinked.

"Sure," Clint chipped in. "We're the Avengers. We'll all chip in."

"Raising a kid by committee," Bruce said. "Oh, that can't possibly go wrong." There was, however, a smile on his face when he said it.

"It takes a village to raise a child," Loki pointed out.

"Speaking of all the Avengers," Pepper said, sharing a look with Tony. "We decided that one of Ada's godparents would be Rhodey."

"An excellent choice," Loki said softly.

"Yeah," Tony said lightly, nodding to his daughter. "I mean, he's used to my vomit, how hard can hers be?"

Pepper rolled her eyes at him. "Another," she said. "Would be Natasha."

For quite possibly the first time since the Avengers had formed, the team saw Natasha look openly surprised, no, astounded, becoming all the more so when Tony carefully handed her the baby, which she handled as if she were made of glass.

"I… I'm not exactly the example you want a little girl to follow," she managed, after a few stunned moments.

Pepper arched an eyebrow. "If my daughter turns out to be half the woman you are, Natasha, I'll consider my job as a mom to be one well done," she said.

Natasha's gaze shifted to Tony, who gave her a wry half smile. "What?" he said. "I think you're scheming, ruthless and absolutely terrifying. It's why I trusted you to look after Pepper and the baby back when the Tower was attacked." He shrugged. "As far as I'm concerned, it's good to know that my daughter's godmom will be someone who can outplay the bad guys at their own game."

Natasha paused, looked down at Ada, then nodded. "Thank you," she managed, without looking away from the peacefully sleeping Ada.

"Another?" Clint asked, after a moment.

Pepper smiled faintly. "There's no explicit rule that says you only have to have two," she said. "I checked." She looked at Tony, who coughed.

"Right," he said. "That means the second godfather is, well…" He trailed off, then turned to Steve. "Look, Steve, you are, morally speaking, the best, most stand up guy I've ever known. And you have finally pulled your head out of your ass regarding your great-granddaughter, so there's that."

Carol flushed and the Twins, who had been politely and awkwardly lurking a bit further back, stared at her in astonishment.

"When I first met you, I didn't get why dad had always been going on about you," Tony continued. He let out a self-deprecating chuckle. "Shows what I knew." He looked up and met Steve's astonished gaze. "A godparent is supposed to guide and protect a kid, teach them about right and wrong. Your daughter, my aunt Ali, did a lot of that for me." He paused. "Okay, so I didn't always listen, but that's another matter." He shook his head. "Anyway: Steve, I can't think of anyone better to do all that for my little girl. I'm not a perfect guy, a long way from it. You're not perfect either, because no one is, but you're closer and you give one hell of an example of how to live your life."

"I… Tony, I'm honoured," Steve managed, as Natasha, following an unseen cue, handed Ada to him. He tensed slightly, then some more as Ada squirmed and let out a little baby noise, before settling down as she did. "I really am."

"You say that now," Tony said. "Wait until you get stuck on diaper duty."

"I was on campaign on both the Western and Eastern fronts, Tony," Steve said dryly, arranging Ada in his arms with an ease that spoke of experience. "And when I was too ill to work before I joined up, I used to do a lot of babysitting while the moms went out to work. I've seen plenty of diapers, Tony. I think I can survive a few more."

"Which," Pepper said pointedly. "Leaves only one more."

"Another godmother?" Thor asked.

"No," Pepper said. "Originally, we were going to leave it with Steve. But after tonight…" She looked at Harry and smiled. "If it wasn't for a certain someone, neither Ada nor me would be here."

It took Harry a moment to register that she was talking about him. "Wait, me?"

Pepper's smile turned fond and amused. "Yes, you," she said. "You saved my life tonight, Harry. Twice." The smile twitched. "Three times, even, depending how you count."

Harry opened his mouth to say that he would have done it for anyone, that it was nothing, then, wisely, shut it.

"You saved my baby," Pepper continued. "And it was only a couple of months ago that you broke into a HYDRA base and got Tony out, among others. Then you saved the universe. You are brave, kind, clever and funny. Even if I didn't know for a fact that your mother was proud of you, I'd say she was, because any mother would be proud to have a child like you." The smile turned wry. "All in all, I'd say that you're pretty well qualified."

Harry, still stunned into silence, said nothing until his father gently nudged him.

"I, um, I'm honoured," he said slowly. Steve, smiling gently, handed him baby Ada. Harry blinked, struck by how simultaneously light and heavy she was. He'd got her settled in his arms, mimicking Steve's pose, when all of a sudden she opened her eyes. While Harry was on a vague level aware that she couldn't focus yet, she seemed to be looking him right in the eye. Everyone held their breath for a long moment, expecting the baby to start crying because her sleep had been disturbed. But nothing of the sort happened. Instead, infant and boy stared at each other. Then, apparently of its own will, a beaming smile spread across Harry's face, one matched by the baby in his arm.

"Unbelievable," Tony said, voice pitched low. "What is it with him and ladies? I swear, every single one he meets, he charms them in about ten seconds flat. She's not even twenty minutes out the womb and he's already got her smiling at him."

"Hush," Pepper said softly, smiling.

"What?" Tony asked. "It's true. Ladies like him."

"People like him," Pepper corrected.

"People like Steve," Tony countered, as Harry tickled Ada's cheek, getting a happy gurgle. "She didn't wake up and smile for him, though, did she?"

"Well, there are worse things in life than than our daughter taking an immediate liking one of her godfathers," Pepper said.

Pepper burst out laughing and everyone looked up, having crowded around Harry and Ada.

"We were just talking about how you're charming my baby girl away from me," Tony said in mock solemnity, a fake frown on his face.

Harry's looked like a rabbit in headlights as he took Tony seriously for a moment, then rolled his eyes, gave Ada one last smile and handed her back to her father.

"You're on diaper duty too, you know," Tony added, an instinctive smile coming to his lips as he took his daughter, settling back down next to Pepper. "Comes with the godparent package."

"And _you_ aren't getting out of it," Pepper reminded him, in tones as lovely and unyielding as a stainless steel rose.

Tony mock pouted, but even the least observant could see the irrepressible smile beneath it.

The darkness had passed. Now came the dawn.

OoOoO

Harold 'Happy' Hogan was not a man entirely at ease. He hadn't been to Avengers Tower more than once or twice since the Avengers moved in en masse several years ago, and he hadn't been to the Mansion since Tony had effectively shut it up for good nearly twenty years ago. In truth, he hadn't seen Pepper or Tony all that much in that time, either. Tony usually worked in the Tower's or the Mansion's extensive labs and Pepper was usually working in her office, in a meeting, travelling or living in the Tower.

In short, it was nothing like the old days in Malibu, when Pepper had been Tony's assistant/link to reality and he'd been Tony's bodyguard. With the exception of Rhodey, Tony's best friend, there'd been no one else.

Well, there had been Obadiah Stane. But, frankly, in Happy's book, Stane was a traitorous bastard who had betrayed Tony and tried to kill Pepper and was therefore not worth the dirt that had been heaped on his coffin.

Now... now, Tony and Pepper were living with scientists, spies, superheroes and Gods. Actual real life Gods. Happy was not a particularly religious man, and on the few occasions that he'd met Thor, he'd found himself liking the bluff, boisterous and charming Asgardian, but he had to admit... it sent a slight chill down his spine.

Happy didn't begrudge either of them their happiness. Far from it. For far too long, neither of them had had much in the way of real friends. Tony had always been a good actor, but Happy had sharp eyes and, lest it be forgotten, had been at Tony's side practically every waking moment for fifteen years. It hadn't taken him anywhere near that long to realise that Tony was lonely. Aside from Rhodey, Pepper, Stane and Happy himself, and technically JARVIS, he hadn't had anyone who he trusted, or who was willing to stand up to him. However, ultimately, Pepper and Happy had worked for Tony, Rhodey had been his liaison to the Air Force, JARVIS had been Tony's creation and Stane had been a traitor all along. And none of them was Tony's intellectual match.

Now, Tony was living with Bruce Banner, Jane Foster and Loki Odinson - another real life God – who were all at least as smart as he was. Well, Happy thought loyally, almost as smart. He'd add the woman that he'd known - briefly - as Natalie Rushman to that list, but he honestly had no idea how smart she was. It was one of a very long list of things he didn't know about her. All that he _did_ know was that she was stunningly beautiful and absolutely terrifying. And, to be frank, most of the general public knew that much from the regular news coverage of the Avengers' exploits.

On top of that, there was also Thor, Clint Barton a.k.a. Hawkeye, an impossibly skilled marksman and, finally, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes. Two living legends, two men who had been presumed dead for decades, until they resurfaced, separately, in the modern day, supersoldiers both.

And what was he compared to all that? An ordinary guy in his mid forties, big, strong, but if he was honest with himself, a bit out of shape. Sure, he could box and box well, but he'd seen the gulf in skill between himself and the Black Widow several years ago. Leaving aside the way she'd taken him down in about two seconds flat in a sparring match, he'd seen her tear through Hammer Industries' security goons like they were made of wet paper.

While he could claim that, when they'd gone head to head, he'd been expecting nothing more than a pretty PA, not someone who was arguably the deadliest woman on the planet, he knew that he'd do no better than one of those goons in a real fight. And with the possible exception of Hawkeye, she was the weakest of the Avengers, the closest to human (though undoubtedly the scariest, excepting only the Hulk).

When he told people that he'd once been Iron Man's bodyguard, they started laughing. That was part of why he'd resigned - that and the realisation that not only could Tony look after himself these days, he was surrounded by some of the most powerful and dangerous people on the planet who would take a bullet for him without thinking twice. In the cases of Thor, Loki and the Hulk, it was doubtful if they'd even notice that bullet, unless it was one of the kind which had been used to lay out Thor with a few months before, enchanted and made of the hardest metal on Earth. And even then, it had only kept the Thunder God down for a few days before he bounced back onto the battlefield, good as new.

The other part was that he'd felt out of place. Now that he was actually in the Tower, invited round to meet Tony and Pepper's new baby, that feeling had only intensified.

"Is something bothering you?"

He looked up and blinked. A young girl, maybe fifteen or sixteen, probably a little less than that, wearing dark blue shorts and a loose red t-shirt, was regarding him with an inquisitive expression. She was pretty, with rich black hair, blue eyes and clear skin, and tall for her age, tall for a woman of any age, really. About as tall as Pepper, if he had to guess. It was, however, a little hard to tell.

Why?

Well, she was floating, leaning down and forward, making him think vaguely of a particularly curious cat, watching him from some high perch.

"Uh... no," Happy managed. He'd heard that Thor had a son, and that son had friends. Maybe this was one of them.

She dropped to the floor, landing gently, and stuck out a hand. "I'm Diana," she said.

Happy instinctively shook her hand. A strong grip, too. Normally, he'd discount the possibility that she was stronger than him, because she was a teenage girl. The fact that she'd been floating, however, implied that she had more than a few supernatural powers. For all he knew, she could juggle tanks.

"My father is Hercules," she said, as if reading his mind. "It's where I get the strength from." She cocked her head thoughtfully. "Probably the flight too, but I'm not sure."

"Hercules. As in, _the_ Hercules," Happy said.

"Yes," she said calmly. "I'm told that he's quite famous down here. He was quite surprised, and rather pleased. It has been about three thousand years, after all."

And that put paid to any hope he'd had that she was talking about a wrestler or something.

"So... you staying here?" he asked, to make conversation.

"Yes," she said. "With Harry." When Happy was momentarily baffled, she added, "Thor's son."

Happy would have thought that she'd read his expression if she hadn't been focused on doing up her sandal strap. In mid-air.

"It's easier than sitting down," she said, as if replying to his sudden bemusement. Then, she looked up at him, and Happy got the disquieting feeling that she was reading his every thought off the inside of his skull. "I can't read your thoughts," she added. "Most people think I can, but I can't. Harry can, though." She looked around. "He'll probably be along soon enough."

Just what he needed. Two psychic kids giggling over his thoughts.

"We don't read people's minds. Not on purpose," Diana said. "It's like having ears. You can block them, but it can be quite difficult, and some thing still sneak through, even if you don't want them to." She made a face. "Nasty things."

Happy winced. He'd heard enough skeevy things as Tony's bodyguard just with his normal, everyday ears, and he could take a better guess than most at what went on in some people's heads. Being able to hear it from childhood... that couldn't be fun.

"It's okay," Diana said, smiling and patting his arm kindly. "I'm used to it. And Harry's pretty good at blocking it off."

"Still sounds like a pretty rotten deal," Happy found himself saying.

She shrugged. "It's normal, for me," she said. "Not for everyone else, but I don't think anyone's normal is the same as everyone else's."

"Well, everyone's different, so I suppose that makes sense," Happy said, deciding to go along with this strange conversation.

"Exactly," she said.

Happy gave her a puzzled look.

"Everyone's normal is different," she said. "So, logically, there is no real normal, is there?"

"I suppose not," Happy said, frowning.

"Therefore, you don't need to worry about being the only normal person in Tony and Pepper's life," Diana said calmly. "Because no one is normal."

"Maybe," Happy said. "But most people don't think that way."

"Most people," Diana said very firmly. "Are stupid." She looked up at him. "And Tony and Pepper don't have stupid friends."

"So, I'm not most people."

Diana nodded cheerfully.

"Uh... thanks."

"No problem," the girl said, hopping up, and cocking her head for a moment. "Pepper, Tony and the baby will be here in a minute."

"Right," Happy said. "Hey, Diana?"

"Yes?"

"Thanks."

All of a sudden, she flashed him a dazzling smile. "You're welcome."

And then she was gone.

In the words of Albus Dumbledore, "Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."

To take it further, sometimes, that light can be lots of little lights, scattered in amongst the shadow, little moments of joy and wonder, of kindness and compassion, of pure delight spread across the dark like stars across the night sky.

And if they were only gathered together, then in less eloquent language, they could make one hell of a light.

OoOoO

Not all of those sparks, however, were in one place.

Clark Kent was not normally a light sleeper. Normally, once he was asleep, he slept like a log until sunrise, whereupon he woke up like clockwork. He could get up beforehand if required, though he tended to be a little out of sorts. And it generally took some persuasion.

That was why, even with his excellent hearing, he didn't wake up until the fourth pebble hit his window.

Frowning, he made his way over to the window and saw an indistinct figure, standing just out of the range of the porch light. As soon as they saw Clark at the window, they quite clearly beckoned.

Still puzzled, and now wary, Clark slipped out of bed, putting on his shirt and shoes, before quietly tip-toeing downstairs. This late night caller clearly wasn't going away, and if they had any malevolent intentions, then he'd be best suited to deal with them.

As soon as he stepped outside, he narrowed his eyes, trying to get a clearer look at the visitor. Before he could focus, however, before he could even blink, the visitor was beside him and then they were in the loft of the barn, Clark's 'Fortress of Solitude' as his parents had affectionately dubbed it. Clark, reeling, wrenched himself away, readying himself for a fight… then belatedly noticed that the visitor was surrounded by golden lightning, lightning that faded as he came to a standstill, the remains of which lit up a familiar face.

"You came back," he said, astonished.

The boy that he had met on Red Sky Day smiled at him. "I said I would," he said, accent recognisably French. Then, he stuck out a hand. "Jean-Paul Beaubier."

"Clark," Clark managed, dazedly shaking the hand. "Clark Kent. I, uh, it's…" He trailed off and shook his head helplessly. "Sorry. I've just wanted to meet someone like me for so long and now…"

"Here I am," Jean-Paul said, tone lightly amused and sympathetic. "I understand, _mon cher_. It can be quite something to not only find that you are not alone, but to meet someone like you." He sat down, gesturing at Clark to take a seat next to him. "And now, I think it is time that you and I had a long overdue chat."

OoOoO

Further away, another of those sparks flickered as a pair of green eyes turned to the west, following a whisper of a flame and a sense of indefinable recognition, of connection. It wasn't the first time that had happened, nor even the strongest – the green eyes hadn't even burned their signature bluish-white this time. But it had been there, nonetheless.

And it inspired a question.

"Who are you?"

 **And that rounds off this chapter. Yeah, even merged with Lily, the Phoenix isn't all sweetness and light. Just because she likes and protects Harry doesn't mean that she's universally that nice. A force for good in the universe, undoubtedly, but one that casts a very long shadow and for good reason. Furthermore, Harry's fragment is pretty much in isolation from the rest of the Phoenix to begin with - while Lily can use it to act through him and protect him, now, since he's learned how to use it, it's mostly in his hands. Which is not necessarily a good thing.**

 **But anyhow, Baby Ada is born, and with those godparents, who knows what will happen. Why wasn't Bruce one of them? There are reasons for that, but the short version is that Tony and Pepper already consider Bruce to be part of the family, take it for granted that he is going to be part of Ada's life on a regular basis for the long haul (in my own experience, godparents are rarely in the immediate vicinity, being somewhat far flung, the way Natasha and Rhodey might well be on missions/deployment and Harry will be with school and you know, being a Prince of Asgard. Bruce, however, is going to be part of the Potts-Stark family for good).**

 **Also, Bucky as Harry's bodyguard? That would be where the title of the chapter comes from. Just think about it. More generally, the times are a-changing.**

 **As for other questions, what will come of Clark and Jean-Paul's talk? Who is the person with the green eyes? Answer: wait and see.**


	4. Chapter 4: Family Ties

**Well, well, well. Here we are again. Sorry for the delay in the chapter, but a combination of holiday business, my computer briefly dying before being forced to pull a Lazarus and uni work has kept me away from all of you wonderful people. Regrettably, I am unable to put out a specifically Christmassy chapter this year, so you'll have to settle for a suitably themed one instead – specifically, the theme being family. Somehow, I think you'll survive.**

 _ **I feel that I should clarify something. As far as the world knows, the Winter Soldier was killed at the Battle of London and poor, heroic Sergeant James 'Bucky' Barnes was a HYDRA experiment and trophy locked away in a cryostasis tube for seventy odd years. A fake body for the Soldier was conjured up and shown, before being quietly vanished.**_

 _ **Bucky's qualifications for being Harry's bodyguard under these circumstances include the incorrect presumption that it's mostly a formality to ease him back into the world, his own major league combat experience fighting dark wizards, HYDRA Agents and monsters during the War and his abilities as a super soldier, presumed to be the result of HYDRA experiments. And if pushed, they would 'admit' that Bucky had had the knowledge and skills of the Winter Soldier uploaded into his brain in preparation for his serving as a HYDRA elite soldier, as some kind of cruel joke by HYDRA and now he's using those skills for good.**_

 _ **So Ron will have**_ _ **absolutely no clue**_ _ **that the man who snapped his father's neck is still alive, much less his best friend's new bodyguard.**_

 **Oh, and another clarification: our mysterious green-eyed friend was reacting to Harry's use of the Phoenix. The only reason that it was placed (misleadingly) after Clark's section was because I felt that it was a better note to end the chapter on.**

After the chaos of the World Cup, it was generally agreed that a break was required – though as was pointed out somewhat unhelpfully by Clint, the World Cup had been intended to be that break, prior to everything going pear-shaped.

Even still, the intention was not to go too far from home, if only because it seemed that it was impossible for Harry to go anywhere without tripping over some ancient secret, fiendish plot, or combination of the two.

"He's a born trouble magnet," Wanda said to Thor when the subject came up, and sighed. "Poor boy."

Said trouble magnet was currently asleep, head resting on her shoulder, arms around her waist and generally leaning in close in a way that suggested that he was well aware that at 5'9'', even with his relatively light build, he was too large and too old to curl up on his godmother's lap, but nevertheless intended to get as close to it as possible. This was something that Wanda was more than happy to encourage and as she spoke, she steadily carded a hand through his hair, making it even messier than usual. That messiness and the relaxation of his features in sleep, briefly erasing most of the visible signs of his cares and experiences, made him look considerably younger than usual. Younger and far more innocent.

But this was only appearance, as both Wanda and Thor knew well. Harry was fourteen, coming to an age where in many cultures, he would be considered a man. In many others, his actions and experiences would have meant that he'd be considered one anyway, age notwithstanding.

"He is a young man, now," Thor said. "But yes. He has a knack for finding trouble that many of his peers would envy, if only because they know not the cost."

Wanda nodded. "He hasn't been sleeping well?" she asked. It was a fairly perfunctory question – the large, dark bags under Harry's eyes answered that question perfectly well.

Thor nodded anyway. "What happened, what almost happened, to Jane, Pepper and the others… it haunts him," he said. "In truth, it haunts us all, Tony in particular."

"Would that be why he's having my apprentice hex some of his new designs?" Wanda asked, eyebrow raised. She had arrived with her apprentice/boyfriend in tow, with the stated intention of having him study the Mansion wards with Loki. However, Dresden had been immediately coopted by Tony to test the resilience of the magical countermeasures on his technology when faced with active magical interference, like a hex, as opposed to passive, like the magic saturated grounds of Hogwarts.

Thor nodded. "He is attempting to create more efficient defences and counter measures against magical and psychic attack," he said. "Psionics is a subject on which he already knows much, thanks to his godfather. Magic is one on which he knows less, and what he does know is mostly derived from Asgardian magic."

"Sensible," Wanda said. "And while I am doing what I can to ensure that he gets some sleep, I'm afraid that it's the sort of thing that really only heals with time."

"I know," Thor sighed. "I know."

Wanda caught his tone and gave him a sad, sympathetic smile, before looking down at Harry. "He's grown up so fast," she said quietly.

"Yes," Thor said. "And I am proud of the man he is growing into, but…"

"With all he's been through, it feels like he's growing up too fast," Wanda finished, then smiled wryly at his slightly surprised expression. "I've been thinking much the same." She returned her gaze to Harry, gently tracing patterns in his hair. "Don't get me wrong, it's wonderful to see him grow into this brave, kind and wonderful young man, but…"

"Sometimes you wish that he would just remain a little boy forever," Thor said.

Wanda nodded and shifted, moving Harry's weight onto her hip. "Yes," she said. "Sweet, innocent, carefree…" Her lips twitched into a wry smile. "Lap sized." The smile faded. "And there's so much time I, he, _we_ have lost, so much of his childhood that was stolen, so much I feel that I need to make up for. I know that Stephen was right, he would never have survived in my care. And with the Ministry being what it is, he would never have been allowed to be given into the care of Remus or Nicholas – and in any case, if it was thrown open like that, you would have had families practically fighting for the privilege, treating him like something to be owned…" She sighed. "But even that would probably have been better. Or at least, less awful."

"Going by what Sirius told me of his upbringing, perhaps it would not have been," Thor said quietly.

"Perhaps," Wanda echoed. "What about that cousin of his, Charles' student, Jean Grey? She quite clearly adores him."

"She does," Thor said, and chuckled. "When Harry told her about what had happened at the World Cup, it was all that could be done to prevent her from wrapping him in cotton wool and preventing him from ever going anywhere alone ever again. Indeed, she and her family visited the Dursleys when she and Harry were children and she defended him." His expression darkened. "Then the creature that Strange has spoken of intervened to keep him there. And when I confronted Strange on the subject, he said that putting Harry in the care of the Grey family would only draw that creature's attention to the rest of them. He said, somewhat cryptically, that the creature had already caused that family enough hurt. At the time, I thought he was simply referring to Harry, but now, I wonder."

"Well, whoever or whatever he is, if he comes near my godson again, I'll render him down to screaming, traumatised molecules," Wanda said calmly, tone carrying not the slightest hint of hyperbole.

"Not if I get to him first," Thor growled, words echoed by a rumble of thunder outside. At that, Harry stirred, mumbling in his sleep, before Wanda hushed him, stroking his brow with a hand that briefly shimmered with red light.

"Well, either way," she said. "I think we need to make the best, and the most, of what chances we have."

"Agreed," Thor said quietly.

"Oh, before I forget, where is Sirius?" Wanda asked.

"As soon as he heard what happened, he postponed his debauchery and came to assure himself that Harry was well," Thor said. "He has since spent the best part of two days having a furious row with his brother over the laxity of security arrangements at the World Cup."

Wanda arched an eyebrow. "Two days?" she asked.

"You know how Sirius can be when he gets angry," Thor said, shrugging. "Besides, those two have many unresolved issues."

"Too right they do," Wanda said. "And it isn't easy, being related to someone like that."

"Yes, Loki can be frustrating at times," Thor said.

Wanda shook her head. "I wasn't talking about Loki, though I don't doubt that that is true," she said. "Loki is, ironically, more human than Regulus – or Peter Wisdom as he is now. No, Wisdom reminds me a great deal of my father, prior to his getting soft in his old age."

Thor raised an eyebrow. "Soft is not a word I would use to describe your father," he said.

Wanda sighed a tired sigh. "Believe me, Thor, everything is relative," she said. She shook her head again and looked down at Harry. "My family and Sirius' might be dysfunctional, but at least Harry has a family that loves him, one that makes him happy." She reached up and tenderly brushed Harry's white forelocks out of his eyes. "And that's all I could ask for."

"He does," Thor agreed. "And you are part of it, Wanda. Do not sell yourself short; you are his godmother and…" He trailed off. The words, 'and since his mother is not here, as his godmother you are the closest thing to a mother that he has, especially considering that Jane understandably treats him as a little brother and Pepper is now often occupied with her own child,' went unsaid.

This was a lot of words to go unspoken and still be understood, but Thor and Wanda had known each other for a long time. In any case, this was a subject on which they were very much on the same wavelength.

Wanda took a deep breath and nodded. "What he's going through now is hard," she said. "But he has family who love him."

And that, it had to be said, was very much that.

OoOoO

This was not quite the be all and end all, however, as Jean was still very much worried about her baby cousin. This was perfectly natural, since she saw him as the little brother she had never had, and it is an accepted fact of the universe that those who are, or who cast themselves as, big sisters are always worrying about those they consider to be their little brothers.

This was a worry strengthened by the fact that Harry was universally recognised to be an epic scale trouble magnet, something that resonated particularly with Jean: leaving aside his many (mis)adventures, she had lost him once to the schemes of an evil and manipulative telepath and she was very much determined that this would not happen again.

So, when Harry told her about what happened at the World Cup, and as Thor suggested, it came as a surprise when she didn't go nuclear. Or at least, not for long.

It is also briefly worth explaining why Harry told her. Over the last few months, he had come to realise something of the sheer power he possessed. His own abilities were potentially limitless in scale and scope, placing him among the strongest psychics ever to live at the tender age of fourteen. He exceeded almost all others by an order of magnitude. He had also realised that that still only made him the second strongest psychic in history after Jean Grey. All other psychics were like the stars in the night sky and he was the Moon. But Jean… Jean was the Sun.

She had also had a decade of near constant tuition by the most skilled, accomplished, and prior to their respective births, most powerful telepath in history, Charles Xavier. Harry's tuition, by contrast, had largely consisted of a few tips from Charles Xavier, lessons from Betsy Braddock, herself recently a former student of Xavier's, and numerous trials by fire. It had all also taken place over less than six months. However, that and the fact that his teacher had been a very attractive young woman had also left him with the ability to prevent stray thoughts from leaking out under all but the most trying circumstances.

Most importantly of all, however, had absolutely nothing to do with her psychic powers and everything to do with her status as self-appointed big sister to the world, most especially that part of the world which went by the name Harry Thorson. Simply put, Jean had an uncanny ability to smell omissions and evasions that beggared belief. This, of course, is something that is common to most big sisters, pseudo or otherwise.

One way or another, he reckoned that she would figure it out eventually.

So he told her and she listened calmly and patiently, only stopping to pull him into a tight hug. Then, once he had finished, she hugged him still tighter and said, voice sad and full of compassion, "Oh, _Harry_."

Harry hugged back, feeling unreasonably tired by the simple act of explaining what had happened, yet also relieved.

"You're not angry?" he asked.

"Angry?" Jean said, baffled. "About what?"

"About what I did," Harry said, hunching in on himself. "To the Death Eaters."

Jean stopped for a long moment, processing this.

"I mean," Harry continued, tone somewhat wretched. "It's not exactly what the Professor teaches – kind of the opposite, really. I'd understand if you were."

Jean just stared at him. Then, moving in a blur that even Jean-Paul would have had trouble tracking, she pulled him into an even tighter hug, saying something that was muffled by Harry's shoulder. Harry, who was very surprised and profoundly relieved, took a few moments to adjust both to this unexpected turn of events and the fact that he was being hugged by a stunningly beautiful young woman – because while his brain knew that she was his cousin and more pertinently that she acted very much like the older sister he'd never had, his hormones were a little behind the times.

As if he didn't have enough problems to deal with.

"What?" he managed.

 _I said,_ Jean replied, mental voice carrying a mixture of fondness, sadness and profound exasperation. _Don't you_ _ **dare**_ _beat yourself up about that. You didn't have a choice. It was a horrible decision, but it had to be made. And frankly, you're my cousin. I'd much it was them that suffered rather than you or your friends._

 _That's basically what dad said,_ Harry noted.

 _Then you should listen to him, because he's talking a lot of sense,_ Jean said.

 _I know,_ Harry said. _But it's… I'm a telepath. It's different._

Jean sat back, holding him loosely by the shoulders and looked him in the eye, arching an eyebrow. _Harry, do you really think that the Professor hasn't done things like that when he had to? Or your teacher, Agent Braddock? She's an Agent of MI13, remember, and she was at the Battle of London at the very least._

 _I know,_ Harry repeated, frustrated. _It's just… I feel like I should have been able to, I don't know –_

 _What? Snap your fingers and make an evil magical psychic who's powerful enough to survive his body being blown up and take down one of the strongest psychics I know in one shot, while controlling half a dozen other people, stop all the bad things he's doing, all without anyone else getting hurt in the process?_

 _No! I just think… I think that there are rules about this sort of thing for a reason. Leave aside_ _ **why**_ _I did it, Jean, or_ _ **who**_ _I did it too, and look at_ _ **what**_ _I did. I know that they were unrepentant monsters who tortured people for fun, but the fact is, I got angry and I destroyed five people's minds as a_ _ **side-effect**_ _. I'm supposed to do better than that._

Jean sighed, clearly caught between fondness and profound frustration, before shaking her head and gently kissing him on the forehead. _You are too good for this world, Harry,_ she said.

 _I'm really not._

 _Yes, you are,_ Jean replied in a firm tone that brooked no disagreement. _From what I've heard of this Voldemort guy and what I know about our powers, I'm pretty sure that even the Professor couldn't have disentangled him from those guys' minds without permanently damaging them, even with all the time in the world to do it in. And honestly, the way you described it, those Death Eaters' minds were already destroyed._

Harry looked up at her, startled. _What?!_

 _Connecting between two minds – not just you entering another mind, though it's quite closely related – on any level beyond the most basic, like this, is risky. You get thoughts and emotions going back and forth across the connection, and it can get hard to tell who's thinking what. Melding two minds, when both participants are willing and know what they're doing, that's a whole other level of dangerous. According to the Professor, you can end up with a situation where you don't know where one mind ends and the other begins and unless at least one of you has a very strong level of self-control, you're not getting out again. Or you can end up destroying them both._

There was a sombre pause.

 _Some people can form deeper conections naturally,_ Jean said eventually. _The Professor says it usually happens in families, especially with twins, though sometimes with couples too. If you're close, then it's more likely you'll be on the same mental wavelength and just click. It makes it easier and it also makes getting lost in each other's minds even more likely. Sometimes, the Professor says, it even leads to a hive mind._

 _Has it happened to you?_ Harry asked, curious. _If you don't mind me asking._

 _Well, connecting minds is easier once you get to know someone,_ Jean said, after a long moment. _Even just entering someone's mind is easier if you know them; the Professor says that it helps you understand the shape of their thoughts. It's how non-telepaths who know each other well seem to read each other's minds. But I'm guessing you mean a deeper connection._

Harry nodded. _If you don't want to talk about it, I understand._

Jean shook her head. _No,_ she said. _You've told me about all sorts of things that have hurt you, it's only right that I should do the same._

Harry fixed his older cousin with a serious look. _Jean. I mean it. You don't have to. If it makes you uncomfortable, just forget it._

Jean smiled. _You're sweet,_ she said. _But I want… no, I need to talk about it. If nothing else, it'd do you good to know that I understand what it feels like to be connecting to a collapsing mind._ She took a deep breath, something that made Harry profoundly wish that his hormones were caught up with current affairs.

 _The Professor and I connect pretty easily. After all, he's been my teacher since I was six. It's also pretty smooth with Scott, too, and he's my best friend._ She smiled at him. _And you and me, we connect even more easily, probably because we're family._ She shook her head. _Anyway, once you know what you're doing, it's also easier to manage._

There was a long pause, while Jean collected herself.

 _When I was six, my best friend was a girl called Annie. Her and me, we did everything together, we shared everything. That was part of the problem,_ she said. _One day, we were playing in the garden. One of our toys, I think it was a ball, went flying into the road. Annie ran to get it and got hit by a car._

Harry, shocked, took one of her hands and squeezed it, but didn't interrupt.

 _I ran over to her. When I reached her, and the shock... the shock activated my powers. Instinctively, I connected our minds, melded them, and I wouldn't let go. But she was dying and I wound up in a coma. Doctor Strange says I wound up talking to Death, the actual personification of Death._ She snorted. _Apparently, she liked me._ She shook her head. _I don't know about what happened – I certainly don't remember that. My parents didn't know what to do, and neither did the doctors at the hospital. But fortunately the Professor came along, having detected it on Cerebro, and showed me the way back. He later said, when he was teaching me about this sort of thing, that it was only a ridiculous stroke of good luck that I survived, let alone undamaged._

 _I'm not entirely sure that it was luck,_ Harry said.

 _What, you think it was because I was that strong?_

 _No,_ Harry said, then amended, _not entirely. But you said that Doctor Strange talked to you about it, knew about what had happened._

 _Yeah, he did. You think he made sure that I survived?_

 _Earlier this year, he brought my godmother's boyfriend back from the dead and regrew Sif's heart without even blinking twice,_ Harry said. _I think he's easily capable of it. More to the point, it's the kind of thing he does._

 _Save the lives of random little girls?_

 _Random little girls who happen to be potentially the most powerful psychic ever born,_ Harry said dryly. His tone softened. _I'm sorry about Annie._

 _Thank you. So am I,_ Jean said quietly. _But it was a long time ago._ She looked at Harry. _What I'm saying is that nearly destroyed my mind, even with all the power I was born with, a helping hand from the Professor and maybe from Doctor Strange too. These sort of things are dangerous, even when it's just between two minds. I meant what I said about the Death Eaters' minds probably being destroyed. Forcibly melding_ _ **five**_ _minds, minds that had already been taken over by force, reshaping them into a kind of psychic pocket dimension and not doing it gently either… honestly, Harry, I think that by that point, Voldemort's will would have been the only thing holding their minds together. The damage was already done. If anything, you ended the suffering of whatever parts of them was left._

Harry stared at her, processing her words, struggling with the tidal wave of emotions, one mostly composed of relief. He knew instinctively that she wasn't lying to him to make him feel better and now… he was reeling. In a good way, but still reeling. "Not angry, then?" he managed.

"No," Jean said. "Not at you. At the monster that played games with your friends' minds, enslaved and destroyed five other minds, all to hurt you, my baby cousin…" Her eyes smouldered, her expression contorted with an indescribable fury and the air around began to ripple and warp, turning thick and hot as it filled with the sort of power that had propelled Jean through the World Tree and struck down tens of thousands of demons in an instant, power that could pulverise a city and drive what remained into the molten heart of the Earth.

And even though Harry had faced dark wizards, superhuman assassins and unholy abominations of all shapes and sizes in his young life without batting an eye, and most importantly knew very well that the anger wasn't even remotely directed at him, he found his spine doing its best impersonation of an icicle as all his hair stood on end.

"Jean?" he managed.

There was a long moment, then Jean refocused, meeting his gaze, then closed her eyes, taking deep, steady breaths. Slowly, steadily, the feeling of immense power faded, the air becoming breathable once more.

"Sorry about that," she said quietly. "When Doctor Strange made me realise how strong I really am, it's like this massive dam broke inside me and what used to be a small lake of power has turned into a huge ocean. I'm still getting used to handling it." She smiled self-deprecatingly. "It doesn't help that I have a temper."

"Believe it or not," Harry said wryly. "I completely understand you."

"I suppose you do," Jean said. "Especially since your psychic powers only came in a few months ago." She smiled. "Maybe you could teach me."

Harry's eyes nearly popped out. " _Me?_ Teach _you?_ " he spluttered. "I know nothing compared to you."

"Why not?" Jean asked. "The Professor says that there's always more to learn, and this is a problem you have more experience with. Clearly you've figured out something that I haven't." Her smile turned teasing. "Besides, little cousin, I think I can manage to teach you a thing or two of my own at the same time."

Harry went bright red at the unintentional double entendre, before the dirtier part of his mind was shoved ruthlessly to one side by a surge of pure, unalloyed happiness, one made all the stronger by the lifting of the shadow that had been on him since the end of the World Cup.

"I'd like that," he said. "I'd like that a lot."

It was quite the understatement. But it would do.

 **Well, I hope that was satisfactory. Yes, I know, it was shorter than you lot are accustomed to, but if you rush a miracle worker, you get rubbish miracles. If this was going to come out on Christmas, it was going to have to be comparatively short. As a result, Jean-Paul's chat with Clark and its results wasn't explored (the whole issue of the other green eyed person was going to be left in abeyance for the time being, because I'm gearing up for that reveal in the next big arc, titled _Forever Red_ ).**

 **I was also going to include a section with Tony, Pepper and baby Ada that would be pure sweetness, but it didn't really add anything to the story – and I'm trying to be a little more ruthless about not getting side tracked by that sort of thing. Plus, I felt it more apt to have Tony getting super-protective and roping Dresden into helping test his magic counter-measures – which we may see next chapter – and Steve and Carol settling their new status, now that he's actually got his head out of his arse and accepted that she's family. That will almost certainly be inclined in the next chapter.**

 **In any case, Merry Christmas, one and all, and a Happy New Year.**


	5. Chapter 5: Museum Musings

**Well, my New Year's resolution to write shorter, more concise chapters seems to have crashed and burned. On the other hand, you lucky people get a chapter less than a week after the last one, and the story advances – the next chapter sets us onto the next important arc, one which reveals many things, including the name and significance of the mysterious person with the green eyes, and brings up the first of the titular ghosts of the past… but first, another lighter chapter, with a bit of character development stuff and hopefully not too heavy in parts on the psychic jargon. I'll go back and sort it out if needs be.**

 **Also, there is a reading of _Child of the Storm,_ being done by one of my amazing reviewers, Kingofclubs8129. It's on youtube, where he goes by princeofangels8129, though you'll find it just as easily by googling it. **

**In any case, Happy New Year!**

"So," Carol said.

"So," Steve agreed.

There was a long, awkward pause. The two of them were sitting in one of the less cavernous of the newly dubbed Avengers Mansion's living rooms. Neither felt entirely comfortable in the house, not when they had time to dwell on it. In Steve's case, he'd grown up in the sort of poverty that was, on good days, only a notch or two above the sort that Charles Dickens had written books about. After that, he'd moved to the confined barracks at Lehigh, before being whisked across the country with the USO and sleeping in a bewildering mixture of relative luxury and poverty, depending on what was available – something that varied on a nightly basis. After that, he'd been on the Western Front, sometimes on the Eastern one too, and often behind enemy lines, where beds were an intermittent occurrence and a comfy pile of leaves out of the wind was the height of luxury.

After he'd woken up – or as Tony once glibly put it, been defrosted – he'd spent his time first in a fairly sparse, yet moderately comfortable apartment given to him by SHIELD, which to him had seemed almost embarrassingly extravagant. He had adjusted, however, and moving in to the Tower hadn't been too much of a shock, since his floor had been decorated with unexpected restraint and sensitivity – which, naturally, meant that Pepper had had something to do with it.

The Mansion, however, was not restrained. It was an old, luxurious town house with richly carved interiors of oak and mahogany and filled with pieces of furniture that, Steve suspected, were each worth more than the apartment SHIELD had given him. The paintings that dotted the mansion certainly were. Every inch of it oozed richness and ostentation and while he could appreciate its aesthetic value, he was at heart a boy from Brooklyn who felt profoundly out of of place. He had, of course, been to more luxurious places – Buckingham Palace and the Royal Palace of Asgard to name but two – but in neither case had he actually been expected to live there.

Carol wasn't quite as self-conscious, having grown up in a comfortably middle class family, and having often been her uncle's plus one at New York based parties after his divorce on the stated grounds that he wanted someone to talk to who wouldn't make him think wistfully of murder. While Avengers Mansion was a mental step up, a significant one, it wasn't the quantum leap that it was for Steve. And, of course, she didn't actually live there. However, her issue was that she was still getting a handle on her newfound strength, reflexes and everything else, and was thus mortally afraid of breaking something, even if Harry and Loki could fix it with a wave of a hand, and Thor with a wave of his wand.

And while their discomfort wasn't the cause of the awkwardness, it most certainly did not help.

"What now?" Carol asked, and at Steve's puzzled look, she elaborated. "I mean, you're not trying to pretend I don't exist any more – sorry."

Steve had winced, but shook his head. "You have nothing to be sorry for," he said. "You're right. I was trying to avoid the issue, to avoid dealing with it." He half smiled. "You've got every right to put it like that. My mom wouldn't have been half so polite if she could see me now."

"Really?" Carol asked, curious.

Steve chuckled. "Oh yeah," he said. "She'd have torn me a new one a dozen times over how I've neglected you."

Carol flushed, embarrassed, but the embarrassment was tempered by a grin. "Sounds like great-great grandma was a tough lady," she said.

"She was," Steve said. "As a nurse in a TB ward and a widow raising a kid who was sick all the time, she had to be. But… she wasn't made of stone. She was tough, but she was gentle too. When I caught fevers and couldn't sleep, she'd stay up beside me after a sixteen hour shift, mopping my brow and singing Gaelic lullabies."

"Do you speak any Gaelic?" Carol asked.

"Not really," Steve said. "Mom taught me a few bits, but mostly, she wanted me to learn English, to be an American kid, not just an Irish kid who happened to live in America. I think she'd have taught me more when I got older, but there wasn't really time. And then... she worked in a TB ward. One day, she got hit and she couldn't shake it."

"I'm sorry," Carol said quietly.

Steve smiled gently. "Thanks, but it was a long time ago," he said. "Even from my point of view."

"Do you remember any of the lullabies?" Carol asked.

"Actually, I do," Steve said, and at Carol's expectant look, cleared his throat. Then, he began to sing. His singing voice was slow and uncertain to start with, but soon grew in confidence and strength as the memories came flooding back.

" _Seoithín, seo hó, mo stór é, mo leanbh  
Mo sheoid gan cealg, mo chuid gan tsaoil mhór  
Seothín seo ho, nach mór é an taitneamh  
Mo stóirín na leaba, na chodladh gan brón._

 _A leanbh mo chléibh go n-eirí do chodhladh leat  
Séan is sonas gach oíche do chóir  
Tá mise le do thaobh ag guídhe ort na mbeannacht  
Seothín a leanbh is codail go foill._

 _Ar mhullach an tí tá síodha geala_  
 _Faol chaoin re an Earra ag imirt is spoirt_  
 _Seo iad aniar iad le glaoch ar mo leanbh_  
 _Le mian é tharraingt isteach san lios mór."_

"Wow," Carol said, eyes wide. "Does super singing come with the super soldier stuff too? Because, seriously, that was amazing. What does it mean?"

Steve chuckled. "It's basically the Irish 'Hush-a-bye baby'," he said. "And used to sing a bit in my church choir. I was okay, nothing special. The serum helped – it meant I had the lung capacity to hold notes, for one thing. Gabe was the real singer in the Commandos and Monty was pretty good at it too."

"What about Peggy?" Carol asked. "My great-grandma?"

Steve's expression faded into a misty smile. "Oh, she could sing." He chuckled. "Bucky, though, can't carry a tune in a bucket."

"Really?" Carol asked, intrigued.

"Yeah," Steve said. "It always annoyed the heck out of him."

Carol arched an eyebrow. "Heck? Really?"

"Mom brought me up not to swear around ladies," Steve said. He eyed her, expression turning dry. "Even if they swear themselves. A lot."

Carol sniggered, entirely unrepentant. Then, the sniggering bubbled into something on the verge of full-blown laughter.

"What?" Steve asked, puzzled.

"Nothing," she said. "Just... you know that I swear."

Steve nodded, looking somewhat resigned to this.

"Yeah, it was grandma, your daughter, who taught me most of the swears I know," Carol said.

"Why?" Steve asked, dreading the answer.

Carol smirked. "To piss off dad," she said. "Which is why uncle Jack taught me most of the rest – though he complained that grandma had already taught me all the really good ones." Her smirk turned into a grin as Steve sighed. "I got some of the rest from Jean-Paul when he stubbed his toe once because he was too busy checking out some guy's butt to pull his usual ballet dancer ninja grace thing. And Harry knows some really interesting Russian cusswords."

Steve sighed again. "What am I going to do with you?" he asked rhetorically, the potential edge of the words taken off by a half smile and a part amused, part despairing tone.

"Yeah, we were kind of meant to be talking about that, weren't we?" Carol said, grimacing. "I mean… you're my great-grandpa."

"And you're my great-granddaughter," Steve said quietly. He sat back and ran a hand through his hair. "I'll be honest with you, Carol. I have no clue what to do next. I haven't had any blood family since mom died. Bucky filled the gap, but he was more like a brother, and so were the rest of the Commandos – though Spitfire and Minerva were more like little sisters, and Peggy was… Peggy."

He shook his head. "And after I woke up, for a long time I had no one. Now, the Avengers are filling the hole the Commandos left." He sighed. "But thing is, I never had nieces or nephews, let alone children. I wanted to, hoped to, with Peggy, but I never expected to, either. And like I said before, I thought after I came out of the ice that that part of my life had passed me by. I thought that I didn't have kids now and probably never would." He smiled wryly. "As it turns out, I did, but until recently, I had no idea." He shook his head. "I've got a whole family; a daughter, a granddaughter and a grandson, two great-granddaughters and two great-grandsons, if I have it right."

Carol nodded. "It should be three great-grandsons," she said quietly. "But yeah."

Steve closed his eyes briefly and nodded. While he had tried to ignore Carol and the issue of his family, he had looked into them. It hadn't taken him long to find out that one of his great-grandsons, Charlie, had found his father's service weapon and accidentally shot himself with it. He'd been only eight years old.

"It was a little overwhelming," he said eventually. "And I wasn't sure who would be better off knowing and who would be better off not knowing. Though that's no excuse for how I acted."

Carol blinked, then cocked an eyebrow thoughtfully. "I hadn't looked at it like that before," she said. "I'm pretty damn sure that Grandma already knows, and you know, she is your daughter. You should probably talk to her."

"I…" Steve began, then closed his mouth again. "She's lived her whole life without me," he said eventually. "Had a long career at SHIELD, married, raised a family, been happy. I don't…" He shook his head. "I don't want to intrude."

Carol gave him a flat look. "To put it bluntly, it really fucking hurt me when you took that attitude, and I'm just your great-granddaughter," she said. "She's your fucking daughter. At the very least, you owe her a conversation." Then, realising what she had just said – something aided by Steve's loosely hanging jaw – she went bright red. "Maybe I could've put that better," she mumbled.

Steve managed to regain his composure and chuckled. "No," he said. "You put it just right." He smiled. "You actually reminded me a bit of Peggy, actually. A bit less… eloquent than she usually was, but the same idea. She never held back when she thought I was being an idiot, either."

Carol went even redder for a moment, then shrugged. "Yeah, well," she said. "Uncle Jack probably doesn't know and would like to. Cousin Sharon would definitely like to know, though she might already. To be honest, I have no idea." She paused. "No, wait, she already knows, I told her after London."

"What about your mom?" Steve asked gently. "And your brothers?"

"The rug rats?" Carol asked, with a half smile. "Joe junior would be bouncing off the walls for months. Captain America, his great-grandpa? He'd never be able to keep it a secret." She sighed fondly. "And then he'd get in about a million fights because no one would believe him, or if they dared to say a bad word against you." Her smile faded a little. "And Stevie…"

"Stevie?" Steve asked, startled.

Carol smiled wryly. "Yeah," she said. "Odd coincidence, huh?" She shrugged. "It's a popular name. Though…"

"Though?"

"It's nothing," Carol said. "It's just one of those little things that makes me think that mom actually uses her brain every once in a while."

Steve opened his mouth to tell her off, but decided against it. It hadn't been that hard to work out (and for 'not that hard to work out' read 'blindingly obvious') that Carol had issues with her family, particularly her father. However, he didn't know all the facts, so he couldn't really step into this debate. Instead, he settled for a disapproving frown that Carol made a face at.

"Stevie... well, he prefers being called Steven for a start," Carol said. "He's a bit of a nerd, really good at drawing, painting and stuff like that. He's also kind of quiet and a bit shy. Not like me. He's definitely not a cool, tough guy, like uncle Jack is, or like dad thinks he is." Her expression spoke of what Steve felt was an alarming amount of contempt for her father, but for now he held his peace. In any case, the expression faded to a sadder, more pensive one. "But he's the older boy and dad's always getting on at him to be more into sports, to be a rough, tough guy, a manly man, going on about how he'll be the man of the house and stuff like that." She paused, then added somewhat grudgingly, "Mom tries to stop him. She bought Stevie some paints at Christmas, too, really nice ones." She smirked. "Dad wasn't happy."

"You think that he'll feel pressured to be more like me," Steve said. "Or to be exact, more like what people think about me." At Carol's enquiring glance, he smiled. "I like drawing and painting too, you know. Mom sneaked me as many spare pencils and old pieces of paper that she could. I don't know how good I was, but it helped put food on the table."

Carol looked surprised, then smiled. "Sounds like it runs in the family," she said. "If he knew, if dad knew…" She paused, and looked caught between a profoundly sour expression and one of wicked delight, as if she did not know quite what to feel.

"Carol?"

"Finding out about you would probably make dad bang on more about his old fashioned crap than he already does, use you as an example," Carol said. "Which would suck a bit for me and a lot for Stevie. Plus, dad's got enough of an inferiority complex as it is over his macho crap – though he'd probably just wind up bragging that Captain America was one of his in-laws. On the other hand, once he actually met you…" She cackled, actually cackled. "Grandma and uncle Jack scare the crap out of him enough as it is. You…"

Steve frowned. "I don't try and frighten people, Carol," he said sternly. "Especially not civilians."

"You wouldn't even have to try," Carol said, waving a hand. "The first time you contradicted him about, I don't know, ladies having serious careers in or out of the military, or just generally revealed that you live in the twenty first century, his head would probably explode."

Steve felt rather uncomfortable. Carol wasn't painting the most pleasant picture of her father as a person, but the fact that she obviously disliked, no, despised him and the contempt in her voice when she discussed him… it spoke of old, festering wounds and scars that ran deep. And in truth, it troubled him.

"I'll go with your suggestions," he said eventually. "For the time being, at least." He looked Carol in the eye. "To be honest, though, I'm not sure where to start. On being a parent, grandparent and great-grandparent, I mean." He sighed. "I want to make a start, but I'm not sure how."

"Well," Carol said, chewing her lip. "I've got previous with grandparents – mostly grandma Alison. Grandma and grandpa Danvers live out of state and I don't see them much." She made a face to suggest that this was not necessarily something she objected to. Then, she looked back at Steve and her expression turned to a small, fragile smile. "I could teach you," she said. "Though, at the World Cup… that wasn't _too_ bad." She shrugged, trying to sound casual. "You know, as starts go."

Steve had, in the past, been accused of being oblivious. But this was something he was not blind to. He made his way over to his great-granddaughter and pulled her into a hug, which she reciprocated with the studied nonchalance of a teenager.

"I can't say I'll be perfect," he said. "I can definitely say that I won't have a clue what I'm doing a lot of the time." That got a muffled laugh from the region of his shoulders. "But I can say that I'll do my best."

Carol looked up, and though she would likely never have admitted it, there was a dampness in her eyes, eyes that Steve saw every day in the mirror. But it was a good dampness, for it was accompanied by a smile. "That's good enough for me, gramps," she said, then laughed as Steve winced. "Yeah," she said, laughter touching every word and mischief dancing in her eyes. "I'm probably going to drive you nuts."

"Only probably?" Steve asked dryly.

"Okay," Carol said, grinning. "Definitely."

Steve smiled. He could live with that.

OoOoO

To an outside observer, the behaviour of Clark Kent at this moment in time was profoundly odd. Having finished his homework, he headed to the little area of the barn's loft that he had colonised, filling it with a couple of old sofas, a telescope and related accoutrements and a miniature fridge. Normally, someone of his age might be expected to be on a computer, on the phone to friends, or in keeping with the surroundings, do some astronomy. At the very least, he might be expected to get out a book.

Instead, however, he cleared some stuff off one of the sofas, pinned all loose papers down and got two cans of Coke from the fridge. Then, after a moment or two, dropped one of them.

Before it had dropped more than six inches, a long fingered, deceptively strong hand snatched it out of the air, followed immediately after by a gust of air. Clark grinned.

"You know," a severe voice from behind him said. "One day, I will let it fall. And then there will be Coke everywhere and you will deserve it."

"Sorry," Clark said as he turned around, not feeling especially contrite. "It's just that there's not many people I know who are, well, faster than me. Who can do something like that."

Jean-Paul raised an eyebrow. "Well, that is true enough," he said. "There is no one faster than I am."

It was not, Clark noted, a boast, or not delivered as such. Instead, it was stated in an entirely matter of fact tone as if it was a fact, and a perfectly obvious one at that.

"Besides," Jean-Paul added. "It is also true that there are not many faster than you, not on foot. Your speed is quite the gift – though not one that I would have expected."

If Clark had been a dog, his ears would have pricked up at this. He knew that, for whatever reason, he looked very much like Prince Harry Thorson. Thankfully, he had been one of only a few to pick up on it, and the other two, Pete Ross and Chloe Sullivan, respectively dismissed it as a weird coincidence and used it occasionally as a means to tease him without really taking it seriously.

During their bi-weekly chats, however, Jean-Paul had alluded to knowing Clark's doppelganger. He hadn't said much more, though, and for all the French boy was charming, friendly and patiently kind, he tended to get fuzzy on the specifics. In fact, Clark got the definite feeling that Jean-Paul was rather carefully weighing him up. It was a vague feeling, one not half so strong as the very definite feeling that the other boy was hitting on him, but it was there.

"What did you expect, Jean-Paul?" he asked, trying to keep his tone neutral.

Jean-Paul smiled lazily. "With a body like yours, _mon cher_?" he asked, enough innuendo in his tone to fill a dozen pantomimes and to confirm Clark's suspicion that Jean-Paul was flirting with him, causing him to blush horribly. The other boy laughed merrily. "I tease, Clark," he said, then smirked. "Consider it revenge for the can trick."

"Uh, right," Clark managed. "Seriously, what did you expect?"

"Superhuman strength, and durability of course," Jean-Paul said.

"Not telepathy and telekinesis?" Clark asked.

Jean-Paul's eyes narrowed and mirth vanished from his face. For a long moment, Clark sat uncomfortably under his assessing stare. Then, eventually, he smiled slightly and inclined his head like a fencer acknowledging a touch. " _Et bien_ ," he said quietly. "Very sharp, Clark. I am impressed."

"You know him, don't you?" Clark said.

"Better than most, not as well as some," Jean-Paul said. "Enough to know that in many respects, you are as alike in character as you are in looks. And in others, you could not be further apart."

Clark frowned, then looked up sharply. "These visits," he said suddenly, angry and betrayed. "They're not friendly chats – you're studying me, trying to learn my secrets!"

Jean-Paul simply sipped his Coke. " _Mon cher_ , if I understand you correctly, your most important secrets are that you have superhuman speed which you wish to hide and that you have some connection to my friend, Harry Thorson," he said. "Both of which I knew the moment I saw you."

"How?" Clark asked, blinking as his anger was derailed before it could get up steam.

"You had not simply whisked your pretty friend away from the burning school, and despite the fact that the building was in danger of exploding, you were only then using your speed," Jean-Paul said in a calm and clinical tone. "That, _mon cher_ , suggests that it was a carefully kept secret and that revealing it was a very last resort. And to be perfectly blunt, Clark, the resemblance between you and Harry is one that only a blind man could miss." He looked Clark in the eye. "I know these secrets, _mon cher_ , and I have told no one. Not my friends with powers like yours, not SHIELD, not even the Avengers themselves. And you know that I have not because we both know that if I had, it would have become obvious by now." His expression softened. "I know what it is like to live with a secret, Clark," he said gently. "I have lived with two in my life. Now, for the most part, I live with only one – and among certain friends whom I trust, none. I have not betrayed your confidence and I will not."

Clark thought this over. SHIELD might well have come for him if they'd been tipped off. They were super spies who dealt with superhumans, after all, even if they were busy dealing with HYDRA infiltrators – it had been all over the news. Jean-Paul's friends… he didn't know about them, so he'd have to take that on trust. And the Avengers? Well, he didn't know for sure, but he felt that Thor and Loki at least would be interested.

"Thank you," he said eventually.

Jean-Paul nodded. "I confess that you are partly right," he said. "I have enjoyed having a new friend and giving you the benefit of my experience. But I have also been trying to get your measure."

"Why?" Clark asked.

"For a number of reasons," Jean-Paul said. "First, your resemblance to Harry is no coincidence, I am certain of that. What it means, however, I do not know and finding out could be vital to your safety."

"Just mine?" Clark asked.

"And your family's," Jean-Paul added. "There are many powers in this world, mundane and supernatural. Almost all of them would be very interested in finding out why you and Harry resemble each other so closely."

The bottom dropped out of Clark's stomach. "You think that they would hurt my family and friends to get to me," he whispered.

"I don't think, I know," Jean-Paul said quietly. He shook his head. "Your resemblance to Harry is one mystery. With that resemblance, your possessing superhuman speed, only speed, is another."

Clark coughed and looked sheepish, causing Jean-Paul's eyes to zero in on him like a sniper's sights. "Yeah," he said. "About that…"

Jean-Paul snorted faintly. "I should have guessed," he said. "What gifts have you been keeping from me, _mon cher?_ "

In answer, Clark zipped over to his sofa and easily lifted it overhead. While Jean-Paul was still on it.

As soon as he was part-way through the motion, there was flicker of golden lightning and Jean-Paul was standing on the floor, watching Clark. "Impressive," he remarked.

"Mom and dad told me that when they found me, their truck had overturned," Clark said. He rubbed the back of his head. "I turned it the right way up."

"How old were you?" Jean-Paul asked.

"Old enough to walk?" Clark ventured.

Jean-Paul's eyebrows shot up and he let out an impressed whistle. "Durability?"

"I'm pretty tough," Clark hedged. Under Jean-Paul's gaze, he sighed. "On Red Sky Day, when I was saving as many people as I could, the gas line in one of the houses exploded. I was thrown out through several walls, into reinforced concrete. I was fine, a couple of bruises aside. My clothes…"

"Ah. Perhaps, then, I should have stayed," Jean-Paul said, smirking.

Clark blushed again. "Well," he said. "After that, I tested myself at a junk yard at night – throwing cars and running ahead to, well, get hit by them. I got a few more bruises, but nothing more than that."

"Impressive," Jean-Paul said again. "Was it hard, to throw those cars?"

"Not really," Clark said, a little embarrassed. "It got a little uncomfortable, doing it repeatedly, but actually doing it?" He shrugged. "It was a bit like throwing a football, I suppose."

Jean-Paul's eyebrows rose, then he nodded slowly. "Strength, durability, speed…" He shifted into thoughtful French.

"Er, Jean-Paul?" Clark said.

"Oh? Ah. Sorry," Jean-Paul said. "Sorry. I was saying that you almost seem more like Thor's son than Harry does. Yet you cannot be, I know that much for sure…" He trailed off. "Of course," he added to himself. "Most of Harry's active abilities come from his mother."

"His mom was psychic?"

Jean-Paul was silent.

"Look, if you don't want to tell me," Clark said, concealing a hint of disappointment.

"No," Jean-Paul said. "It is not that I do not want to tell you, I am just trying to figure how to explain those parts which I may without discussing those parts which are not for me to say." He steepled his fingers. "Perhaps it would be best to say that among other things, Harry's mother, though she was human, was an accomplished sorceress. She also had the potential for psychic abilities of immense power, potential that is realised in Harry. One of his cousins also has those abilities."

"Really?" Clark asked, intrigued.

Jean-Paul nodded. "And according to Harry, she is stronger than he is by quite some way, something which I had not previously believed possible," he said.

"Why?" Clark asked.

"Because Harry is one of the most powerful beings I have ever encountered," Jean-Paul said. "Potentially, second only to one, though that power was gifted…" He trailed off, leaving Clark baffled. Seeing Clark's bafflement, he shook his head. "Simply put, _mon cher_ , Harry is every bit as powerful as you are," he said. "For the time being at least, in his own way I believe that he may be a great deal more so. Of course," he added. "I do not know your limits."

"Neither do I," Clark admitted. "Do you know his?"

"I have a reasonably good idea," Jean-Paul said. "I suspect that the nature of your powers means that you have more stamina than he does – from what you describe, your body is superhuman in every way." Clark was surprised to detect no innuendo in that sentence, despite the opportunity being clear. "That, I presume, extends to stamina."

Clark nodded. "I don't really get tired," he confessed. "Not physically. Not any more." There was a tinge of sadness in his voice that he couldn't get past.

"I don't either," Jean-Paul said, with gentle sympathy. "I used to, but then…" He sighed. "Suffice it to say, _mon cher_ , that some nights I cannot sleep until I have had a good run, simply to burn off some of my energy."

"How far?" Clark asked.

"From New York to Paris and back," Jean-Paul said. "It takes me two hours."

Clark's jaw dropped, then he frowned. "On Red Sky Day, you were coming through Smallville practically every minute," he said. "Quicker, even."

"I can go faster," Jean-Paul said. "However, as I found on that day, running that fast… it has its dangers. Even for me. _Especially_ for me."

Clark nodded.

Jean-Paul smiled faintly. "Anyway – your stamina is superhuman. Harry's is as well, I think, but not half as much. He has the physical abilities of Captain America, or a bit less," he said. "Superhuman, but not yet beyond the reach of human potential."

"Wish I could say the same," Clark muttered. "I'm getting faster and stronger all the time, I know it."

"And you fear that one day you will not be able to control them," Jean-Paul said.

Clark gaped and got a sad smile in return.

"We all fear that too, _mon cher_ ," the French boy said gently. "All of us."

"You do?" Clark asked, then thought and nodded. "Of course you do." He paused. "You said earlier that you were getting my measure. Did you think I might not be able to control my powers well enough?"

Jean-Paul sighed. "No," he said. "I worked out quickly that you could control your powers perfectly well. I wanted to take your measure as a person."

Clark frowned. "Why?"

"Because I know better than anyone how tempting speed can be," Jean-Paul said. "How easy it can be to misuse. And with strength and invulnerability too…"

"I'm not invulnerable," Clark said.

"You are far more so than anyone I have met who is not a god," Jean-Paul said bluntly. "Or at least a demigod. Which leads me to wonder about your origins."

"You don't think I got my powers like you did?" Clark asked, clinging to his last, feeble hope. "That I'm a mutant, like you told me about?" Jean-Paul's explanation about mutants had resurrected his previously dead hopes that he might be human – or at least, a close relative.

Jean-Paul shook his head. "Mutants usually have only one distinct power. I know of almost none who have two," he said. "At least."

"Almost none, you said. I have two powers," Clark said.

"Technically, you have three. And the only mutants with two distinct powers that I know of are psychics," Jean-Paul said. "Those who are both telepathic and telekinetic. I have heard it argued that those two powers are simply different manifestations of one power. And they are all students, or in Harry's case, the student of a former student, of a man called Charles Xavier. He is a powerful telepath, one who finds young mutants so he can teach them how to use their powers at his school. I have no doubt that if you were a mutant, he would have detected you and offered you a place at his school." He gave Clark a sad look. "And Clark, you say that your powers manifested when you were a baby?"

"Yeah," Clark said. "What about it?"

"The earliest mutant power manifestation that I know of is at the age of six," Jean-Paul said. "And that was under very stressful circumstances. Mine didn't appear until just before I started puberty. It is also usually… less than controlled. Yet even as an infant, you could control your powers." He raised a hand before Clark could say anything else. "And when I touched you to share my speed and bring you out of your school on Red Sky Day… you felt different, somehow, to any human, mutant, god, demigod or mutant demigod that I have done that too. I could not explain how, but it was like your body was made of something stronger than ordinary flesh. The closest comparisons I can draw were to my friends, Uhtred, and Diana, a teenage Asgardian and a teenage Olympian demigoddess. Their bodies were also stronger, but yours had a different… energy. I do not know a better word. I am sorry, Clark. You are certainly not a mutant. I am almost certain that you are not a god or a demigod either, which puzzles me greatly."

"So you don't know what I am," Clark said bitterly. "Thanks."

"Not true," Jean-Paul said quietly. "Even from our short acquaintance, I know that you are a good person, kind and friendly. I know that you are desperately lonely, that you hate keeping your secret from your friends and fear their reactions when they find out, and you feel as if you are always an outsider looking. I know that you are far cleverer than you appear at first sight." He smirked. "And I know that you blush adorably."

Clark, naturally, blushed.

"I know what you are, Clark," Jean-Paul said, serious again. "What I do not know is where you came from. There is a difference."

Clark was, for the moment, lost for words.

Jean-Paul glanced at his watch. "I am sorry," he said. "But I have to go. The usual time?"

Clark nodded.

Jean-Paul smiled. "Excellent," he said, then gave Clark a pointed look. "But I meant what I said."

"Which part?" Clark asked, puzzled.

"All of it," Jean-Paul said. "Especially about dropping the Coke cans."

Clark grinned unrepentantly.

Jean-Paul rolled his eyes. "Before I go, mon cher," he said. "I have a suggestion. Ask your parents about the day they found you."

"Why?" Clark asked.

"Because from what I understand your parents reacted calmly to the appearance abandoned child with obvious superhuman powers after a meteor shower that nearly killed them. Then they took that child in without blinking an eye, regardless of the risks. Furthermore, they were resourceful enough to hide your abilities from the world and presumably fake a birth certificate and adoption papers, all while under the noses of the world's press," Jean-Paul said. "I think that it is reasonable to suggest that people so resourceful, so diligent and so moral, would at least have investigated the area where they found you, to at least ensure that you weren't simply separated from your parents and that they were not hurt and in need of help. _À bientôt_ , Clark."

With that, he vanished in a flash of golden lightning. And Clark was left much to think upon.

OoOoO

Steve, meanwhile, went from one in-depth discussion to another. What with all the to-do over the World Cup; the Voldemort's mental manipulations, the unleashing of Harry's psychic wrath and the birth of baby Ada, along with the reactions to all of the above, it turned out that no one had informed Bucky that it had been decided that he was to be Harry's bodyguard and teacher. Thus, Steve, as one of those who had known Bucky longest, was nominated with Natasha, the other person, to join Thor in discussing this with Bucky, and if need be, talking him round.

It turned out that this was most definitely required.

"You have got to be joking," Bucky said flatly.

"You're more than qualified," Natasha said.

"Indeed," Thor said.

"Thor, it wasn't so long ago that I shot you," Bucky said.

"Not of your own will. In any case, that is part of why I agree with Natasha," Thor said calmly. "As my brother observed, you are _the_ master spy. You taught Natasha, after all."

"I wasn't her only tutor," Bucky pointed out. "Mostly my expertise lies in how to kill people or how to prepare to kill people. I'm not sure that you exactly want Harry learning that."

"Harry is already learning the warrior's arts," Thor said. "But his education somewhat limits the opportunities to do so."

Bucky raised an eyebrow. "If I remember correctly, the Banshee spent months at Hogwarts doing almost nothing but teach hand to hand," he said. "He's good."

"He also had many other students," Thor said. "Even his private classes with Harry included Harry's friends, Ron and Hermione. They are the best of friends, brave, worthy and wise, but Harry already learns the warrior's arts far faster than they do – it is quite literally in his blood. In this respect at least, they will only hold him back, Sergeant Barnes."

"Cassidy was also on assignment from MI13," Natasha said. "He was at Hogwarts to protect it and keep an eye on what was going on. Now, Wisdom's priorities have shifted and he doesn't have that many experienced superpowered personnel at his disposal. There's a very good chance that he'll deploy Cassidy elsewhere." She gave him a pointed look. "And he's not you, James. He's very good, but his skills are in _aikido_ and brawling techniques, and he learned those as a supplement to his primary weapon: his powers."

Bucky grimaced at this, but didn't deny it.

"And it is not just how to fight that Harry needs to learn," Thor said. "Indeed, that is not even the main thing he needs to learn. He knows well enough how to fight, enough to handle most adversaries."

"He doesn't know how to make and shake a tail, spot a sniper or a trap," Natasha said, and her lips quirked in a smile. "Or fight in any way that doesn't involve charging head on at his enemies, leaving a trail of destruction that can be seen from space." She sobered. "He's smart, James, and resourceful. But he's not street smart. He can fight smart, but…"

"He needs to learn how to avoid the fight in the first place," Thor said. "Or if it needs to be started, how to play to his strengths and avoid exposing his weaknesses." He shook his head. "He has the powers of a God, indeed, powers that are greater than many full grown gods. But his body is mortal, or near enough. In the past he has too often forgotten this, and once…" He took a deep breath. "Once, it got him killed. He was brought back by a miracle, but you can understand why I would not wish him to repeat the experience."

Bucky nodded. "I understand that," he said quietly. "But if you or Loki can't do it yourselves, why not get an Asgardian bodyguard, someone who can teach him the tricks of the trade and, conveniently, soak up bullets?"

"There would no shortage of volunteers," Thor said, with a chuckle. "And Harry already has a Sworn Sword, a young man called Uhtred, one who is already very strong and very skilled – he fought on the Mountain at Easter and at the Battle of London. Yet he is still young and he has a disadvantage that would plague any Asgardian who took the role; he knows and understands little of Midgard, Earth. He knows little of its threats, its technology, its methods of war, especially those employed by assassins and spies, nor how to prepare Harry for those mortal threats, or threats that would use mortals, that would strike while he is still vulnerable. While a grown Asgardian would know far more about the magical or alien enemies Harry might face, organisations like HYDRA would be beyond their ken." He sat back. "Besides," he said. "An Asgardian warrior protecting Harry would broadcast his vulnerability and make him even more of a target than before."

"Maybe," Bucky said. "But speaking of magical threats, over a certain power level, I'm not going to be able to take them head on. Voldemort, for instance. I could probably hunt him down and put a bullet through his head, and back when he was first around, I'd have been fairly confident of taking him if I could get in close – though that wouldn't be my first option. But you say he's a psychic now, and one powerful enough to nuke Agent Braddock while holding six people, including two fairly powerful young wizards tutored by Loki, a young god and a young woman who was literally too stubborn to die – which, of course, made it obvious that she was related to Steve," he added, smirking at Steve, before sobering. "To be honest, over a lower power level, I wouldn't want to take them head on if I could avoid."

"That is exactly what I wish you to teach Harry," Thor said. "How you would approach such enemies, such situations. While his power is far greater, his body is no stronger than yours, not yet. What is deadly to you would be just as deadly to him."

Bucky raised an eyebrow. "I've got to admit, that's a much more pragmatic view than I would have expected," he said dryly.

"My brother is Loki," Thor said, equally dryly. "Between him and my two sojourns as a mortal, I learnt well. Eventually."

"Why not one of you two, then?" Bucky asked, glancing at Steve and Natasha in turn.

"I don't know what you do, Buck," Steve said simply. "I don't think like you do. I'm a commando, yes, and I could teach him a lot. I'd be honoured to. But I don't know how to think like a spy, or an assassin."

When Bucky's gaze shifted to Natasha, she arched a brow. "You want me to live in a school with hundreds of teenage boys for at least nine months?" she said. "What did I ever do to you?"

Bucky snorted. "You know what I meant," he said. "You'd be a better teacher for him. Your skill set is even more geared towards avoiding unnecessary fights than mine is. You can teach him to read people, situations, better than I can. You were, are, a spy, an Agent. I was a killing machine pointed at targets and told to kill, kidnap or occasionally interrogate. Plus, you're more up to date than I am. My team as HYDRA's puppet aside, I've been in the deep freeze since the Motherland fell." His expression turned funny. "The Soviet Union fell," he amended, then looked wry. "Old habits die hard."

Steve was silent, noting it as just another reminder of how much his friend had changed and been changed.

"Anyone smart who wants to take out someone with Harry's firepower will use a sniper, an IED, something that gives no warning," Natasha retorted. "With his abilities, if they get in close, they probably won't stand a chance. Anyone who wants to kidnap him will similarly prepare well in advance. They'll have to. You're better at handling that sort of thing, watching for that sort of thing, than I am." She shrugged. "Also, a lot of my advantages come from being underestimated and working from the shadows. If I'm his bodyguard, I'm much less likely to be underestimated and I won't be in the shadows." She gave him a look. "Before you say anything, Clint said a lot of the same things that I am. He also said that you can do everything that he can, but better. Except for aim."

Bucky snorted. "You won't be in the shadows," he said. "Or be underestimated. And I will?"

"Everyone thinks that you're dead," Natasha said bluntly. "Almost everyone, at least. To pretty much everyone, you'll be Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes, war hero and legend in the magical and non-magical worlds."

"I'm a hero to wizards?" Bucky asked, surprised.

"As Steve and Albus Dumbledore's sidekick, sure," Natasha said, with a small smirk. The smirk vanished. "You'll be a on a relatively easy, relaxed assignment, readjusting to the world and sharing your wisdom."

"Relatively easy?" Bucky said, shooting a look at Natasha, who remained resolutely poker faced. A couple of years ago, Steve would have missed the amusement in her eyes, but not now.

"A lot of people, especially in the magical world, think that Harry is effectively invulnerable," Thor said. "And not without reason. On several occasions, he has survived things that should most definitely have killed him and once returned from the dead, spectacularly destroying all his enemies as he did so. While that was Lily, the Phoenix, acting through him, very few know enough to make that distinction. Many do not know that he is vulnerable." He sighed. "Sometimes, I think that that many includes Harry himself."

Bucky frowned, but said nothing.

"Buck," Steve said, feeling that at this point he should speak. "We could go on about how you've got the skills, the know-how, the anonymity and whatever else we can think of for hours. The point is, Harry could use someone like you around him, someone to keep him calm and centred." He smiled. "And you've got to admit, you know a thing or two about wrangling dumb kids who pick fights way out of their league."

Bucky chuckled and smiled a crooked smile. "I do," he said. "Not like you ever listened, though."

"What can I say?" Steve said, shrugging. "I'm stubborn."

"I'd never have guessed," Natasha murmured.

Thor looked amused at this by-play, but then sobered. "Sergeant Barnes," he said. "Will you do it? Will you protect my son, and teach him to protect himself?"

Bucky was silent for a long time. "I've got enemies," he said eventually. "Enemies that, if they figure out I'm alive, could put Harry in a lot of danger. It's not like he needs more people after him. On top of that…" He looked at them all, gaze settling most on first Steve, then Natasha. "I'm afraid of reverting. Or being reverted. I know that Professor Xavier gave me a clean bill of psychic health and found no trigger words or sleeper programming, but it's still a possibility." He tapped his arm. "I had Tony put something in that'll take me down if it ever happens, rendering the arm inoperable, and track me if needs be."

"You let Tony Stark lo-jack you?" Natasha asked, voice low and dangerous.

"I asked him to, Nat," Bucky said calmly. "You know why."

Natasha glared at him and said nothing, though Steve got the very definite sense that Bucky was going to be sleeping on the couch tonight. He hadn't asked about the nature of Bucky and Natasha's relationship, and suspected that a full explanation would fill several psychological textbooks. However, some parts were fairly obvious, even to him.

He couldn't say that he was happy with Bucky letting Tony bug him like that either. In fact, he was very unhappy about it, unhappy with Bucky and unhappy (but not especially surprised) with Tony for doing it. That said, he was also painfully aware that to Tony, Bucky was the Winter Soldier first, Bucky Barnes second, and the Winter Soldier was someone that Tony had been taught to fear from a young age. Their only face to face encounter had been non-violent, even non-threatening, but had nonetheless scared Tony witless, and Bucky had previously proved able to slip through both Loki's wards and Tony's security.

And to be frank, Tony had been paranoid enough to begin with, in large part thanks to his mentor and father figure setting him up to be kidnapped and executed by terrorists, something which instead resulted in (aside from Iron Man), months of physical and psychological torture, shrapnel only kept out of his heart by use of an arc powered electromagnet and the death of one of the few people Tony called friend. The fact that said mentor had then attempted to swipe Stark Industries from under Tony by legal means, before paralysing him, stealing his arc reactor and leaving him to die a slow and painful death, then finally attempting to kill him with a knock-off Iron Man suit, only exacerbated the situation.

Furthermore, Tony also had a newborn baby and a girlfriend to think about. Pepper, though she was gutsy, clever, cool under pressure and an all-round amazing lady, was a civilian and very vulnerable. It was hardly surprising that he'd want to take measures to ensure their safety before letting Bucky into his home – hell, it was a minor miracle that he'd done that in the first place. So while Steve couldn't say that he liked it, he understood it.

Natasha most likely knew all these things and more, but it didn't make her any happier with the situation. Since she'd spent much of her life under the control of the Red Room and only broken free with great effort and at great cost, while Bucky had spent much of the time she had known him under a much more explicit and harsher form of control, Steve supposed that the knowledge that he was effectively putting himself at least partly in someone else's power, even Tony's, was not something calculated to make her happy. He could understand that, too.

But he'd also known Bucky since they were both children. He trusted his judgement, if reluctantly in this case. More to the point, he knew the look in Bucky's eye – this was one position on which he would not be budged.

"And Thor," Bucky said. "I appreciate the offer. I really do. But even if you want me teaching your son what I know, even if you discount my enemies, I would need to be in close proximity to him twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, for at least a year. Agreed?"

"Not in Asgard, nor perhaps other realms and when the other Avengers are present," Thor said. "But broadly, yes."

"Maybe nine or ten months, then," Bucky said. "At least."

Thor conceded this with a nod.

"He's a telepath," Bucky continued. "One of the strongest alive. And the more I teach him, the more we'll be in sync – we'll have to be. We might even have to use telepathic communication for an edge."

"And?" Thor asked.

"So he'd be exposed to my memories," Bucky said. "And with what I'd be teaching, what we might face, they would not be part of my relatively small collection of pleasant memories. The things I've seen, the things I've done… he's gone through enough horror in his life without having to experience some of mine too."

"I'd put money on the first thing he learned being how to block thoughts, Buck, other people sensing his and his sensing other people's," Steve said gently.

"Sucker bet," Natasha said. "His teacher was Betsy Braddock."

"Is he good enough to do it twenty four seven?" Bucky asked. "For months at a time?"

Steve folded his arms. "Buck," he said. "You're going past reasons into excuses. If you don't want to do it, just say so."

Bucky gave him a hard, angry look for a moment, before it smoothed away, to be replaced by an expression that was more tired than anything else.

"I'd like to help him, Steve," he said. "I really would."

"Then will you at least think about it?" Thor asked. "We do not have many candidates."

Bucky grimaced. "I'll think about it," he said. "No promises, though."

Thor inclined his head. "Thank you," he said.

OoOoO

After the discussion had ended, Steve and Bucky made their way into one of the main areas of the Mansion, which could be relied upon not to be covered in dust. As they did, Steve studied his friend.

Sometimes it was hard to believe that this was Bucky. He had the same face, most of the same expressions (if you allowed for a certain bitter, cynical twist) and a lot of his mannerisms rang painfully familiar. Others, however, were just that little bit different. There was the way he moved in daily life, for instance, with the cool smoothness of a winter's breeze, or in battle, when that grace took on the speed and bone deep bite of a winter's gale.

The Bucky he had known had been open, warm-hearted and sardonic, more than capable of being ruthless, but equally, more than capable of switching off. This Bucky was permanently switched on, more distant, more observant, eyes always on the move. And those eyes had a kind of focus that Steve had previously only seen in his oldest friend when he was lining up a kill-shot with his rifle.

The Bucky he had known had a limited willingness to simply wait around, to do and say nothing. While not quite as hyperactive as Howard, he always needed to be doing something. Of them all, Peggy was the one who had simply been able to sit in silence and just... be. This Bucky, on the other hand, seemed perfectly content to stand like an ice statue.

If this Bucky reminded him of anyone, it was Natasha. Clint reminded him of the Bucky that had been, with flavourings of the Bucky that was now, but Natasha was the one who seemed to be most like the silent, watchful Bucky he knew now, always choosing her words carefully, even apparently artless chatter serving a purpose.

The reason for this depth of observation was quite simply that the Bucky he had known wouldn't have hesitated to take the job. Well, he amended internally, he would, but only because that would involve leaving Steve to his own devices, something that Bucky seemed constitutionally incapable of doing, for fear that Steve would do something stupid. This was not, Steve had to admit, the most unwarranted of fears. But while he might have grumbled about leaving Steve and about having to prevent another punk kid with too much guts and too few brains from getting himself beaten to pulp, he'd do it happily enough. Now, though… Bucky seemed positively afraid of the prospect.

"I'm not the same man you knew, Steve," Bucky said eventually.

"I know," Steve said.

Bucky smiled faintly. "No," he said gently. "You don't." He cocked his head. "Or at least, you don't know how deep the changes go. And I'm not sure if you ever can."

"Why not?" Steve demanded.

"Steve, you slept through the Cold War, the age of the Red Room and the Winter Soldier," Bucky said. "You even slept through the fallout afterwards. Every experience you have of it is going to be second hand." He looked at Steve. "You know what I'm talking about - when people talk about the War, or the Depression, like they know what they're talking about when they were born decades later." He looked away. "They know the facts. But they don't know what it was like."

Steve grimaced. Bucky was right about that much. "And it's the same for you," he said.

"Worse," Bucky said. "A lot of the stuff about the Depression and the War, that's historical record. The Cold War, though... there are still so many stories that haven't been told. And I was part of a world of secrets and lies, Steve. How can you trust records when you can't even trust your own memories?"

"Have you been having trouble?" Steve began, worried.

Bucky shook his head. "No," he said. "I'm fine. The memories are fine. There's a few from my time as the Soldier that I'm still working on, but mostly they're fine."

"Why would you want to remember those?" Steve asked, tone one of honest enquiry.

Bucky smiled. "The Winter Soldier wasn't just a robot, Steve," he said. "I didn't just wake up one day with a metal arm as a hollow, mindless killing machine, then switch back to being Bucky Barnes. I lived." The smile turned wry. "It wasn't much of a life, being a Soviet murderer and boogeyman, but every now and then... I managed to snatch something for myself. Moments, experiences, feelings that were my own."

"Like for Natasha," Steve said.

Bucky nodded. "In retrospect, she almost reminded me of you," he said. "Neither of you would give up for anything. And I could completely trust her. Completely, without question or reservation."

Steve nodded.

"I'm still your friend, Steve," Bucky said. "I'm still Bucky. But who Bucky is has changed a bit, down the years."

"Yeah," Steve said. "I guess he has." He looked over at one of the Mansion's living rooms, where Harry and Carol were light heartedly bickering about the comparative merits of _Star Wars_ and _Lord of the Rings_ , in between Carol's assertions that Harry was, in fact, basically Luke Skywalker. "He's not the only one, though."

"Yeah, having kids changes people," Bucky said, without looking round or showing any sign that he'd seen Steve do so.

"Especially when those kids turn out decades older than you," Steve sighed. "And have kids of their own. Who then have kids of _their_ own."

"She's a good kid, you know that," Bucky said, a faint hint of reproof in his voice.

"I know," Steve said, rubbing his jaw. He'd had difficulty dealing with it. Some things, after all, took time to sink in. But when she, Pepper, Jane and the rest of the kids had almost died, it had shaken some sense into him. "I get that now. It was just a bit… weird."

"Steve, you're a super soldier with a biological age of about twenty nine who spent seven decades in an iceberg, your best friend is a one armed American war hero and Soviet assassin and you lead a team consisting of two gods, another former Soviet assassin, your best friend's master marksman grandson, a tiny scientist with epic anger management issues and a lunatic billionaire in a rocket powered tin can," Bucky said dryly. "When you take into account her friends; the living lightning bolt, the junior league god, the major league demigod and the Omega Class psychic spontaneously resurrecting major league demigod, a great-granddaughter who's biologically less than a decade and a half younger than you is practically normal."

Steve chuckled wryly. "I guess it is," he said.

"So you're not going to be a self-hating ass about it again, then?" Bucky asked, eyebrow raised.

"No," Steve said.

Bucky grinned, and all of a sudden, it was the Bucky of old. "Good," he said. "Then I'd really have to kick your ass."

"Like you could," Steve scoffed, smiling himself. Some things had changed, sure. But many of those changes were for the better. Besides, not everything had changed. And he could live with that.

OoOoO

In the midst of all this in-depth cogitation, Tony realised something very important: in all the time Harry had been in New York, he had never been sight seeing. And he had very definite plans on where to go first.

"Welcome to the Museum of Natural History's new wing," Tony said. "The Unnatural History Museum."

"Tony," Pepper said reprovingly, rearranging the straps for the baby carrier, while Ada looked around at everything with the sort of solemn, wide eyed look that was common to babies everywhere. "It's not actually called that."

"It should be, though," Tony said. "And they've got so much stuff that they're thinking of moving into a new building with a new wing for the alien stuff. You know, all of the stuff that isn't classified into oblivion."

This was indeed true. The first part was a display called 'New Horizons' and it was full of all sorts of things. First, there were models and replicas of Steve's shield and World War II uniform – apparently the original was in the Captain America exhibition in the Jeffersonian museum in Washington. Along with them were similar replicas of HYDRA uniforms of the era, armoured vehicles and weaponry which, to Harry's surprise, seemed futuristic in comparison to what HYDRA had been wielding only recently, especially in terms of their described capabilities.

"HYDRA's weapons were powered by the Tesseract," Steve explained. "Among other things, it gave them a lot more bang for their buck." He then proceeded to give concise, detailed explanations of each HYDRA weapon and vehicle on display, their strengths and their weaknesses. When it came to the last, however, a large, v-shaped aircraft, with a good couple of dozen of tiny one-seater oval shaped aircraft arranged next to it in the display, he stopped.

As he did, Harry exchanged a worried look with Carol, before making a closer examination of the aircraft itself. It was unlike anything he'd ever seen, all in one smooth shape, with a number of propellers along the back, like a boat, as opposed to along the front like a normal plane. The smaller planes shared this characteristic, except that their rearward propellers were huge by comparison.

"Oh," Carol said quietly, and Harry followed her gaze to the description below.

' _The_ Valkyrie _,'_ he read, _'was the first known stealth bomber. It was the third jet powered aircraft of the war, following the Gloster Meteor and the Messerschmidt 262 into service. However, it was far more advanced, with swept wings, effective radar invisibility, autopilot and the ability to reach hypersonic velocities, and the recovered schematics revolutionised aerospace engineering. A variant on the '_ Amerika Bomber _' concept, it is believed to have been the only one of its kind. Its payload consisted of twenty four single seater flying bombs, which served as auxiliary propulsion in the early stages of flight, before being released over the American mainland to target metropolitan cities from the East Coast to the Midwest. Flown by the leader of HYDRA,_ _Obergruppenführer Johann Schmidt, the so-called 'Red Skull', from HYDRA's final major base of operations, it was intended as a final revenge on the Allies. However, his intentions were thwarted by Captain Steven Rogers, who managed to gain access to the_ Valkyrie _and overpower Schmidt, forcing the plane against the autopilot into a steep dive into the Arctic Ocean, saving tens of millions of lives. Unknown to all, the_ Valkyrie _and Captain Rogers both survived, the cold temperatures putting him into a form of cryogenic suspension until his rediscovery by SHIELD over sixty years later.'_

Steve stared at the display in silence, then said, in an attempt at wry humour, "I guess I don't have to explain this one."

Carol squeezed his hand, while Harry simply nodded and Jean-Paul inclined his head. No more explanation was required, and from his own near-death experiences and how he felt about them, he knew it would be cruel to do so.

Thankfully, Steve gathered himself and moved on, while Harry, Carol and Jean-Paul explored the rest of the exhibit, which included models of various Iron Man armours, multiple Quinjet variants and the SHIELD Helicarrier, a wax replica of a Chitauri, one of their recovered flying machines and far above in the vaulted halls, a replica of a Chitauri Leviathan.

"Until now," Harry said quietly. "I never really got just how big those things were."

"I would have to agree with you, _mon cher_ ," Jean-Paul said, looking a little stunned by it.

"Yeah," Carol said. "Super-sized sushi. We've fought bigger and scarier."

"True," Harry acknowledged. "But I can't say that I'd enjoy fighting that."

"Nor me," Jean-Paul said. "If nothing else, _mes chéris_ , it looks disgusting."

"Fair point, on both counts," Carol said, before spotting a model of the London HYDRA base. "Huh," she said. "Pretty good replica. Except for, you know, all the holes that we made."

"If they added all of those, _ma cherie_ , it would be mostly hole and not much model," Jean-Paul pointed out and smirked at the two of them. "The two of you were… _thorough_."

Both looked a little embarrassed, but only a little. "They had it coming," Harry said tightly.

"Yeah," Carol said. "I mean, that thing was offensive to my artistic sensibilities."

Harry snapped out of his darkening mood and stared at her incredulously. _"What_ artistic sensibilities?"

"Oh, now you're in trouble," Jean-Paul said, sensibly stepping back out of Carol's line of fire as she gave Harry a spectacularly evil glare.

"I," Harry began, then, with unusual perspicacity for a teenager, stopped and thought about what he was saying. "I meant that you don't usually come across an arty person. I mean, you don't draw, paint or write, or anything like that, not as far as I know."

Carol continued glaring at him for a long moment, then wrinkled her nose. "No," she said. "That's Stevie's thing."

"Yeah, I remember Steve sketching a few times," Harry said, after a moment of profound surprise.

This mishap, however, proved an ice breaker, as Carol actually giggled. "Not Steve," she said. "Stevie. My older little brother. He's the arty one in the family." She gave Harry an interested look. "But you know that Steve draws?"

"Yeah," Harry said. "He sketched a picture of me, dad and uncle Loki when we went to sleep on the sofa one day."

Carol blinked. "Huh. You learn something new every day."

"We are in a museum, Carol," Jean-Paul said in the driest of tones. "That is to be expected."

Carol rolled her eyes. "You're an asshole, you know that?" she said, without heat.

"A magnificent one, yes," Jean-Paul said cheerfully. "Harry will agree with me."

Once, Harry would have been flustered and bemused. Now, not so much. "About the learning thing or your belief that your arse is magnificent?" he asked.

"It is worshipped by gods," Jean-Paul said easily. "What more proof do I need? Your support is welcome, of course, but more in the sense of confirming what is already self-evident."

" _A_ god," Harry said. "And Uhtred is the God of… well, actually, I'm not sure what he's god of, if anything, but he's definitely not the God of Arse Appreciation. His 'worship' is not proof."

Carol was now giggling in earnest, though she'd probably have murdered anyone who described it as such.

Jean-Paul sniffed. "Philistines," he said, then smiled wickedly. "Though I will waive your poor taste, Harry," he said. "In light of the fact that you do not have the… _insight_ to appreciate it." The smile turned even wickeder as Harry got a distinct sense of foreboding. "I suspect that as a result, your _appreciation_ would be less focused on me, and more on Carol, _n'est-ce pas?_ "

Harry opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, then closed it once more. Eventually, he said simply, "Carol is my friend. She knows what that means and so do I."

Specifically, it meant that as he had said before, when he had been momentarily dazzled by how she looked in a swimsuit, that whatever else, she was his friend first and foremost.

The resultant smile from Carol spoke volumes, packed as it was with meaning. The smile itself and its warmth nearly set him blushing.

Jean-Paul, however, looked thoughtful, the teasing wickedness abandoned entirely as he scrutinised first Harry, then Carol, and in that scrutiny seemed to see far more than what was on the surface. Then, eventually, he smiled faintly and inclined his head to Harry in a way that was too deep to simply be a nod.

Even for a telepath, Jean-Paul was hard to read, especially if he wanted to be, and he was not giving any clues as to what he was thinking at the moment. But whatever he was thinking, he didn't tease either Harry or Carol, on that subject at least, for the rest of the day.

Instead, he joined them as they examined the rest of the display. Some of them were artefacts that were supposedly at least six thousand years old and had been found all over the world, and while none of them recognised them, Loki did.

"Kree," he remarked. "They came here before Odin's time, when Earth was less closely watched."

"Why?" Harry asked, puzzled.

"Let us merely say that Earth has always been a source of interest for the intergalactic community and leave it at that," Loki replied, and did not go further.

Other artefacts on display included a few deactivated robots of the type that Tony had occasionally referred to as 'Doombots', owing to their presumed creator, Victor Von Doom, ruler of Latveria. No one could prove it, of course, and not for lack of trying. Nor could anyone fathom why they were sent, as they were every now and then. One of the running theories was that Von Doom simply thought it was funny.

After that, they came to two galleries. First was the so-called 'Rogues Gallery', featuring exceptionally realistic models of some of the greatest superhuman threats of the modern era: Johann Schmidt a.k.a. the Red Skull, living up to his name and sneering down at all and sundry, Ivan Vanko a.k.a. Whiplash and both of his armours – first the very basic one with which he had attacked and almost killed Tony at the Monaco GP, then the much more sophisticated one which he had ultimately detonated in an attempt to kill Tony and Rhodey, examples of HYDRA troopers past and present, then a couple of other figures.

"Who the hell are they?" Carol asked.

Harry frowned. "Dad told me about them," he said, pointing to the model of the well-dressed middle aged white man. "That's Count Nefaria – he was a powerful criminal who used to traffic in stolen SHIELD tech, magical artefacts, that sort of thing. He got badly injured when the Avengers broke up one of his operations and apparently he tried to heal himself with an experimental device that had been damaged by magic. It worked, sort of."

"Sort of?"

"It healed him, gave him superpowers, but it did it by turning him into energy," Harry said. "It meant that he had to wear a kind of limiting bracelet or something to keep him in human form. Plus, he was apparently kind of pissed that because he was energy, he didn't have to eat, drink or sleep, and wasn't able to no matter how hard he tried." He shook his head. "Anyway, they wound up fighting in Rome. It was uncle Loki's first major Avengers mission and he managed to break the bracelet and trap Nefaria's energy in a wine bottle."

" _C'est vrai?"_ Jean-Paul asked, eyebrow raised.

Harry nodded and smirked. "Uncle Loki's got a flair for the dramatic," he said.

"I'd never have guessed," Carol drawled. "So who's Roid of the Rovers?"

"The Juggernaut," Harry said. "The result of a magic stone that provides a conduit to an Elder God that likes smashing stuff even more than the Hulk being picked up by a dim-witted thug, in Loki's words. Once the Juggernaut gets going, he's supposed to be unstoppable, even by the Hulk, and he's got the strength to match. Thankfully, though, he's not very bright." His gaze shifted across, taking in models of Baron Zemo with sword in hand, Lucius Malfoy with wand in one hand, cane in the other and a cruel smile on his face and Gravemoss, looking almost as sinister and inhuman in effigy as he had in life.

And then there was another figure. Dressed in black combats, with a black mask and opaque black goggles with hair that flowed out behind, and armed with a sniper rifle, he was unmistakable even before one reached the red star emblazoned on the metal arm: the Winter Soldier.

"I can see why people had nightmares about him now," Carol said, after a long moment.

Harry, though, wasn't looking at the statue of the Winter Soldier. Instead, his blood had run cold as he looked at the last statue in line, apparently out of chronological order, but in relative pride of place.

"Harry?" Carol said, before Jean-Paul lightly touched her arm and shook his head.

It was Loki, garbed as Harry had never previously seen him, in ornate green and gold armour, with a long sharp bladed sceptre with a pale turquoise stone inset and with two rearward curling horns emerging from an open faced golden helm. His expression was one of cool, contemptuous arrogance, though Harry fancied that the sculptor had somehow managed to capture the spark of madness in his eyes.

"Why?" he whispered. Hadn't his uncle proved that he was no longer the person who had invaded New York? Hadn't he proved his willingness to put his life on the line time and time again for the sake of the world, to pay the blood-price for his crimes? Hadn't he at least earned the right not to be inclined with the unrepentant (or in the case of the Winter Soldier, one who almost no one knew to still be alive, let alone repentant) criminals and genocidal monsters?

If the exhibition had been made several years ago, fresh after Loki's invasion, he would of course have understood. But now, after his uncle had almost _died_ fighting to save the world…

"Because I requested it," his uncle's voice said from behind him. Harry turned, to see a bland, entirely ordinary looking middle aged man behind him – his uncle, either under a glamour or in full shapeshifted disguise. The line between the two could be thin.

"Why?" Harry repeated.

"For a number of reasons," Loki said. "Firstly, as an acknowledgement. All the good I have done, and all that I have yet to do, will not erase the damage I did, nor will it restore the lives I took. Secondly, as a reminder to myself of what I was and what infamy I justly earned, a reminder to strive every day to atone and a spur to never forget why I must do so and for what." He gave Harry a very serious look. "I was a monster, nephew, little different from the company my wax replica keeps. My membership of the Avengers was granted because it was accepted that the Avengers were best suited to manage, contain, and if necessary, eliminate me – and don't look like that, Harry. Though by that point in my rehabilitation I was not as far gone as I had been at my worst, I was still an incredible threat, one long steeped in insanity, malice and true evil. If I had relapsed, it might well have been necessary. Steve, Natasha and my brother also argued that I would be far better able to repay the society that I had hurt by working to defeat and eliminate threats like that which I had once been."

"Natasha spoke up for you?" Carol asked, surprised, then blushed at interrupting. "Sorry," she said. "It's just that she doesn't seem like the poster girl for trust."

Loki smiled. "She is not," he said. "However, she had been in a similar position, of having 'red in her ledger', crimes that she wished to atone for. Her stated rationale was that she would much rather have me where she could see me. Clint agreed, though his turn of phrase involved rather more profanity and explicit, rather than implicit, death threats. Specifically, he wanted to be first in line to put an arrow through my skull if I reverted. After what I did to them, I can't blame them – and there are no words that can adequately thank them for the forgiveness that they have granted me."

Harry was shocked, though a large part of him realised that he shouldn't be. While the Avengers were now a happy, if somewhat dysfunctional, family unit – not without their inter-personal issues and squabbles, but steadfastly united against all comers – it stood to reason that they had not always been that way, even before an at first tenuously sane Loki had been added to the mix.

It didn't take a telepath to see that Bruce, Tony and Natasha had all once been poster children for paranoia for varying reasons and still had a very broad streak of it in their natures, and that Clint was a similarly mistrustful loner. Meanwhile, Steve still had visible issues coming to terms with his long sleep in the ice, what he had lost and what had changed, and Harry could only imagine how much worse those had been several years ago. And as for his father… well, he'd probably been the most psychologically stable of the lot, but having his beloved little brother go batshit insane and attempt to take over a world which Thor had come to love out of, apparently, pure spite, had to be have been hard to take – especially since the rest of his newfound comrades all not unreasonably hated said little brother's guts and wouldn't hear a good word about him.

That had all changed with time, of course, but it was naïve to believe that it had been undying friendship and loyalty at first sight. Harry knew that, but to be confronted with the fact of it, as well as the knowledge that at least some of the Avengers had been willing to kill Loki if required… it was a shock.

 _Yeah, I wasn't expecting to hear that either. I mean, wow. It makes sense, but it's not something you think about_

Harry looked up sharply and blinked at Carol, who looked puzzled, then nodded in comprehension.

 _It happened again, didn't it?_ she thought.

 _Yup,_ Harry replied.

Loki raised an eyebrow at the two of them, then cocked his head, eyes briefly going out of focus. "Interesting," he murmured.

"What is?" Harry asked.

"The two of you seem to have formed a psychic connection," Loki said. "The result, I think, of Harry's dabbling in mitigatory psychic care." At Carol's bemused expression, he elaborated, "His actions in helping you with your entirely understandable case of night terrors. In doing so, he would have had to go quite deep into your mind."

Both nodded, as Jean-Paul watched them speculatively.

"I would also imagine that you, Carol, were an active participant in this?" Loki asked, and as Carol looked around at the other museum patrons milling about them, he waved a hand. "I cast a privacy ward. Anyone listening to us will hear meaningless chatter."

Carol bit her lip, then nodded, before sharing a look with Harry. "I kind of wound up getting a look inside Harry's head too," he said.

Loki's eyebrows shot up. "Well," he said. "I think I had better hear all of this."

"I will go," Jean-Paul said.

"No," Harry and Carol said in perfect unison, before exchanging surprised looks.

"You're our friend," Harry said. "We trust you. You can stay."

Jean-Paul stood very still for a moment, then gave Harry another one of those very deep inclinations of his head that were almost, but not quite, bows. _"Merci,"_ he said.

Harry and Carol, speaking in tandem, then explained what had happened all those weeks ago.

When they were done, Loki nodded slowly. "That would definitely explain it," he said. "The full explanation is complicated, but in essence, your minds did not merely connect, but actually mixed somewhat."

"I've heard about this before," Harry said. "Jean discussed it."

"Did she now?" Loki asked. "What did she say?"

"Well," Harry said. "She said that melding minds, even when you know what you're doing, is really risky. You can end up not knowing where one mind begins and the other ends."

Loki raised an eyebrow. "I take it that she was referring to a full meld," he said.

Harry nodded.

"In which case, she is correct," Loki said. "Though the sort of connection you formed was not half as… in-depth, shall we say. Intimate, perhaps, but not a complete mix. It is like when you are baking and you add, say, sugar or flour to the mix, pouring it on top. That is what you did. The two are perhaps mixed somewhat, but they are easily enough separated. The sort of melding Jean described would be more akin to firmly stirring the sugar or flour into the mixture, so that the two are effectively one and rendered inseparable. However, to continue the baking metaphor, the separation leaves behind little bits of each part in the other."

"Wait, are you saying that we've got bits of each other's minds in each other's heads?" Carol asked, eyes wide.

"No," Loki said. "Rather, your minds have a familiarity with one another now, a sense of the other. It is one area in which psionics and magic, in this case, sympathetic magic, are very similar. The way your minds interacted… for want of a better description, they now resonate. In moments of close proximity and especially charged emotions – and I mean _especially_ charged – that connection is liable to reform, if only on a level sufficient to share thoughts. As time goes on, it is likely to strengthen and become fairly constant, so that you can swap thoughts and feelings and communicate as easily as breathing."

"Can it be stopped or undone or something?" Carol asked. "I mean, the mind to mind thing is kind of cool, but it happening without warning and without any control…"

"Not so much," Harry said. "I think we'd both like to be able to make sure that we're alone in our heads every now and then."

"Stopped, yes," Loki said. "Harry has learned how to discipline his thoughts so that none leak out." His expression turned amused as Harry flushed, remembering just how he had done so. "He had ample incentive." He turned back to Carol. "On your end, there are exercises in mental discipline. Alternatively, or in addition, you can have psychic shields installed. Though in all honesty, I am not entirely sure how well either would work. The two of you think rather a lot alike and you are very much in tune with one another – I saw you both in action in London. You are on much the same mental wavelength to begin with."

"Can it be undone?" Harry asked.

"The mental arts are a complex area," Loki said. "Especially in cases like this. Connections can be cut, yes, but the connection here is an effect, not a cause."

"So… we're stuck with it," Carol said.

Loki nodded.

"Sorry," Harry said quietly.

Carol nodded, clearly deep in thought, so Harry turned to his uncle.

"Will this happen with everyone I do more than simply talk mind to mind with?" he asked.

Loki shook his head. "This scenario came about only because of a number of specific circumstances: the fact that the two of you were already close friends, the fact that Carol willingly opened her mind to you, the extraordinarily emotionally charged nature of what you were doing and, to be frank, the fact that you were sloppy." As Harry wilted somewhat, he added kindly, "What you did was both very kind and revealing of a great deal of natural talent. What you did not do, however, was insulate your mental self."

Harry raised a puzzled eyebrow.

"Essentially, when you are going into someone else's mind, you must keep your own sense of self under great control, in order to prevent it from being influenced by the mind you are in," Loki explained. "Therefore you must insulate it."

Harry nodded. "Jean said something like that."

"I am not surprised," Loki said. "She is a wise and well-educated young woman."

Harry nodded, then looked back at Carol and shuffled his feet.

Loki smiled faintly and glanced at Jean-Paul. "I think that is our cue to examine another exhibit and give the two of you a moment or two to discuss this," he said.

"I think that you are right," Jean-Paul said, also smiling.

"The privacy ward will remain," Loki added, as he left.

Both Harry and Carol nodded, then look at each other awkwardly.

"I'm really sorry, Carol," Harry said eventually.

"You did what you thought was right," Carol said with a sigh. "After I accepted your offer to do it. And it really helped." She smiled lopsidedly. "If an occasional psychic connection with my best friend is the price, I'm cool with that."

"Best friend?" Harry asked, startled.

Carol nodded. "You know me better than anyone else does," she said. "Except maybe Uncle Jack. And I'm willing to bet that I know you better than almost anyone." She shrugged. "To be honest, I didn't have many friends to begin with. The girls on the soccer team are cool, and Lex and Jean-Paul are really good friends. But Lex is Lex. We see the world very differently. And Jean-Paul… I love the guy, but I always get the sense that he's holding back. He's a grandmaster of not talking about himself, not about anything that matters, and sometimes it feels like what we see most of the time, the cheeky, flirty camp guy, is just a mask for who he really is. Or at least, it's part of him which he uses to hide the other parts. And there are other parts."

Harry nodded. He knew very well that there were other sides to Jean-Paul. There was a more solemn, serious side that could read people, him especially, like a book. And then… there was another side. A darker, more ruthless side that was capable of killing without batting an eyelid. Harry had seen it a grand total of twice; once briefly when he'd pushed Jean-Paul about his sister, attempting to get her help, and on the second occasion, during the Battle of London – specifically, when they were fighting some of HYDRA's superpowered soldiers. There had only been a stain left when Jean-Paul had finished with his opponent. It hadn't been a very large stain, either.

This wasn't to say that he thought that Jean-Paul's usually wise-cracking, flirting self was simply a mask put on to put others at ease – not entirely, anyway. But he did think that Jean-Paul had a tendency to conceal both his true intellect and some considerable hidden depths.

"Yeah," Carol said, reading his expression. "Anyway, he holds stuff back. Which is fair enough – everyone's got a right to privacy. If he doesn't want to open up, that's his right. Lord knows he has enough reason. But it does kind of disqualify him from the very best friend category. Leaving you. You've been open with me from the start – hell, you've even opened up your brain to me." She smirked. "Even if it was by accident." Her expression sobered. "You know my mind, I know yours, and we're friends. I figure that makes you my best friend."

"I…" Harry began. "I'm flattered."

Carol grinned suddenly. "You should be, skunk-stripe," she said.

"Oh come on, the hair, seriously?"

"Hey, can I help it if you got a magic dye-job?"

"As a result of being possessed by the fragment of an evil Elder God," Harry said.

Carol made a face. "Yeah, that didn't look fun."

"Understatement like that, you could be British," Harry quipped.

"Smart-ass," Carol said, rolling her eyes. "Though technically I am, through great-grandma Peggy. Also, sorry, but my response to near-death experiences is laugh, because it's better than crying. And definitely better than nightmares. And the hair does stand out."

"Yeah," Harry sighed. "I'll just add it to the list of scars and marks left by evil people trying to kill me."

Carol reached over and gave him a brief shoulder hug. "To be fair, though," she said. "It does look kind of cool."

Harry felt that the jury was out on this, so shrugged noncommittally. "There's a fair bit more to see," he said, looking around the exhibit.

"Looks like it," Carol agreed.

Next was the 'Heroes Gallery' which included the entire Avengers roster – including, to Harry's pleasure, Loki, Rhodey as War Machine, the Howling Commandos and Peggy Carter. The last Commando, the so-called 'Spitfire', first of that name, caught the eye because it seemed that the sculptor had been unsure what she looked like. The features were fairly generic Caucasian, average looking, while the eyes couldn't decide if they were blue or green and the short cropped hair couldn't decide whether it was blonde or red, changing as the light hit it. From one angle, somehow, it even looked black. It was a puzzle.

Beside it was a roped off area marked with a sign explaining that there was going to be an expansion, to take into account newer heroes, like MI13's Excalibur squad, Wanda, King T'Challa, and presumably those other members of the Shadow Initiative who had been conclusively identified.

 _You think you're gonna end up on that pedestal?_ Carol asked, mentally for the sake of privacy.

 _I hope not,_ Harry said and sighed. _But the answer's probably going to be yes._ He glanced at her. _You probably will too._

 _Really?_

 _You lit up half of Southern England with a giant Avengers symbol and flew around in a glowing green uniform kicking the shit out of giant monsters. You were pretty hard to miss._

 _Fair point,_ Carol said. _Want a Slurpie?_

 _What's a Slurpie?_

Carol grabbed his arm. _Part of American culture 101. Follow me._

 _I kind of have to. I'm rather attached to my arm and I like to think that it's rather attached to me._

OoOoO

All arms remained attached to their owners as they bought Slurpies, Harry paying by the simple expedient of putting the cash down for both before Carol could and the two of them getting a good-natured smile from the cashier. Said cashier, judging by overflowing thoughts that Harry couldn't avoid picking up, had Harry erroneously pegged as Carol's earnestly chivalrous exchange student boyfriend. Carol, naturally, enquired at his funny expression, then nearly laughed herself sick when he reluctantly explained.

"She has no idea how much weirder the truth is," she said.

"She doesn't?"

"Sure. Exchange student couple, that's fairly normal. Psychically connected best friends with superpowers, not so much."

"Good point," Harry said. "You know, sometimes I wish I was normal."

"Take it from me, Harry, normality is over-rated."

"Since when were you normal?" Harry asked, smirking.

Carol rolled her eyes heavenwards. "Someone, somewhere, once made the horrible mistake of telling you that you were funny," she said. "I don't know who they are, but right now, I'd like to know, just so I have someone to blame."

"Try Tony," a voice said. "Most things are his fault, so it's a safe bet."

Both of them turned to see Clint, wearing baseball cap and sunglasses to go unnoticed at a casual glance, who grinned. "Hey kids," he said. "The others are looking for you. Well, since I've got the best eyes, I was picked to do the looking and they're just sitting around and doing nothing." He paused. "Well, actually, Tony's trying to change Ada's diaper and demanding a Hazmat suit, but the rest of them aren't doing much."

"Oh," Harry said, a little guiltily. "Is it time to go? Have we been holding you up?"

Clint's grin widened. "No," he said. "And not exactly." He lowered his voice. "There's something that's not on display to the general public for you to see."

OoOoO

"You know," Carol said slowly. "When Clint said 'not on display to the general public', I was thinking a couple of bits of more valuable memorabilia, like an actual HYDRA tank or something. This… is a bit more than that."

"Just a bit," Harry agreed.

" _Mais oui."_

Pepper smiled, gently bouncing on her toes to rock Ada to sleep. "This is a new part of the Museum," she said. "It deals with magic and magical creatures and it's been in the works for a while."

"Part of my atonement has been to examine and identify magical artefacts," Loki said. "Sifting what is magical from the non-magical and removing what is too dangerous for public display."

Pepper nodded. "At the moment, it's shut off – the Museum trustees are waiting for the right moment to open it up," she said.

"When will that be?" Harry asked.

"When it is believed that people have adjusted to the introduction of superhumans, aliens and gods into their lives," Pepper replied.

"So, you know, basically never," Tony said. "Even though Red Sky Day meant that there were demons crawling out of the woodwork."

"Denial is a powerful force," Thor said.

"What if someone sneaks in?" Harry asked. They had been let in through an apparently not especially tough door. "Or if someone talks about it."

"The door is concealed by magic, so no one can just wander in," Pepper said. "And if someone blabs, then I wish them the best of luck trying to talk people into walking through an invisible door. There are other security measures too, of course." She smiled. "Have fun."

And they did, the kids leading the way into the eerily quiet display. One, however, quickly caught their eye: specifically, that of several dragon skeletons hanging from the roof.

"So," Carol said, staring up at the huge skeletons and idly slurping on her aptly named Slurpie. "Lemme get this straight: these things are real and live on Earth. Not temporarily, like escaping from some hell dimension, but actually live on Earth."

"Yup," Harry said.

"So we're basically living in a combo of _Jurassic Park_ and _Lord of the Rings_ and no one's really noticed."

Harry thought about it. "Well… yes, I suppose."

" _Dieu merci_ _,"_ Jean-Paul murmured.

"Wow," Carol said. "Okay, that's a whole new level of oblivious."

"Well, part of it is that people don't want to believe," Harry said. "Would someone believe you if you started talking about dragons?"

"More likely than you'd think these days, but point taken," Carol said. "Still…"

"You'd be amazed at what people are capable of ignoring," Harry said.

"Sad thing is, I'm not sure I would."

Harry conceded this with a nod. "Another part is that people can use magic to keep non-magical people away from dragons and, apparently, the dragons are on reservations," he said, then added, "My friend Ron, his older brother looks after dragons on a reserve in Romania."

Jean-Paul let out an impressed whistle.

"Sounds like a cool job," Carol said.

"Yeah," Harry said. "The less cool part is that there are spells to erase memories, in case someone stumbles on something they shouldn't."

Carol shivered. "Definitely not cool," she said.

"Yes," Jean-Paul said, expression grim. "Very definitely not. Though I can understand why."

"You can?" Carol asked.

"If you look at history, Carol, those who are different, especially those believed to have magic, have not always been treated well," Jean-Paul said. "Fear is a powerful motivation; on both sides."

Carol wrinkled her nose, but nodded.

They then moved on to the rest of the exhibition. It was extensive to put it mildly. There were skeletons and models of vampires of the Red Court, Grey Court and the Black Court, and stuffed specimens of Hippogryffs, Griffins and winged Horses, among many others. There were giant, troll and ogre skeleton that dwarfed the other exhibits, including skeletons identified as Sidhe, Sylphs and Goblins.

Then, Harry stopped in front of a display and frowned. It consisted of a mannequin in close-fitting silver scale armour, sort of like the sort that covered his father's arms. But that wasn't what caught his eye. No, the pair of giant metal wings did that, being around twenty feet across.

"Whoa… is that some kind of ceremonial armour?" Carol asked, in that special hushed voice people reserve for museums and places of worship.

"I'm not sure that it is," Harry said. "In fact, I'm pretty sure I've seen it before. The wings, I mean."

"You know a guy with metal wings," Carol said. "Of course you do."

"You do too," Harry said.

"Since when?"

"It does look familiar," Jean-Paul remarked thoughtfully.

"Well, you didn't meet him," Harry said. "But you both probably saw him at that thing in London…"

Carol gave this some thought, idly sucking at her straw. "I was mostly dealing with the fact that I'd just gone god-size, but yeah, I think I know who you mean," she said eventually. "He was hot."

"Very," Jean-Paul said, with a certain tone of satisfaction.

Harry rolled his eyes slightly and nodded. "Well, his wings were originally feathery," he said. "But his dad injected him with a mutation suppression serum. Basically, it was meant to make his wings fall off."

Carol's eyes widened and she bit through her straw. "What? _Why?_ " she asked loudly, before wincing and repeating herself in a hushed, harsh voice. "I mean," she added. "Wings are freaking awesome."

"His dad didn't think so," Harry said grimly. "I think he was about ten."

Carol's left eye start twitching and her coke can crumpled under her grip, sugary liquid going everywhere. Jean-Paul simply turned into a statue of cold marble, expression not giving anything away.

"Carol. Eggs, remember?" Harry said pointedly and Carol took a deep breath, releasing the somewhat crushed can and grimacing at the mess.

"Right. Carry on."

Harry nodded. "The serum didn't make them fall off. In fact, it nearly killed him It took a bit of tweaking by Doctor McCoy and someone else called Doctor MacTaggert to save him, but instead, it turned them into, well… those, basically," he said. "Which kind of makes his life miserable because they can cut through pretty anything like that." He snapped his fingers for emphasis. "It's how he tore through HYDRA's aerial assault on my school. It's also why he broke up with Jean."

"Wait, _he's_ Jean's ex? The unbelievably hot total dumbass? The one who broke up with her because of his issues?" Carol asked, eyes wide.

"Yup."

Carol shook her head. "Man, he's an idiot," she said. "Jean is smart, lovely and totally gorgeous. Seriously, I'm not even into ladies and I think Jean is smoking hot. No offence," she added. "I mean, I know she's your cousin and all. Could be a bit weird."

"None taken," Harry said, tone slightly dreamy as he went to a mental happy place. "None whatsoever."

Carol rolled her eyes. "Of course not. I should have known.

"Sorry," Harry said, rubbing his hair awkwardly.

"You're just being a guy," she said, shrugging.

Jean-Paul cocked an eyebrow. "And what were you being when you catapulted out of bed over possible shirtless photos of Colonel Rhodes, _ma cherie?_ " he asked.

Carol glowered.

"Or going on about Clint's arms," Harry said. "To my godmother."

Carol went pink and glowered at him. Harry raised the other eyebrow. She looked between the two of them. Then, after a long moment, she grumbled, "Touché."

Harry nodded, wisely refraining from smirking. "I don't even want to know what you've thought about me in the past," he said, trying to ignore the fact that he was, in fact, a bit curious.

Now it was Carol's turn to raise an eyebrow. "Who said that I had?" she asked.

"No one," Harry said. He looked awkward. "I don't go looking, but… empathy _is_ part of the telepathic package, you know."

"Oh?" Carol asked, then went red as this sunk in. "Oh. _Oh._ "

"Yeah," Harry said, coughing.

Carol looked at him, expression awkward. "Why are we even talking about this?"

"I don't know," Harry said, tone every bit as awkward.

"We should stop."

"Yes, yes we should."

There was a gust of wind.

"Please don't," Jean-Paul said, amused as his hand reached into a box of popcorn. "It was just getting interesting."

There was a long pause at the sheer incongruity of this. The three shared a look. Then, for lack of any better option, they all started laughing.

OoOoO

This amusement too passed, however, and they resumed their perusal of the exhibition.

There were any number of magical artefacts, including cauldrons, broomsticks of varying vintages and old, disused wands through the ages. Some of them, Harry didn't recognise the purpose of straight off: pelts, musical instruments and other artefacts used in ritual magic, including a belt that looked to Harry to be made of wolf fur.

However, if his namesake, Harry Dresden, had been present, he would have immediately identified it as a replica of that of a _Hexenwulf_ , something halfway between an Animagus and a werewolf – it allowed a seamless transformation into a giant wolf, one out of primordial nightmares, while retaining one's own mind and being able to transform back and forth as one wished thanks to the monstrous spirit of rage bound within the belt. Side effects included addiction, hyper-violence and generalised degeneration into frothing insanity.

So all in all, it was probably better that Harry didn't recognise it. He had more than enough nightmares to deal with already.

And then there was one thing which Harry didn't recognise at all, a glyph carved with laser precision on a chunk of rock. Nowadays he could recognise a number of scripts and pictograms on sight, if not actually read them, thanks to his uncle's teaching. But this was one that he had never seen before and when Carol asked, he said so.

"Well, it looks kind of like an 's'," she said. "Inside an upside down triangle that's had the top tips cut off."

"Or a diamond," Jean-Paul said.

"Right."

"I wonder what it means," Harry murmured to himself. _Uncle?_ He thought at Loki.

 _Yes?_

 _What does this mean?_ Harry asked, thinking the image at him.

There was a moment of silence from Loki's end, then a sad mental sigh. _Hope. It means 'hope'._

 _Well,_ Harry thought, mostly to himself. _I think now's a good time for a bit of that._

 _Yeah?_ Carol asked, with a mental raised eyebrow. _What are you hoping for, bucko?_

 _What am I hoping for?_ Harry asked, adding Jean-Paul to the mental conversation and exclude his uncle. _The usual: world peace, good weather, a year to go by at school without someone trying to murder me._

 _You have the weirdest life, I swear to god._

 _I'd agree with that,_ Harry said. _But I'm still figuring out who to swear to. Or possibly at._

 _I am sure you will figure something out,_ Jean-Paul replied. _You usually do._

 **Well, I hope that wasn't too heavy handed an ending to the chapter, but I felt it was amusing and appropriate. I too think that now is a good time for hope, though in my case, it primarily boils down to 'please don't let 2017 be as bad or worse than the turd of a year that 2016 turned out to be.' Happy New Year, one and all.**


	6. Chapter 6: Meet the Family

**Aaand I'm back again. Sorry for the wait, but real life intervened. I am also sorry to say that I'm pushing the start of** _ **Forever Red**_ **back another chapter after I realised that kicking it off this chapter would require a chapter approximately 30,000 words long. At least. A bit much, even for me. Also, I wanted to publish another chapter this month.**

 **In any case, this is… well, it's not quite filler, since there's a fair bit of character development in here. In fact, if I had to say what this chapter was about, I would say that it was about family, warts and all.**

 _ **Before we get started, I would like to dedicate this chapter to the late, great, Sir John Hurt. A character of unsurpassed brilliance, he brought Mister Ollivander, the Great Dragon, the War Doctor and so many others, so, so many others, to life on our screens. He will be well remembered and sorely missed.**_

The rest of the summer continued in this pleasantly quiet vein, which in turn was a nice change for Harry, who had previously been caught between Hogwarts – which he loved, but which could hardly be called quiet – and the Privet Drive. In fact, a large part of him didn't want it to end.

Then came the visit from some of the people who would, if they had had their way, ensured that his every Summer, his every holiday, had been like that from the moment they had met him. Their names were John and Elaine Grey, parents of Jean Grey, and thus among Harry's extended family.

Normally, Jean would have gone home to stay with them. However, this summer it had been decided that she would stay at the Institute to get a handle on her sudden and vast increase in raw power and, of course, remain in reasonable distance of her newly rediscovered baby cousin. And naturally, he was the immediate subject of discussion.

This was something that was calculated to make Harry, said newly rediscovered baby cousin, a bit nervous. His father had offered to be present, but Harry had turned the offer down, figuring that it was going to be complicated and emotionally fraught enough as it was.

So Harry, as he waited in the lobby of the Xavier Institute with Jean, was left feeling very nervous, tensing every time someone opened the door – something that got what seemed to be a sympathetic grimace from Logan, one of the Institute's teachers (when Harry asked exactly what he taught, the deadpan answer was, "art." Harry, who had a pretty good idea of what he really taught, accepted the answer and returned to mildly panicking) who also happened to be a former World War II colleague of Steve, Bucky and Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall. Jean assured him that Logan was, in fact, a total pussy cat. Harry remained sceptical.

In any case, his main worry wasn't Logan. It was this: what if they didn't remember him? While the telepathic influence of the mysterious person behind Harry's remaining at Privet Drive had faded with time, neither Jean nor Harry had been entirely certain of whether it would do so as quickly in non-psychics.

So, when the Greys walked in, Harry honestly didn't know what to expect of this fairly average looking couple, Mister John Grey – or rather, Professor John Grey, since he was a History Professor – who had greying dark hair, a moustache and the family's signature green eyes, and his wife, who had cinnamon coloured hair that was also steadily going grey, and brown eyes.

Both of them looked delighted to see Jean, and immediately greeted her with hugs and kisses, while Harry waited, patient and nervous.

Eventually, Jean stepped back and gestured to Harry. "Mom, dad," she said. "You remember Harry." There was more than a hint of a question in her voice. Harry was not the only one worried that they might not remember.

However, their worries were for naught, as Jean's mother, damp eyed, immediately pulled Harry into a tight hug as her father said, "Of course we do."

After the immediate greeting, they all moved into the kitchen to get a cup of coffee or, in Jean and Harry's case, tea and the discussion moved on to awkward, stilted small talk. After all, what do you say to the first cousin once removed who you only just remembered thanks to an evil telepath, who is now double the age you last saw him at and has, it could be said, changed quite a bit?

In fact, considering that since he was 7, Harry had discovered that he had magical abilities, that he was a demigod and then that he was a psychic, all while running the gauntlet of any number of deadly threats – though the Greys weren't quite so aware of that and Harry wasn't disposed to discuss it.

More to the point, back when John and Elaine had last seen him, Harry had been a tiny, skinny and bespectacled scrap of humanity always on the look out for the next blow from his much bigger and stronger cousin or torrent of verbal abuse from his guardians. Now, he'd grown half his height again, dropped the glasses, put on a considerable amount of lean muscle. In short, he now looked like someone who, if pushed, would push back hard. And while many of Harry's more interesting exploits hadn't made it into public knowledge, his confrontation with a HYDRA assault team in New York a matter of days before the Battle of London had been shown far and wide, before the fall of HYDRA stole the show.

Needless to say, after the initial delight at the reunion, awkward rather understated it.

"Jeannie tells us that there was some kind of telepath preventing us from remembering you," John said. "Still, I feel that –"

"You don't need to apologise, Mr Grey," Harry said, inwardly noting the fact that he was more comfortable talking about mental manipulation than making small talk and wondering what the hell that said about him and his life. "I've seen what bad telepaths can do, even to people with experience of psychic attacks and, you know, actual psychic powers. Some of it very recently. You had no way of stopping him and no way of remembering." He shook his head. "He messed with a lot of people, not just you."

John reluctantly nodded.

"Well," Elaine said carefully. "If you don't mind me asking, why did your uncle not intervene? I mean, the news said that your father had his memory wiped, though it wasn't clear why…"

"Mum's murder and his own drove him insane," Harry said. "Berserker insane. My father's powerful enough to break planets normally, when he really cuts loose, and the Warrior's Madness makes him a lot stronger. He could have destroyed Earth. As for uncle Loki…" He sighed. "He wanted to. But my grandfather, Odin, wouldn't let him. There were a lot of complicated reasons behind that. For starters, he's five thousand years old, so a decade is like a month to him, if that. There was other stuff, too, and… I think granddad felt that I was safer there." He waved a hand. "I've come to terms with it."

This wasn't exactly an answer calculated to reassure the Greys, but they reluctantly accepted it and the conversation moved back on to lighter topics.

"Jean says that you two have been teaching each other about your powers," John said. "But, forgive me, Jean's been learning about her powers for a decade now - and you only got yours relatively recently, is that right?"

Harry nodded. "Believe me, I was pretty surprised by the idea that I might have something to teach Jean," he said. "And I've been doing far more learning than I have teaching. But…" He half shrugged. "As you say, Jean's had her powers for ten years. I only got mine a few months ago. And thing is, when I got mine, I got them all at once, whereas Jean was taught about her powers as they developed."

"And like I told you, mom, dad, my powers recently took a massive leap," Jean said. "And since they're now so much stronger, well." She smiled self-deprecatingly. "You know that I've got a temper."

"Us and the rest of New York state," Elaine said, with a smile.

Jean blushed. "Anyway," she said, a little embarrassed. "Harry had similar problems."

"The temper seems to run in the family," Harry said dryly. "Both sides of the family, in my case. And…" His expression closed off as the Pensieve Incident replayed itself in glorious high definition. "I was already having problems controlling my powers. People got hurt."

Jean laid her hand on his. "Harry's nearly as strong as I am now," she said. "And definitely much stronger than I was before my powers jumped." Her expression turned wry. "Or, according to Doctor Strange, before I figured out how strong I really was."

"Doctor who?" Elaine asked, bemused. Harry felt that he deserved a medal for maintaining his poker face.

 _Yes, please don't laugh,_ Jean said, tone amused. _My parents are confused enough as it is._ She looked at him. _You want to take this? You know Strange better than I do._

Harry nodded and said, "Doctor Strange is the Sorcerer Supreme. Basically, he's the most powerful mage on the planet and Earth's first line of magical defence against the really bad stuff. He also knows a lot. He's a time traveller and dad thinks he might also be able to tell the future. Almost never, anyway. He's… he's a good guy, but he's definitely not a nice guy. He uses people."

"And you trust him?" Elaine asked, incredulous.

"He never lies," Harry said. "Though he isn't exactly honest, either. And I know why he does what he does, how he sees the world – and I mean actually sees it, not his worldview. I don't like what he does, but I understand it."

"Forgive me for bringing this up, Harry, but if he knows so much, why didn't he see this evil telepath coming and make arrangements?" John asked.

"Dad asked him about that," Harry said. "Quite pointedly."

"I'll bet," John muttered. "What did he say?"

"He said that putting me with you would allow him access not just to me, but to Jean too," Harry said. "He also said that the telepath can dodge his tracking. Which is… kind of scary, actually."

"You never mentioned this," Jean said, frowning.

"It never came up," Harry said apologetically.

"Will this telepath come for you, or for Jean?" John asked.

"Probably not for Jean," Harry said. "He probably hasn't bothered her because of Professor Xavier. Now? Whoever he is, Jean would probably send him running." His lips twisted into a dark, grim smile. "And me? Honestly, I hope he tries."

The Greys shared an uncomfortable look. "Well, I hope he doesn't," Elaine said.

"I've gone mind to mind with worse and won," Harry said.

There was a moment of silence.

"That wasn't what mom meant, Harry," Jean said gently. _She doesn't doubt that you're strong,_ she added, then paused. _Well, maybe she hasn't worked out just how strong either of us is – and I hope she never has to find out. But she's still worried about you._ Her mental tone turned wryly amused. _Also, I'm not sure how well the announcement that you've got 12 psychic rounds with serious bad guys will go down._

Harry blinked. "Oh," he said, blushing as he self-consciously rubbed the back of his head. "Uh. Sorry about that, Mrs Grey. My temper got the better of me."

Elaine smiled. "It's nothing," she said. "You should have seen Jean when she got angry."

"I wasn't that bad," Jean said defensively.

Her father waggled a hand sceptically, and grinned at his daughter's scowl.

Jean rolled her eyes at him, then said, "Anyway, when Harry has moments like just now, there's no sign of his powers. If I had a moment like that back at the start of the summer… well, the rest of you would probably have headaches from the psychic feedback as my powers seeped out. Harry taught me how to prevent that. Most of the time."

"Basically, repress really, really hard," Harry said dryly. "And in the mean tim, Jean taught me pretty much everything else."

"Which he picked up about ten times faster than I ever did," Jean mock-grumbled. "Particularly telekinesis."

"I'm older than you were," Harry said. "I had a lot of catching up to do. And I already knew the basics." Then, he gave her a winning smile. "Besides, it helps that I had great teacher."

Jean laughed. "Flatterer," she said, affectionately ruffling his hair.

"You know, I have a hard enough time getting it to neaten up to begin with," Harry said.

"Harry," Jean said. "Your hair is never neat. And besides, it looks cute."

Harry went pink, then went red when he saw that the Greys were watching with looks that could only be described as fond amusement.

Jean looked up and went red herself. "Sorry," she said, Harry nodding an abashed affirmative.

Elaine snorted. "You two have nothing to be sorry for," she said. "It's wonderful to see you both getting along." She sighed. "If only…"

There was long moment as everyone around the table considered what might have been.

"It wasn't," Harry said, a touch sadly. "I'd have liked to have a family – before I found out my dad wasn't dead, I mean. It was all I wanted. I don't want to dwell on what could have been, though, but be happy with what I have now. And I'm glad that you're family, that I can get to know you, now." He paused. "I'm not sure if that makes much sense."

All three members of the Grey family laughed.

"It does to us, Harry," Jean said, slipping an arm around him and pulling him into a hug, kissing him chastely on the cheek. Harry, naturally, went red again. "And we're glad that you're family now too."

"We definitely are," John said.

"Definitely," Elaine agreed. "And we'd love to get to know you. So would the rest of the family."

"Sara might find it a little awkward, though," Jean said, amused. "Considering that she's got a crush on Thor."

"Definitely awkward," Harry said, before adding sardonically, "Thanks for that."

"My pleasure," Jean said, smirking slightly. Not many knew that the straight-laced, well-behaved and high-achieving Jean Grey had an occasionally wicked sense of humour. It was, Harry supposed, rather like the Spanish Inquisition – unexpected, and all the more effective for it.

OoOoO

This was not the only long overdue familial meeting to come to pass. This one, though, was arranged by Tony.

Growing up, he hadn't had much in the way of family. There was his father, who was often distant, his mother, who was loving but frequently busy – and unknown to Tony, Professor Xavier's agent against the Hellfire Club, whose marriage to Howard was largely one of convenience (something that Tony _did_ know). And that was pretty much it, as far as biological relatives went.

But he'd also had his godfather, Charles Xavier, and his pseudo-aunt, Alison Carter – who'd been close to the Stark family from birth, with Howard Stark having been one of the few to know the secret of her ancestry and her _de facto_ godfather. As a result of that and the fact that she'd also been involved with SHIELD before Tony was born, she had often been around, always having a kind smile, a hug and a handful of sweets for the younger Stark.

Therefore, it was only natural that Tony would invite her to meet the newest Stark baby.

When Steve first saw his daughter, from the corner of the corridor leading to the stairs that led into the entrance hall, it was like being punched in the stomach. Carol had been enough of a shock, but he'd met her before he'd known that they were related, and that relationship was at something of a remove. The woman before him, though, she was his _daughter_ , blood of his blood and bone of his bone. And naturally, that knowledge fully informed his first impressions.

She was tall, like her son and her younger granddaughter – Sharon Carter, a.k.a. Agent 13, was closer in height and build to her great-grandmother, Peggy, being average height for a woman and stockier built. Her eyes and hair were the exact same shades of blue and gold that he saw in the mirror every morning. She had the muscles of a trained fighter who kept themselves in shape, softened only a little by motherhood and retired life, and she moved with the kind of unconscious smoothness and grace that Steve had begun to recognise as indicative of a super soldier or someone similarly all-round enhanced, such as Bucky, Natasha, Sif, Fandral, Loki and even Thor. Though other cases, such as Carol, Harry, and very occasionally Diana, that grace was occasionally somewhat undermined by the fact that like puppies with paws too large for them, the people in question hadn't quite adjusted to the new length and strength of their limbs. Age had reduced neither, he noticed – indeed, for a woman in her sixties, she looked closer to her late forties.

Her eyes also bore watching, automatically sweeping and assessing the room and everyone in it in a fashion he'd first seen in Peggy. It was only natural, he supposed, that she'd teach her – _their_ – daughter everything she knew.

And that was far from the only way in which she was Peggy's daughter. While she most obviously resembled him, a closer examination revealed a definite resemblance to the incredible woman that he had loved and lost. The bone structure, including the strong jaw that all her descendants seemed to have inherited too, was a dead ringer for Peggy, especially in profile. She had the same lips and porcelain complexion too, though she had the Rogers nose. She was also, going by his own memories of his mother, a little stockier than his side of the family, like Peggy, though not so much as Sharon was.

It was also clear that she had her mother's sense of style and class. While Steve could hardly claim that he was up to speed on male fashion, let alone female fashion, Pepper and Natasha were good barometers for such things, and insofar as he could tell, his daughter was impeccably dressed and made up, while simultaneously looking like she could beat you to death without turning a hair.

All in all, while most people might immediately focus on her resemblance to him, in Steve's eyes, right down to her mannerisms and the way she moved, she was so like Peggy that it hurt.

"Hello, Tony," she said warmly, her accent a mixture of Peggy's upper class English overlaid by a lifetime predominantly lived in the environs of New York, kissing him on both cheeks. "How are you? Fatherhood seems to be agreeing with you."

"Well, one thing I have found is that having a baby means that means I'm exhausted pretty much all the time and that I can't just lock myself in my lab and let my brain run wild to power on through, so I'm actually getting more sleep than usual," Tony said, then scrutinised her. "You're looking pretty good yourself, Aunt Ali," he said. "So good that people are going to stop believing you about your age. I'm telling you, these days SHIELD have these masks that can imitate faces perfectly, and anything they can do, I can do better."

"Tony," Alison said, in a tone that said that this was an argument that they had had many times before.

"It'll save you so much time in the mornings," Tony said, wheedling.

"You know that I don't like the idea of going out with my face behind a mask," Alison said. "Besides, the face isn't the only place that shows ageing."

"I so don't want to know," Tony said, sounding very much like a grossed out teenager.

Alison rolled her eyes, for a moment looking exactly like Carol. "You're worse than your father," she complained.

"I know," Tony said glibly. "My back-up plan if the arc reactor I've worked in to the Mansion's power systems ever fails is to power everything through the rotary motion of dad spinning in his grave."

Steve felt a brief stab of pain. He had come to realise over the years that the Howard Stark he had known and the Howard Stark that Tony had known were two very different people. While Howard as Steve had known had achieved that rare feat of being both a great and a good man, and a true friend to boot, he had never had many real friends and it was palpably obvious that Steve's presumed death had hit him hard, Peggy's all the more so.

Both events had changed him, leaving a distant and closed off man in place of the open and exuberant one that Steve had known. As much as it pained him to admit it, Howard had been a poor and neglectful father to Tony, leaving psychological scars that were still very much apparent. And even though he understood it, it was still hard to hear Tony disparage his father when he was certain that the Howard he had known and the Tony he knew would have got along famously. He smiled briefly at the thought of the two of them working together, then and now. The amount of mayhem caused in either time would have risen exponentially.

"Tony," Alison said reprovingly. "What I _meant_ was things like hands," she said, raising one. It was, Steve noted vaguely, a young woman's hand. "I can get away without liver spots for another year or two, maybe. If I start putting on a mask every morning, I'll forget about little details. And…"

"'It's the little details that matter,'" Tony said, with the air of someone repeating something learned by rote, then grimaced. "Yeah, yeah, I know. It's just kind of disconcerting that under the makeup, you're starting to look younger than I do."

That gave Steve a shock as Ali sighed sadly. But when he looked closely, using every bit of his knowledge as an artist, as a former member of the USO (which had left him with an excellent grounding in the use and abuse of makeup) and his enhanced eyesight, he could see through the cleverly applied makeup, the fake crow's feet and the artful deepening of lines around her mouth, to the face of a woman who looked barely an older than he did.

"I know," she said. "As every year goes by, I get a better idea of what my father went through when he was removed from the ice. Though unlike him, for me it's happening in slow motion."

"Wait, you know that Captain America is your dad?" Tony asked, eyebrow raised.

Alison matched him, her dryly amused expression the very image of Peggy's. "Darling," she said. "I can comfortably bench press any of those fancy sports cars you own, I've never been ill, I haven't aged since my late twenties, I was born in 1945 and my 'sister' was twenty five years older than me and most famous, unfortunately, for being Captain America's lost love – and speaking of whom, I happen to look rather a lot like him. It really wasn't that difficult to figure out. In any case," she added. "Mum told me when I was eight."

"She did?" Tony asked, surprised.

"Yes," Alison said. "Though she didn't want to. My being kidnapped by the Red Room and their alien allies explicitly for the serum in my blood rather forced her hand."

Tony stared at her, apparently as stunned as Steve was, and Alison grinned.

"I haven't told you all my secrets, Tony, darling," she said.

"I can see that," Tony managed.

"I presume that you figured it out after Carol was briefly enhanced by a rather powerful magical being, along with some of her friends," Alison said. "And it stuck." At Tony's expression, she smiled faintly. "I have my sources.

Tony narrowed his eyes. "You're supposed to be retired," he said, tone faintly accusing.

"The main reason I retired was my age," Alison said. "Specifically, how it wasn't showing it. And even though I had retired from field ops, the wrong people were starting to take an interest in that fact – something made all the more disquieting in retrospect by the fact that most of them turned out to be HYDRA Agents. One of them was Alexander Pierce, a snake of a man if there ever was one. He was preparing his protégé, the then Agent Nicholas Fury, to assume the Directorship and since I was one of the other candidates, he was watching me carefully. I decided to settle into a more sedentary semi-retired role, mentoring Fury, before retiring in full once he took the role, and sooner rather than later, Pierce's gaze turned away." She waved a hand. "Besides, retirement is boring."

"You think that you're going to get back into SHIELD?" Tony asked. "I mean, after or during the big clean-up?"

"I'm considering it," Alison said. "But that's quite enough talking shop. You, Anthony Edward Stark, have a baby to introduce to me."

"Why did you have to full name me?" Tony whined.

"Because it's a reliable method making you pay attention," Alison said tartly. "One of very few, and one of even fewer that I care to use. Now, chop-chop."

And remarkably, Tony did as bade.

OoOoO

It wasn't long before Alison was gently taking Ada from her mother's arms. "Oh, she is _beautiful_ ," she said, cradling the baby with an ease born of long practise. She smiled at Tony and Pepper. "You know, she actually looks quite a lot like you did back then."

"Then I hope she grows out of it," Tony said. "Because I can't imagine that this beard would look good on a girl."

"Loki said that half the dwarves you were working with in Asgard a couple of years ago were women," Pepper said.

Tony pulled a pained expression. "Pepper, those dwarf guys – people – were cool, but I don't want my daughter to turn into an ambulatory beard," he said.

"But you would love her anyway if she did," Pepper said. It wasn't a question.

"Of course," Tony said indignantly. "I just think that it would be drastically unfortunate if she did, considering how hot we both are."

Alison chuckled. "In some ways, Tony, you have changed so much," she said. "For the better, I might add. In others, though, you haven't changed in the slightest and I hope that you never do."

"Don't worry, Aunt Ali," Tony said. "I'm never going to stop being awesome. If I do, I'll have Pepper to answer to."

"Yes," Pepper said, with raised eyebrows and mild amusement. "You will."

Alison smiled and shook her head slightly, before turning to Pepper. "How is she sleeping?" she asked.

From there, the conversation shifted in to how Tony and Pepper intended to balance work and childcare – since Pepper was usually at work and likely to be on business trips as soon as her maternity leave ended and Tony usually worked from home, he'd be doing the bulk of it. However, it was also accepted that Tony usually wound up being distracted for hours at a time.

"There's no shortage of potential babysitters, of course," Pepper said. "Including her four godparents. But the thing is, all of them might get called away at any moment. So we're still working on choosing a nanny."

Alison nodded. "I completely understand," she said. "It's something you have to do carefully – luckily, Roger, my late husband, was more than happy to handle childcare at first and SHIELD was developing a day-care."

"SHIELD _daycare?_ " Tony asked incredulously. "What were the people in charge of it called, Agents of D.I.A.P.E.R?"

Alison burst out laughing. "No," she said. "No, they weren't." She shook her head. "Anyway, if you want, I can reach out. There's a few people I trust, some of them ex-SHIELD or their relatives, who might be able to help."

"Thank you," Pepper said. "Though I think we'll manage for the time being."

"Yeah," Tony said, frowning faintly.

"Tony?" Pepper asked.

"He's wondering where my father is," Alison said.

"Yeah, he should be here," Tony said, frown deepening.

"Oh, he is," Alison said, looking deeply amused. "He was in the corridor on the level above in the entrance hall, watching me like a little boy hoping to catch a glimpse of Father Christmas."

The sheer mental image sent Tony into hysterics and even Pepper started giggling. Ada, too young to understand the joke, nevertheless joined in.

As soon as the laughter died down, Alison raised her voice. "You two can stop skulking out there now," she said.

There was a moment of silence, then, reluctantly, Carol sidled in, followed by Steve, both of them looking like children caught red-handed up to their elbows in the sweets jar. In Steve's case, this was mixed with an intense sense of bemusement at the sheer situation.

Alison handed Ada off to Tony, then folded her arm and said, in faux stern tones, "What's this? My granddaughter hiding when I come to call?"

Carol shuffled her feet. "I," she began, then stopped and looked at Steve.

"You saw him staring at me, so you wound up staring at him, puzzled about what he was doing," Alison said.

"… Yeah, pretty much."

"I'm sorry," Steve said suddenly, taking a half-step forward. "For not being there."

Alison arched an eyebrow. "You didn't have much choice about landing in the ice," she said.

Steve grimaced. "I didn't mean that so much as… after," he said. "At the very least, you were Peggy's sister." His expression turned wry. "Or believed to be. After I woke up, I should have come to see you for that alone. And after…"

"By that point, I'd waited around half a century to meet my father," Alison said lightly. "A few months more doesn't make much difference."

But this time, the lightness was false, put on. Because while her tone told one story, her eyes, locked on to Steve's, intense beyond words, told another.

Steve, for his part, flinched. "Finding out about you, about Carol," he said. "It was a shock. I tried to deal with it by pretending it wasn't there." His expression turned serious. "That was wrong," he said. "I only realised how wrong it was when it was nearly too late." He met Alison's gaze. "I am your father. And I know that I'm a little bit late, but I'm here now. If there is anything I can do, anything at all, just say it."

Alison's gaze did not waver, nor did her expression change. Then, slowly, detaching herself from her granddaughter, she made her way across the floor towards him, until she stood right in front of him. And, still slowly, she raised her hand, touching his cheek as if to make sure that he was real. Steve, for his part, simply looked at her. Close to, the resemblance between the two of them was more striking than ever, and both sets of identical cornflower blue eyes were damp with unshed tears. Then, he reached out and pulled her into a tight hug.

Some things do not need to be said.

OoOoO

Not all familial meetings, regrettably, were quite so amiable.

It is a commonality throughout the universe that sooner or later, parents will invite their children's closest friends around in order to get to know them, and so, on a fine sunny day towards the end of the summer, that was exactly what happened.

Mrs Danvers did not fit Harry's mental image of her, one informed by Carol's comments and description. Both of those had led him to expect someone submissive, nervous and perhaps not all that bright. Someone, in other words, who was Carol's complete opposite.

As it was, however, mother and daughter could hardly have looked any more alike. They had the same golden hair and cornflower blue eyes and the same strong jaw. They had the same build too, tall and strong with feminine curves. In other words, what most would objectively describe as beautiful. And though she was less visibly muscular, in many ways, looking at Mrs Danvers was like looking at a snapshot of Carol's future.

The similarities were more than skin deep, too. While Carol had repeatedly stated a dim view of her mother's intellect and willpower, Harry did not get the sense that this was a stupid or weak woman, quite the opposite. In fact, he was beginning to get a sneaking suspicion that one of the problems between the two of them was that they were too much alike. She even had something of her daughter's air of command, though it was more subtle and applied in the domestic sphere, as demonstrated when she corralled all three of her children and set them to laying the table. Harry tried to offer his services, but was politely, yet firmly, waved away – though he did wind up intervening when Joe Junior, the younger of Carol's little brothers, tripped and the salad bowl he'd been carrying went flying. A thought or two and a couple of gestures from Harry caught both the flailing child and the flying bowl. He even managed to catch a few escaping leaves before they hit the floor.

"Looks like those powers of yours come in useful," Joe senior, Carol's father, grunted.

"Sometimes," Harry replied evenly.

Carol's father rather more closely resembled his daughter's view of him. He was on the upper end of average height, not quite so tall as his wife and daughter, with greying dark hair and a thick moustache. Harry had determined before he arrived that he was going to try and give the man a fair chance to prove he was better than his daughter thought he was. However, from the moment they met, Harry found that something about the other man rubbed him up the wrong way. It had a lot to do with the way the man was watching him, almost as if he was assessing him.

"Thanks," Joe junior said, grinning at Harry, oblivious to the faint tension between his father and his big sister's best friend. Harry looked down and grinned back. He liked both of Carol's brothers for different reasons. Little Joe was Steve in miniature, physically at least. Already tall for his nine years, with a shock of blond hair and a dazzling smile, he had immediately bounced up to Harry, brimming with confidence and started peppering him with questions about anything and everything, and pestering him to show off his powers. Indeed, Harry half-suspected that the nine year old had slipped up on purpose to make Harry use his powers on him.

Carol's other brother, Steven, was the odd one out. A slim soon-to-be thirteen year old of no more than average height and with dark hair, he stuck out like a sore thumb. Only the tell tale cornflower blue eyes marked him out as Carol and Joe junior's brother. He was quieter than his siblings, more solemn and shy, as evidenced by his half-hearted objections to being called 'Stevie', but when Harry called him Steven, something he took as a gesture of partisanship, he got a smile every bit as dazzling as one of Joe junior's or Carol's.

He also contrasted from his siblings in that where Carol was _the_ star of her school athletics team and captain of her school's football – or, as Harry was frequently reminded, soccer – team, and Joe junior was showing signs of being similarly gifted, he wasn't particularly sporty at all. This wasn't to say that he lacked the ability, as Carol noted across their telepathic link, just the interest.

 _He prefers reading, writing and drawing,_ she said. _Actually, he's a really good artist._

"He'll get into it eventually," Joe senior said bracingly. "Mark my words, Stevie will show the world what a Danvers man can do."

 _I suppose that now would be a bad time to observe that the athletics seem to come from the Carter side of the family,_ Harry observed to Carol, who promptly choked on a mouthful.

"Carol," her mother sighed.

"Forry," Carol mumbled, before swallowing. Her mother sighed again, but said nothing.

Hiding his grin with difficulty, Harry turned to the boy across the table. "What do you like doing, Steven?" he asked.

Steven chewed his lip, then flicked a glance at his father.

"Your sister's mentioned that you like reading. She also mentioned that you're a really good artist," Harry said, after a moment. "That's an amazing talent."

"Art is for girls," Joe junior said, and a bark of laughter from his father said exactly where he'd learnt it from. Steven, meanwhile, visibly wilted. And something inside Harry began to burn with anger.

"Joe," Mrs Danvers scolded, sparing a hard look for her husband, who shrugged.

"It's not just for girls, actually," Harry said, controlling his temper.

"Who says?" Joe junior asked, frowning in puzzlement.

"Joe," his mother said warningly.

"It's all right," Harry said, and looked at both Danvers boys in turn. "Who says? Captain America says."

Steven looked up, similarly confused. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that Captain America loves drawing, and painting," Harry said. "He's really good, actually. So's Tony, Tony Stark, though he mostly just draws schematics – designs for his suits, inventions, things like that." He gave Steven a significant look. "If Tony couldn't draw, he couldn't get his ideas out of his head and onto the page. He wouldn't be able to build his suits, rebuild his Tower, or make any of the cool things that he makes." He smiled. "It helps Steve, Captain America, too. It helps him read maps, draw maps and work out plans and things like that. But mostly, he just does it because he thinks its fun." He shrugged. "Even I'm learning to draw better. It helps with doing magic, you see, if you're working a big spell, like binding something or trapping bad guys."

He met the gazes of both Danvers boys, Joe, whose eyes were wide and mouth was open in astonishment, and Steven, who was wearing a blush and a small, conspiratorial smile. On impulse, Harry winked at him, then looked at Mr Danvers.

"So you see," he said, pausing for emphasis. "Art isn't just for girls."

Mr Danvers stared at Harry for a long moment, then forced a smile on his face. "Well," he said, in a painfully false jovial tone. "You learn something new every day."

Harry sensibly refrained from adding anything.

 _Hey,_ Carol said, and Harry glanced at her, getting a warm smile. _That was kind of you. Thanks._ The smile turned into a smirk. _Nice touch, bringing up Steve and Tony. Steve in particular is basically little Joe's hero, and dad couldn't say a thing. Also, dad's expression… oh, that's one to treasure._

Harry shrugged. _Yeah, well, I'm trying not to provoke him._

 _I saw. You didn't add anything when you very easily could have done,_ Carol said. _Though, for the record, you can not say things very loudly._

 _Oh. Oops._

 _Hey, I'm not complaining._

 _I'm trying to be diplomatic, Carol._

 _And you're doing great,_ Carol replied cheerfully. _Just letting you know that my dad is probably going to take it personally no matter how diplomatic you are and if you ever want to stop… please, feel free._ She paused. _Though preferably not when the boys are around. Or, at least, if they are around, do it in a way that'll go over their heads. They get caught up in enough as it is._

 _I'm not sure that much goes over Steven's head,_ Harry observed. _But okay._

This entire conversation took place in a dozen or so seconds. Not long at all, in other words, but long enough, it seemed, for Mrs Danvers to give the two of them a thoughtful look. This was something that added to Harry's distinct impression that while Carol's judgement of her father was dead on, she'd drastically underestimated her mother.

There was another moment of silence, which Joe junior then broke. "I want to do art!" he said.

"You already do, short stuff," Carol drawled.

"Oh," her little brother said, frowning. "Like in class? But that's boring!"

"Maybe you could ask your brother to teach you," Harry suggested. "I'm sure he'd be happy to."

Carol stifled a cackle at her father's expression as Joe junior, oblivious, turned to his older brother. "Would you, Stevie? Would you, please?" he begged.

"I…" Steven began, looking rather surprised. Then, he smiled. "Yeah, I'd be happy to." His expression turned serious. "Though if you want to be good, you'll have to practice."

"Yeah, sure," Joe said, impatiently.

"It might not come to you immediately," Harry said. "When I was first learning to draw, I was terrible at it. Your brother's right, you'll need to practice."

 _He'll probably give up after a few days,_ Carol predicted. _Impressionable as a lump of butter is little Joe._ This last was said with definite affection.

 _Or he might not,_ Harry said.

 _He might not,_ Carol agreed. _And it'll drive dad around the bend in the meantime. He's been trying to get Stevie to stop drawing, painting and stuff like and buckle down to 'men's stuff'. Now that they all know that Captain America, the man's man, does it, dad's going to find doing that much, much harder._

"So," Mr Danvers said. "What sports do you do?"

"Well," Harry said. "I play a couple of sports. I enjoy a bit of football – soccer – but my school doesn't play it."

"I thought that all British schools played soccer," Mr Danvers said.

"Mine's a bit different," Harry said. "It's a magical school. It teaches magic, and it has sports of its own."

"They're kind of crazy," Carol said. "And complicated. Seriously, complicated."

"Let the boy speak, Carol," Mrs Danvers said, as Harry rolled his eyes extravagantly at Carol, who smirked.

"The main sport," Harry said. "Is called Quidditch. It's really old, like, most of a thousand years old, so the names are a bit weird. The basic idea is that there are seven players on each team, and three kinds of ball. The quaffle is used by the three Chasers. They try to get it into the other team's goals, three hoops guarded by the other team's Keeper, while protecting their own goal and keeper. It's a bit like basketball that way." He paused. "By the way, this is all played on broomstick."

"Yeah, flying broomsticks are real," Carol said, at the stunned expressions. "Though they're not half as goofy looking as the ones in picture books. His," she said, nodding at Harry. "Is basically the magical equivalent of an F1 car."

"It does 450 miles per hour," Harry said. "After my uncle tuned it up. Though it only does 300 on the Quidditch pitch, to make it fair."

"Whoa," Joe junior breathed, eyes like saucers.

"Yeah," Harry said, grinning. "Anyway, the Chasers dodge the Chasers from the other team, they also have to dodge the second kind of ball – the Bludgers. They're basically…"

"Proof that Britain has no concept of child safety?" Carol quipped.

Harry rolled his eyes again. "You're ones to talk," he said. "In the American version, there's only one ball, and it explodes." He shook his head. "Anyway, the bludgers are balls of iron," he said. "About so big," he added, gesturing. "And there are two of them. They're enchanted to go after any player they can reach. Each team has two Beaters, whose job it is to keep the bludgers away from their team and aim them at players on the other team. To do this, they each have a large bat. That part is a bit like baseball."

"What about the seventh player?" Steven asked curiously.

"The seventh player is the Seeker," Harry said. "And they go after the third ball, the Golden Snitch. It's tiny," he said. "About the size of a walnut. It's really fast, really hard to see, and really, really, manoeuvrable. Catching it ends the game and earns a 150 points."

"Doesn't that mean that whoever catches the Snitch always wins?" Joe junior asked, frowning.

"Not always," Harry said, trading a look with Carol.

"We were at the World Cup final for Quidditch," she said. "It was Ireland versus Bulgaria, and thing was, the Irish Chasers were just way too good. The Bulgarians didn't stand a chance, they were getting thrashed. The Bulgarian seeker, though, this guy called Viktor Krum, was incredible. He made the other guy look like a total rube, even tricked him into crashing."

"I should mention that the Irish seeker was fine," Harry said. "Stunned, but fine."

"Yeah, right," Carol said. "Anyway, Krum got the Snitch, but the Irish won because they were simply that far ahead."

"Krum wanted to end it on his own terms," Harry explained. "Which I can understand – I'm a seeker too. I play for my house team at school."

"And apparently a ridiculously good one, judging by how the Twins were going on," Carol said. "The youngest Seeker in a century, or something like that, supposedly better than their brother, the previous House seeker, who could have played for England."

"Whoa," Joe junior repeated, awed.

"That sounds very impressive," Mrs Danvers said. "Though not particularly safe."

"There are always people on hand in case something goes wrong," Harry assured her. "Magic can fix broken bones in moments."

"Still," Mrs Danvers said, frowning slightly.

"So, you play this Quidditch, then," Mr Danvers said. "And a bit of soccer."

"I spar too," Harry said. "A bit with most of the Avengers, except for Tony who's usually working on tech or looking after his daughter, and Bruce, who…" He smiled wryly. "Well, Bruce doesn't generally need to spar."

"Also, the Hulk would never spar with you, because he likes you too much," Carol said.

"Also true," Harry said. "Though mostly, I spar with a couple of other people my age. A little bit with Carol, for instance, an Asgardian friend of mine called Uhtred…"

"I am actually amazed he seriously spars with you, considering all that 'my lord' business he does around you," Carol said.

"He believes that it's the responsibility of a good Sworn Sword to keep their liege lord on their toes," Harry said.

"Sworn Sword?" Mrs Danvers asked, eyebrow raised.

Harry coughed, a little embarrassed. "It's an old title, like bodyguard, or right hand man," he said. "I didn't ask him to swear himself to my service – in fact, I'd much prefer it if he hadn't, but, well, I _had_ just saved his life. So he felt that he had to repay that debt, and…" He trailed off, looking even more embarrassed. He cleared his throat. "Well, he's good. And he doesn't go easy." He smiled. "And I spar with someone else, too. Her name's Diana. She's a cousin of mine, on, ah, my dad's side."

"She's even better than Uhtred is, and he's pretty much the best in his generation," Carol said.

Harry nodded.

"Girls fight in Asgard?" Steven asked, a little surprised.

"Just you try and stop them," Harry said. "Sif is the Goddess of War. By definition, she's the best warrior in Asgard. Dad says that he's stronger and faster than she is, and so's uncle Loki, but when it comes to skill, she's just plain better than they are. And dad and uncle Loki are pretty much the very best, so. Uhtred's her student. Then there's grandma, Queen Frigga. She used to be a shieldmaiden too, and she was really good at it. These days, she mostly handles medicine. And then, of course, you have Diana, who's every bit as good as Uhtred at most things, and better at some. She's already more powerful than he is, too, and she's only getting stronger."

"Well, that's Asgard," Mr Danvers said. "Earth is different."

"Well," Harry said, tone entirely polite. "With respect, I'm not so sure. I mean, Nat, Black Widow, is one of the toughest people I know. My godmother, Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch, is the Sorceress Supreme in Waiting. That means that she's going to be Doctor Strange's successor - he's the current Sorcerer Supreme. It also means that she's the second most powerful magical human on the planet, and with her other powers, she's at least as powerful as dad. She travels all over the world, fighting bad guys and monsters. My first psychic teacher, Lady Betsy Braddock, is a senior Agent of MI13 – they're like British SHIELD and they fight bad guys and monsters too – and she's one of the most powerful psychics on the planet. And my cousin on mum's side of the family, Jean… she's got psychic powers like mine, but she's much, much stronger than I am. As in, she's the most powerful psychic alive."

He smiled. "A friend of mine, a girl called Hermione, she's one of the smartest people I know, and she's a powerful witch too." The smile widened into a grin. "And you don't have to be a fighter to be tough – Jane, for instance, my dad's girlfriend. She's pretty small, but she was the one who rigged up the system that found and revealed HYDRA's last base in London. Everyone had been looking, everyone, and even the gods couldn't find it – it was hidden in a pocket dimension, you see, like a little bubble in space. Well, Jane popped the bubble and gave HYDRA nowhere to hide. And my mum fought magical terrorists in the eighties and nineties."

He looked around the table, at the grinning Carol, the assessing Mrs Danvers, the two wide-eyed Danvers boys, and the stony faced Mr Danvers. Focusing on the boys, Harry continued, "So, there's a lesson," he said lightly. "You know what it is?"

"Uh-uh," Joe junior said, shaking his head.

Harry leaned forward and grinned. "It doesn't matter which realm you're in," he said, before lowering his voice. "Don't mess with the ladies!"

Joe laughed, but it was a laugh of delight.

Harry leaned back and began to finish his meal. As he chewed, he heard Carol's voice in his head, tone completely frank.

 _You're amazing, you know that?_

He turned to see her looking at him, elbow resting on the table, chin resting on her palm and a small, almost disbelieving smile on her face.

Harry, naturally, went bright red.

 _So are you,_ he managed. _You know that, right?_

Carol laughed softly. _Yeah,_ she said fondly. _Thanks to you, I do._

OoOoO

After that, the meal ended in fairly short order, and Harry immediately offered his services in clearing up. However, despite his best efforts, Mrs Danvers used that same inexorable air of command to gently shunt him to one side. And before he could protest, Mr Danvers slipped an arm around his shoulder.

"Come on," he said bracingly. "Let them handle the women's work. I think it's time for you and I to have man's talk."

"Really?" Harry asked, a little surprise, and as he was steered outside, he caught Carol's eye. The resultant eye-roll spoke volumes.

In any case, within a minute or two, they were out in the back garden, a neatly tended space of green lined with the last blooming flowers of summer.

"Take a seat," Mr Danvers said,

"So," Mr Danvers said, looking at Harry. "You might be wondering why I invited you over."

"I was a bit, Mr Danvers," Harry admitted. He had been ever since Carol had said that her father wanted to meet him.

"Well, as you know, my daughter has problems with boys," Mr Danvers said.

Harry nodded, wondering where this was going.

"She's also headstrong, refuses to mind her elders and is determined to do things that aren't good for her," Mr Danvers continued. "There's a simple solution to both of these problems - Carol's a young woman now, and needs a man's steadying influence on her life, someone who can look after her." He regarded Harry. "She doesn't talk much to me, but from what I can tell, she thinks a lot of you. And you've got… talents."

"Powers," Harry said flatly. "Magic. Psychic abilities."

Danvers nodded. "That sort of thing helps," he said. "Maybe it'd help here."

"What do you mean?" Harry asked carefully.

"Well, I wanted to see whether you were the sort of the person with the balls to take her in hand, to look after my little girl."

"Take her in hand?" Harry asked. "Like, control her?"

"I wouldn't put it like that," Danvers said. "It's not controlling, it's just… making her take the right path, if you follow me."

Harry was silent for a long moment, trying to control his suddenly ignited temper. _How dare you_ , he wanted to scream. _How dare you, you stupid, ignorant, bigoted little man, ask me to violate the trust that Carol's shown me and take control of her._ _HOW DARE YOU!_

In the end, with the cold, careful precision of the very angry, "I think she looks after herself pretty well, Mister Danvers. And she knows what the right path is just fine."

Mister Danvers waved this away irritably. "She says that, sure, but we both know that she doesn't understand what she's talking about."

Harry's hands clenched into fists, cracking like gunshots.

"Actually," he said, voice soft and dangerous. "I know that she does."

Danvers paused, anger at being challenged by this young pup conflicting with urgent signals from his hindbrain that were telling him that said pup might be young, but it had a rather nasty set of fangs, and therefore going any further was ill-advised in the extreme.

"You'll learn, boy," he said eventually. "Women don't know what they need. Carol, for instance - she needs a man. But instead, she hangs out with that Luthor freak - I ask you, what normal guy is bald at his age? - and that French homo. I was thinking that you might be a step in the right direction. Powers and all."

He tried to give Harry a meaningful look, but when his gaze met Harry's, he looked away. Harry suspected that this was probably for the best. If he had to look into the man's eyes and see only a certain belief in the rightness of what he was saying, he might lose his temper.

"No, Mister Danvers, I think that it's you who needs to learn," he said, voice rising with the anger that was finally seeping though. "Carol doesn't need anything more than people who support her. She hasn't had many of those in life. And going by this evidence, you definitely haven't been one of them. You're blinded by your own prejudices to what an amazing person your daughter is. You go on about 'women's work' and how she needs a man and you miss her achievements. She wants to shape the future - and believe me, she can do it - and you want to tie her to your notion of the past. And you _dare_ to ask me to control her!"

"I didn't invite you here to criticise how I raise my daughter," Danvers growled, standing up. "Try showing a little bit of respect."

"No, but you invited me here to help you force her onto the path you wanted for her," Harry snarled, standing up himself, going nose to nose with the older man, showing himself the taller. "I'm sorry to disappoint, but people have minds of their own. I will _not_ violate hers. _How_ _ **dare**_ _you ask me to!"_

Danvers went white and Harry advanced, the air now hot and dry, eyes burning gold in sympathy with his rage.

"You're more interested in yourself than your daughter - you don't care about her, you care about maintaining your authority over her and making her do what you want. And you want to use me to do it," Harry hissed, wrath and the sound of crackling flames infusing every syllable. "Respect? After what you've said, you have the gall to demand my _respect?_ You've insulted Carol and Jean-Paul, two of my closest friends, and Lex, another who I call friend. In Asgard I could have _fried_ you for that!"

"You little -"

" _Shut up_ ," Harry said, double voice slamming Danvers' jaws closed, tone one of absolute command and pure menace. " _I don't see anything in you worth respecting, and believe me, for Carol's sake, I tried. But that's the least of it: you don't deserve to have someone like Carol as your daughter. You don't deserve your sons, either, two absolutely delightful boys who seem to have turned out the way they have in spite of your best efforts. As for Carol, you say you want someone with balls enough to look after her when you don't have the brains to appreciate her for the amazing person she is. Instead, you treat her like a dog!"_

This last was spat with simmering anger as Harry pressed forward, pushing Danvers back by sheer force of personality.

" _I know your type,"_ he hissed, as the older man fell back, sitting down with a thump back into his garden chair. _"You hate and fear anything that doesn't fit your ideas of how the world should work, anything that isn't_ _ **normal**_ _. So you lash out. You try and take_ _ **control.**_ _You're just like my aunt and uncle, the ones who locked me in a cupboard. They treated me a lot like a dog too. They are currently paying the price for it."_

"Are you threatening me?" Danvers demanded, defiance breaking through his shock and fear. Under other circumstances, Harry might even have been impressed. But not right now.

Instead, he slammed his hands down on the arms of the chair with a thunderous crack of wood that echoed through the hot summer evening, making the older man flinch.

" _Believe me,"_ he said softly. _"You'll_ _ **know**_ _when I'm threatening you. Right now, I'm just telling you why I'm disgusted by you. You judge people for things that they can't help, like who they love or how much hair they have on their head. You dismiss the things your children love, dismiss who they are, and try to make them what you want them to be. How can you be so pathetically small minded?"_ Danvers could give no answer, but Harry didn't particularly want one. _"And worse, you treat your daughter like she's a robot - no, not like a robot actually. Tony Stark treats his robots with more respect than you do your daughter, which is just fucking_ _ **sad**_ _. You treat her like a_ _ **puppet**_ _. You asked me to make her dance on your strings and you thought I would_ _ **accept?!**_ _"_

He shook his head. _"It's people like you that make me_ _ **really**_ _wish that it wasn't wrong to rewrite your mind. And yes, I_ _ **am**_ _speaking literally."_ His eyes blazed gold as Danvers went grey with fear.

" _You don't value your daughter when I can tell you for a fact that she is one of the bravest, kindest and most_ _ **amazing**_ _people I know,"_ Harry said, voice harsh and deadly. _"I know that partly because I'm her friend, partly because she let me into her mind - not just had a psychic chat, but into her mind. Do you have_ _ **any idea**_ _what that_ _ **means?**_ _The_ _ **trust**_ _that requires? Well, I'll tell you what it means for the right here and now. It means that I know that she doesn't need someone to protect her from the big bad world - she protects other people, including me, usually from myself. It means that what you wanted me to do would be the ultimate betrayal. And it means that right now, I'm so angry that I'm scared of what I might do to you!"_

There was silence as those words rang out, emphasised by Harry's burning eyes. In that silence, he stepped back, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. When he opened his eyes again, they were green, but still flecked with gold, and when he spoke, though his voice was normal, it was still vicious.

"I hope you'll learn from this. From what I can tell, you probably won't, but I'm hoping that I'm wrong."

He leaned down, eyes hard. "In case I'm right, though, listen closely," he said. "If I ever hear about you trying to control your daughter, treat her like an animal, like property, to be given to someone else _ever_ again, I'll make you regret it for the rest of your miserable life you pathetic, primitive prick!"

The words lashed out and in Harry's resurgent anger, a little psychic power lashed out as well, sending Danvers rocking backwards.

"You wanted me to look after your daughter? That's how I do it. I watch her back and cover her blind spots, the same way that she does for me. You're one of those blind spots because you're her father and she loves you, even though you don't deserve it. So be told: _I'm watching you."_

He stood up straight. "Oh, and by the way: _that_ was a threat. I'll see myself out."

OoOoO

"How did the chat go?" Carol asked, once Harry got back inside, expression thunderous. He grimaced, pinched his brow and closed his eyes, reining in his anger. "Oh. That well, huh?"

"I think we understood each other," Harry said eventually. "And no, that is not code for 'I melted his brain', though I'd dearly have loved to."

Carol shrugged. "I can't blame you - dad has way of getting on people's nerves," she said.

"That he does."

"Did he say anything offensive?" Carol asked. "Oh, who am I kidding, of course he did. He always does. Even if he didn't, you look like you want to kill something. Better question: what did he say that was offensive?"

Harry gave her a short summary of the conversation, doing so telepathically to save time. Carol's eyes narrowed and her fists clenched. "That fucking asshole," she said softly.

"No disagreement here," Harry said. "I don't think I'm going to be invited back."

"Probably not, no," Carol said. "Thanks, though."

"For what?" Harry asked, puzzled.

"Standing up for me," Carol said.

Harry shrugged. "You'd do the same for me," he said.

Carol nodded. Then, she smiled. "Did you really call him a pathetic, primitive prick?"

"Yup."

"Nice alliteration."

"Thank you."

There was a pause. "When he snaps out of the shock, he's going to be pissed, isn't he?" Carol said, tone resigned.

"Yeah. If you want, you can stay at the Mansion," Harry offered.

"Really?"

"Sure," Harry said. "Hell, Tony would be happy if you decided to move in. He'd probably throw a party."

Carol bit her lip, looking as if she was seriously considering this. "Yeah… but that would leave mom and the boys to deal with dad while he's angry," she said.

"I can deal with that," Harry said. _Without messing with his head_ , he added.

"How?"

"Wit and charm," Harry said. His eyes flashed gold. _He's asleep now. Give it a few minutes, then you and I can go out and carry him up to bed. You stay over at the Mansion, maybe spend the day hanging out, then come home to find your dad hopefully in a better mood._ He paused. _Or, at least, one where he'll think twice about bothering you._

 _Thanks._

Harry shrugged. _It's like I said: I cover your blind spots, you cover mine._

 _Your blind spots being your temper and habit of blaming yourself for whatever goes wrong._

 _Pretty much, yes._

"Carol?"

Both of them look up to see Carol's mother. "Your dad's fallen asleep outside and won't wake up. Could you help me get him in?"

"I'll help, Mrs Danvers," Harry said.

"Oh, bless you," she said, with a smile.

"Mom," Carol asked. "Is it okay if I spent the night over at Avengers Mansion?"

Carol's mother shot a look at her daughter, then at Harry, then out at her sleeping husband, eyes narrowing in thought. Not for the first time that night Harry suspected, while maintaining a prize winning innocent expression, that Mrs Danvers was a lot sharper than her daughter gave her credit for. "Well…" she began.

"It wouldn't be any trouble, Mrs Danvers," Harry interjected earnestly. "Tony's always complaining about there being too many empty bedrooms."

"Harry's term starts next week, mom," Carol said. "He's at boarding school. In Scotland."

"Your father won't be happy," Mrs Danvers said, frowning.

"Please?"

"Fine. I'll talk to him. Carol, once your dad's in bed, pack an overnight bag. I want you to be on your best behaviour," Mrs Danvers said.

"Gotcha, thanks mom," Carol said.

The two of them went outside and with relative ease managed to carry him up the stairs, settling him into bed.

"Mom can undress him," Carol said, removing her father's shoes, before the two headed back downstairs.

"Dad's in bed," Carol reported.

"Thank you, honey," Mrs Danvers said. "And you, Harry." She raised an eyebrow at Carol. "Now, overnight bag?"

"Right," Carol said, vanishing upstairs.

Once she was gone, Mrs Danvers folded her arms and gave Harry a long look. "All right," she said. "Out with it. What did you do to my husband?"

Harry stared, stunned.

"I can make a reasonable guess about why," Mrs Danvers continued. "My husband is a man of old fashioned views and you're quite the opposite. He's as stubborn as a mule and I'm guessing that you're the same. A bit of a firebrand too, I'll be bound. You're also devoted to my daughter, same way she is to you, anyone with eyes can see that." She snorted. "I've heard of people joined at the hip, but going by the way you two spent at least half of dinner talking to each other in your heads, I'd say that you're joined at the brain." Her expression turned more thoughtful. "So if I had to guess, I would say that you and he had a discussion, probably about Carol, and neither of you looked particularly happy when it ended." At Harry's surprised expression, she smiled faintly. "I might not be a mind reader, but I know my daughter and my mother raised no fools."

"He asked me to 'take her in hand', to 'make her take the right path'," Harry said quietly. His hands clenched into fists again and he had to concentrate to shove down the instinctive anger. "Acted like her opinions didn't matter, that she wasn't smart enough to decide what she wanted," he said, curtly and roughly. "Said some things about her and a couple of my friends that in Asgard would be answered with a duel. I…" He searched for a phrase, picking one that his uncle had used. "Made my position clear."

Mrs Danvers nodded. "He got angry and you were worried that it would splash back onto Carol."

"Fairly much," Harry said, not adding that Mr Danvers had been afraid and anger would be something that would come afterwards.

"So you did what? Knocked him out?"

"Psychically suggested that he go to sleep," Harry said. "He should wake up in the morning having slept off the anger."

Mrs Danvers nodded. "Fine," she said. "But don't pull that trick ever again."

Harry was silent for a moment. "I could have done a lot worse, Mrs Danvers," he said softly, meeting her gaze. "I wanted to. I don't like wanting to, it's wrong, and it terrifies me. I don't even like putting people to sleep much – people's minds are their own and I don't like to intrude. So I don't do it, I won't do it. Not unless I feel that I have to."

Mrs Danvers narrowed her eyes for a moment, scrutinising him, then nodded slowly, understanding the underlying message. She smiled wryly. "My daughter doesn't think very much of me," she said. "She thinks I'm a coward for not standing up my husband the way she does. You might think much the same thing."

"I don't know you very well, Mrs Danvers," Harry said evenly. "But you just gave an ultimatum to a demigod with a temper who admitted to having telepathic powers and being willing to use them. I don't think that's the action of a coward. You don't strike me as a fool, either." He met her gaze. "Maybe if you do the same to your husband about how he treats Carol, and Steven, she might respect you more. If you'll forgive me, Mrs Danvers, but going by tonight and what Carol says, he more than has it coming."

Mrs Danvers looked away and sighed. "There's no changing that man," she said. "Carol would hate to admit it, but she got her stubbornness from him. If you give either of them an ultimatum, they'll spit in your eye out of sheer contrariness. Mind you, my brother's the same way. And…" She smiled sadly. "Well. It's complicated. It may not seem that way to you, because everything's in black and white when you're young. When you're older, you may understand."

"Maybe," Harry said, tone non-committal, as Carol came thundering down the stairs.

"Do you always have to make such a racket, Carol?" her mother asked, wincing.

"Sorry," Carol said, arranging her bag on her shoulder. "Shall we?"

"We shall," Harry said, then turned politely to her mother. "Thanks for dinner, Mrs Danvers. It was lovely."

"It was my pleasure," she replied. "Carol, be back by dinner time tomorrow at the latest and mind your p's and q's."

"Yeah, mom," Carol sighed, as she kissed her mother on the cheek. "See you tomorrow."

When the door shut behind them and they made their way over to the waiting car, Carol cocked her head at Harry. "What were you and mom talking about?"

"She figured out that I put your dad to sleep," he said.

"Seriously?" Carol asked sceptically.

Harry nodded.

"Guess the blinkers had to come off some time," she said. "She give you a hard time about it?"

"A bit," Harry said. "We understand each other."

"Is that another euphemism?"

"No, actually," Harry said, and explained.

"She stood up for dad? Typical," Carol muttered. "She stands up _for_ him but never _to_ him."

Harry debated adding the point Mrs Danvers had made about Mr Danvers being too stubborn for that to work, but decided against it on the grounds that it wouldn't improve matters. In any case, he didn't believe it. For starters, Carol wouldn't have let herself be intimidated the way that Mr Danvers had. And he somehow doubted that there was anyone else in the world who had survived certain death by simple dint of being too stubborn to die.

No, to him, it sounded more like an excuse.

But that was another matter.

 **There we have it. Harry is his usual diplomatic self, Jean is basically the ultimate big sister, Carol's mother reveals that there is much more to her than meets the eye (and this isn't the last we'll be seeing from her, oh no…), Carol's father does too (unfortunately) and Carol's grandmother is exactly what you'd expect from the daughter of Peggy Carter. Also, Steve is an adorable dork and a good man.**

 **Oh, and Harry and Carol seem to have generated a ship name: 'Carry'. I like it, it's sweet.**


	7. Chapter 7: Forever Red - Part I

**And here we are again. Sorry it took so long, and thank you for all the lovely reviews, but I wasn't entirely sure how I was going to arrange this next couple of chapters, having debated with myself about where I was going to put Clark's proper entry into the story – writing about 10,000 words of his introduction in the process. In the end, however, I pushed it back to give a little breathing space, so we can properly address it and this arc without it all being clumped together.**

 **Also, I've had most of this chapter written up for ages, the last couple of scenes have just been being a gigantic pain to write, as have some of the details for the rest of this arc. Plus, I have real life things to do, like write my dissertation, do essays (one of which is due on Monday and I postponed to write this. Be thankful). Oh, and it's a big one, longer than intended, with several reveals, so that should be compensation enough.**

 **Anyway, without further ado, I welcome you to the first major arc of this book:** _ **Forever Red.**_

 _The Academy_

"General Lukin."

The man addressed was a man of average height. He was wrinkled, with greying hair and distinguished white wings at the temples, and a little late middle aged spread at the waist, though a look at his face, unfazed in the face of the icy cold, would quickly establish that this was a man not to be trifled with. A casual estimate of his age would put him anywhere between 48 and 62. He was, in fact, in his mid fifties. Roughly the same age as the current President of Russia, with whom he had a fair amount in common. Both of them had risen through the ranks of the old Soviet Union. Both of them had been intimately involved in the shadowy battlefields of the Cold War with the West. Of course, unlike the President, Lukin's battles had moved into territory that was a little more… otherworldly.

And unlike the President, he was not content to sit back and let selected members of the oil mafia grow fat on the lifeblood of Mother Russia whilst taking his share, eliminating potential threats and playing games with parts of the world that few really cared about.

Of course, they shared a goal, of returning Russia to its rightful place as a superpower, one respected and feared, something only rendered necessary thanks to traitors who had turned the country into an international joke. Though, Lukin would admit, in the privacy of his head, the old Soviet Union had lacked a certain agility and flexibility. However, where they differed was in how they intended to do it.

In Lukin's opinion, Volodya was playing an old game in a new world. Yes, increasing Russia's conventional military and steadily pushing back against a war-shy NATO, while spreading the tendrils of Russian influence back into the heartlands it had arguably never really left was a decent enough strategy. But it was also an old fashioned one. It didn't reckon with what some in the West were, ridiculously, calling 'the Heroic Age'. It didn't reckon with the exponential increases in technological advancement, public knowledge of the superhuman, the supernatural and the alien (even if that knowledge was deeply limited, and the proliferation of all three, along with increasingly powerful non-state actors.

For goodness sake, there were gods, actual gods, walking the Earth, beings whose very existence challenged the fundamentals of belief! And that was before you took into account the events of this last year; the rise and fall of HYDRA, the Battle of London and the gutting of SHIELD. What use were ordinary weapons and ordinary soldiers in this extraordinary age? Volodya might have ordered the reactivation of the Red Room, but only as an afterthought, a garnish for the army, a weapon with which to play his old games. He was a fool – the balance of global power was undergoing its biggest shift in a century, perhaps even in a millennium. This was a new world, with new players to contend with and new horizons to reach for. There was no place for old games.

Of course, this was not to say that the old world had nothing of use. All that was required was to… update it.

And that was why he was working with the man who had just called his name. Well, man, he thought as he turned to look at the creature that addressed him. That might be a little generous.

While he was more than capable of disguising himself and looking however he wished – and more to the point, looking human – Essex's true form made it very easy to see how he had got his bevy of other names. He was tall and slender, with long, spidery fingers that it was hard to imagine not holding a scalpel or a syringe and were much, much stronger than they looked. His skin was deathly pale at a contrast with his neatly combed black hair and neatly clipped goatee beard, and his eyes gleamed red, in concert with the red gem-like object on his brow. He tended to dress in dark old fashioned formal clothing, or in a well kept lab-coat, the latter of which he was wearing at the moment. He never showed any sign of feeling either heat or cold, of pleasure or discomfort of any kind.

Lukin didn't know what Essex really was, even though he'd known him for thirty years, when he'd first joined the Red Room. And even then, the older heads had said that Essex had been around for decades, since the very beginning of the Red Room program, in all that time not ageing a single day. Lukin's original theory had been that he was a vampire. Now, that theory having long since been disproved, he'd decided that he didn't really care. He also suspected that Essex had been involved in many similar projects to the Red Room, and decided that he didn't really care very much about that either, so long as the Red Room reaped the benefits.

"Doctor Essex," he said. "Is everything in place?"

"My preparations are complete," Essex replied, his voice almost jarringly normal in comparison to his appearance. His tone, as ever, was calm and clinical. Lukin didn't think that he'd ever heard Essex raise his voice. "Are yours?"

The muscles in Lukin's jaw twitched. No one spoke to him with such implied disrespect. Belova knew not to push him. Essex's other pets, among them that clawed monster, that impudent and frequently incomprehensible thief, and that… _thing_ in the lower levels that he tested subjects against, all put on at least a show of respect. Even Volodya would show him at least the modicum of respect of according him his rightfully earned rank. No one spoke to him like that!

No one, that was, but Essex.

"They are," he said. "Rodchenko has been… persuaded."

"Excellent," Essex said.

There was a silence, then Lukin turned to him.

"You wish to know why I have returned to the Red Room now, and why I was so willing to involve myself in this latest operation," Essex said. It was not a question. Lukin had discovered long ago that Essex numbered telepathy among his many disturbing talents, and even more disturbingly, could navigate his way through Lukin's psychic defences with nonchalant ease. Lukin would have been more worried about this if he actually thought that Essex cared about what he thought. The implied dismissal rankled a little, but Essex didn't seem to care about that either.

"I do," Lukin said. "I have known you for many years, Doctor Essex. You are not normally one to act in the field. Especially when there is such risk attached. Most especially when you do not need to."

Essex smiled a cold smile. "Are you saying that I am a coward, Lukin?" he asked.

"You know very well that I am not," Lukin said coolly. "Even if today was not evidence enough, you work with monsters every day. Half the people on this base would kill you if they thought that they could get away with it. The other half would help them hide the body if they thought it were possible. You know this and have no fear. You are no coward." He gave Essex a flinty look. "But you do not waste your time with work that you feel can be delegated."

Essex tipped his head in acknowledgement. "I have a special interest in this case," he said.

"Your hound could have done it alone," Lukin grunted. "You are lucky that I am the only one who knows how powerful your pet really is, Essex. If anyone else did..." He trailed off meaningfully.

"An attempt at capture would be made," Essex agreed. "It would be inadvisable." His gleaming red eyes settled on Lukin. "As you well know."

Lukin shivered. He knew. He remembered the screams.

"In any case," Essex said. "This case required… delicacy. And it will require yet more."

"That much is true," Lukin said. "We will only have one chance at this. Time is on our side, but only for now. It must be done soon, or…"

"The clay will dry beyond the possibility of moulding," Essex said calmly. "Yes, I am aware." He waved a hand. "Tell your servants to be ready."

Lukin gritted his teeth. "They will be."

OoOoO

 _6 hours earlier_

 _Diagon Alley_

With less than two weeks to go until Harry was due to return to Hogwarts, it was felt that it was time for him to do his school shop, and Carol and Jean-Paul had been invited along – Uhtred was in Asgard with his family and Diana was also in Asgard, enjoying some time with her father. However, there was a distinct lack of available adult supervision.

Thor, Loki and Steve were being quizzed at the UN about Asgard and the Avengers' respective roles on Earth going forward, Clint had been dragged kicking and screaming (or at least, sulking) to the Triskelion to fill out reams of overdue paperwork, Pepper was at work, Tony, Jane and Bruce had been called in to a symposium of the world's most brilliant minds to help piece together the long term effects of Red Sky Day, Darcy was applying for a part time job to work around her Masters degree and Remus was in Wakanda having been invited by King T'Challa.

Wanda had wanted to be present but had been distracted by the emergence of something vile and tentacular from a crack in reality in Tokyo which she and her apprentice – the latter cracking unspeakable jokes about sushi and Japanese pornography – went to deal with it (though not before she firmly chided Harry for thinking that it was his fault for not sewing up Chthon's cracks in reality neatly enough). Natasha, meanwhile, had disappeared a couple of days earlier, saying that she had one or two things to check up on. Jean was more responsible than a good half of the above, but wasn't quite a legal adult. And Sirius, though available, was also unable to come to magical Britain due to that inconvient Kiss On Sight order.

This left only one person to keep an eye on three trouble magnet superpowered teenagers, even if he was a little reluctant to do so for reasons that had nothing to do with the people in question.

On a lighter note, it opened an opportunity for two worlds to meet.

"Hermione," Harry said. "These are Carol and Jean-Paul, two of my friends from New York."

The slender and somewhat fey dark haired young man let out a pointed cough.

"From France via New York in the case of Jean-Paul," Harry amended.

"Hey," Carol said, sticking out a hand, which Hermione shook. "Harry says good things about you – thinks you're one of the smartest people he's ever met, smartest in his school by far."

"Well," Hermione said, flushing slightly and looking at Harry, who shrugged as if to say that he'd merely been stating the obvious. "I do my best."

"Harry doesn't compliment people without reason," Jean-Paul observed, with a faint smile. "And Loki did not choose you for one of his apprentices without reason, either."

"Of course I don't," Harry said. "And of course he didn't." He then turned to the silent, fourth member of the party. "And this, well. I think you can guess."

Hermione focused on the man for the first time, who had previously seemed to fade into the background. Now that she was looking at him, however, there was no way that she wasn't going to recognise him.

The recently resurrected Sergeant James Buchanan 'Bucky' Barnes, looking like he'd stepped straight out of a 40's newsreel, gave her a slight smile and inclined his head. "Pleased to meet you, Miss Granger," he said.

"A-and you," Hermione stammered.

Harry looked surprised at her reaction. "Hermione?"

"You know," Carol said, amused. "Not everyone's totally accustomed to hanging out with living legends. Give the girl a moment."

"Huh? Oh," Harry said, and coughed, embarrassed.

Hermione herself blushed. "Sorry," she said.

"No need to be," Sergeant Barnes said easily. "I've had far worse reactions." There was a brief, strange silence, before he continued, with an easy, charming smile, "you should have seen how the girls swarmed over Steve back in the war. And the guys, come to that."

Hermione blushed again. Barnes was, after all, quite handsome. "I," she began, then faltered, unsure of what to say.

"Bucky's here as… adult supervision," Harry said helpfully, before eyeing Bucky. "Even -though we can look after ourselves."

"It's a way to help get me back in the world again," Barnes explained, then eyed Harry right back, then Carol, and smiled slightly. "And keep an eye on a couple of dumb kids who couldn't keep out of trouble if you paid them. It's something I have a little experience with."

Harry rolled his eyes and Carol folded her arms and said, "A couple?"

"Sure," Barnes said, smile turning into a smirk. "Jean-Paul's got common sense. You two don't." He raised a finger. "And before you protest, Carol, I have a list of reasons."

Carol, who had indeed been about to protest, subsided grumpily, though not before sticking her tongue out at Barnes.

"What about me?" Harry asked.

Barnes simply arched an eyebrow at him.

"He's right, Harry," Hermione said, amused. "You don't exactly have the best track record in that department."

Harry pouted, actually pouted.

"Don't bother," Barnes said, entirely deadpan. "Tony's better at it than you are."

"He is right, I am afraid, _mon cher_ ," Jean-Paul said, patting Harry on the shoulder. "You have many other charms to fall back on, however." He smirked. "I too have a list."

"Thanks," Harry said flatly. "And does Uhtred mind?"

"He helped compose it," Jean-Paul said cheerfully. "As did a certain other someone."

Hermione noticed that Harry darted a glance at Carol, who looked uncomfortable.

"It was Diana," Jean-Paul said.

"Diana?" Harry asked, surprised.

"She thinks you have a rather lovely smile," Jean-Paul said matter-of-factly. His eyes slid over to Carol. "And unlike some, is perfectly happy to say it."

Carol rolled her eyes and stuck her tongue out at him.

Hermione watched this with a mixture of astonishment, happiness and just a hint of jealousy. Astonishment at what looked very much like how she imagined that her, Ron, and Harry looked to the outside world, happiness that Harry seemed so comfortable with the friends that he'd made outside of Hogwarts, and jealous because, well… the kind of trio dynamic she was seeing here was one she thought of as being just theirs. As in, unique to herself, Harry and Ron. Of course, theirs came without snarky adult supervision. And fewer implied dirty jokes. And no hints of UST whatsoever, of course.

Indeed, Hermione found herself briefly entertaining fears that both her and Ron would be edged out of Harry's life entirely, replaced. However, those fears soon faded as she found that she rather liked Harry's friends.

Sergeant Barnes was quiet, but friendly and polite, with a variant on the dry sense of humour that seemed to be endemic among the Avengers and everyone who spent even a little time around them. Hermione thought that it might be contagious.

In any case, he answered her questions about the War fairly freely, and seemed silently grateful that she steered well clear of what had happened after he fell from the train. Otherwise, he let the conversation flow around him.

Carol, the tall, blonde American girl was cynical, sardonic, but friendly too, and the two of them quickly bonded over mutual amusement at Harry's foibles, much to the latter's exaggerated disgust.

As for Jean-Paul, the slender, charming French boy was softer spoken and clearly possessed of a wicked sense of humour that tended towards the very dirty, one that he was more than happy to show in conversation… but somehow, Hermione felt that in his own way, he was every bit as reserved as Barnes.

And that was not the only oddity she noticed. It wasn't anything definite, but she got the very definite sense that Sergeant Barnes wasn't just present as _ad hoc_ adult supervision. There was something very _aware_ about him. Watchful.

It was more obvious in Jean-Paul, who had that same watchful air about him. In his case, however, much of the watchfulness seemed to be focused on Hermione herself, as if he was weighing her up. He was perfectly charming, and spent much of his time cheerfully teasing his friends, even teasing her in a light, gentle fashion, but even still, Hermione wondered.

Carol, meanwhile, seemed to be the most ordinary of the lot of them, coming off for the most part as an ordinary, if particularly snarky, teenager. The latter characteristic was definitely on show, with her and Harry sharing an easy, whip-fast banter. But then, she wasn't just an ordinary teenager, that much had already been implied. And in any case, Hermione privately thought that you weren't likely to be ordinary if you were drawn to Harry, nor, depressing as the thought was, would you be particularly likely to survive the experience if you were.

No, what sealed it for Hermione, however, was the way she moved. She moved like someone who could handle herself, and either hadn't learned how to hide it, or didn't care to do so. Indeed, Hermione found the other girl vaguely reminiscent of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Only taller. And more muscular. And more, ahem, filled out.

Then, of course, there was Harry himself. He'd changed. This wasn't unexpected – after all, she could hardly miss how he'd been changing, physically and mentally, over the last year, ever since he'd rediscovered his father. But in the three and a half months since they'd seen each other last, those changes had almost accelerated. While he'd previously gone from short to tall in what had seemed like the blink of an eye, glasses vanishing in the process, he'd still been on the skinny end of lean, with hands and feet that seemed puppyishly too large for him.

Now, while he'd grown a little bit taller, he also seemed to have grown into his limbs, looking more solid than he had before. The main change, the biggest difference, wasn't physical, though. Hermione couldn't pin it down, but there was an edge to him now, a hardness in his features and a shadow in his eyes, one that hadn't been there before. It vanished briefly when he smiled, but as soon as the smile faded, it came back, like the smile was only a mask.

Of course, she had to admit that that wasn't the surprise it might have been. Being murdered, after all, was likely to leave a mark.

OoOoO

Hermione's musing aside, it was true that Harry had changed. Which, as it happened, was something that he was more than a bit worried about. So while Hermione played tour guide/got to know Carol and Jean-Paul, he and Bucky took a detour.

"Ah, Sergeant Barnes, Mister Potter," Mister Ollivander said. "This is a pleasant surprise."

"Garrick," Bucky said, with a smile, reaching out to shake the other man's hand. "It's been a long time."

Harry blinked. While he intellectually he realised that Mister Ollivander had to have a first name, he'd only ever thought of the wand-maker as Mister Ollivander and suspected that almost everyone else did the same. Bucky, however, was apparently different.

"Indeed it has," Ollivander said, smiling slightly, silver eyes roaming over Bucky, settling briefly on his left arm. "Though I have not aged quite as well as you have."

Bucky smiled tightly. "Being a HYDRA guinea pig has its upsides," he said. He turned to Harry. "We – the SSR – consulted Garrick about wands: specifically, repairing damaged ones, making new ones and identifying captured ones."

"Yes," Ollivander said. "Grindelwald's forces used some truly remarkable wands, drawing on his demonic connections to provide arcane woods and cores. Demon summoning is an abhorrent art, of course, and the wands were often somewhat unstable, particularly in the hands of those lacking the will or the conviction to control them, but still… they were truly remarkable." His tone turned somewhat peevish. "And Howard Stark was forever taking them apart, trying to find 'circuits', 'batteries' or some other means of explaining how they worked."

"He did improve your wand making equipment, though," Bucky said.

"That is true," Ollivander allowed. "I still use his machines, actually."

"Don't you use magic, Mister Ollivander?" Harry asked, and those silver eyes turned to him.

"Not when making wands, oh no," he said. "Wand-making is a delicate process and using magic in creating wands can have grave effects on the wand itself. Now, Mister Potter, what is it that brings you to my shop?"

Harry took a deep breath. "I'm not sure about my wand," he said, drawing the artefact in question. "You've probably heard that my dad is Thor."

Bucky snorted slightly.

"I could hardly miss it, Mister Potter," Ollivander said. "And I must say, the fact that you are a son of the Thunderer himself… I am almost surprised that you were not chosen by an oak wand. But then again, the wand chooses the wizard, and the wand that did was made of the other King of the Forest, one that was unique for entirely different reasons."

"That's just it, Mister Ollivander," Harry said. "I'm not entirely sure I am a wizard any more. Or maybe I won't be for long."

Ollivander's eyebrows rose. "And what makes you say that, Mister Potter?"

"I can still do magic, obviously," Harry said. "But my father's…" He trailed off.

"Harry is beginning to inherit abilities from his father's side of the family," Bucky said quietly. "His Asgardian nature, specifically. And while Lily Potter was a witch, Harry may not have inherited his magic from her. He inherited non-magical psychic abilities from her, either as well or instead. He's worried that he'll lose the ability to use his wand." He glanced at Harry. "Even though I've reminded him that his father is completely Asgardian and can use his wand just fine."

Harry didn't directly answer, instead muttering something about being glad 'Tony and other Harry aren't here.'

"Curious," Ollivander said. "Very curious. I believe that I can set your mind at ease, Mister Potter. While I can hardly say that I am an expert on demigods, my family has been in Britain for a very long time and I have made a study of my ancestors' work and their journals. More than once, they sold wands to children of Asgardians and muggle men and women – more often the latter than the former by far, of course – in whom magical gifts manifested. Apparently it was rather more common than among Asgardians themselves. My ancestor, Edgar Ollivander, noted that Asgardians all possessed the talent for magic but that it usually had to be encouraged to manifest."

Harry nodded at Ollivander's enquiring look. "That's what my uncle tells me," he said.

Ollivander smiled. "Excellent," he said. "In every case, they reported that while choosing the wand sometimes took some time, each witch and wizard was chosen by a wand and never had any problems with it. So no, Mister Potter, I do not believe that you have to worry about your wand losing its allegiance to you. May I see it?"

Harry handed it over and Ollivander took it in long, precise fingers. "Ah…" he murmured. "Holly and Phoenix feather, eleven inches long, nice and supple, in good condition. You have looked after it very well, as it has looked after you." He examined the wand. "This wand is a rare combination of wood and core, very rare. Rare and all the more remarkable for it." His gaze shifted to Harry. "Much like yourself, Mister Potter. This wand is, I think, a better match for you than either of us ever realised."

His gaze shifted back to the wand. "Of course, that is often the case with wandlore. While the basic meanings and preferences of certain wand woods and cores, and combinations thereof, are well known, there is always dispute about the nuance and the detail. On top of that, some favour wands because of mere appearance!" He snorted, as if this was totally absurd. "Silver lime, for instance, went through a significant vogue at one point, not because of its properties, but simply because it made for a beautiful wand. And different woods are popular in different places: Japanese wand-makers greatly favour cherry, while my colleagues in Samarkand have long favoured beech."

He shook his head. "Aesthetics have little effect on wands, though it is true that certain wand-makers work better with certain woods, which can have an effect on the wands themselves, and a witch or wizard dissatisfied with their wand can cause it to perform poorly. In short, Mister Potter, each wand and its relation with each owner is truly unique, where qualities perceived by the wand do not become apparent until much later in life. Your mother, for instance, is a case in point."

"What do you mean?" Harry asked.

"Well, it is remarkable that you should say that your psychic powers come from her," Ollivander said. "For her wand was made of willow, a wood often associated with the mental arts by wanded and wandless practitioners alike – if not quite as much as Silver Lime – and great potential. The healing arts too, of course, due to its medicinal properties. It is also a very emotional wood, one drawn to wielders like it, wielders with a great capacity for emotion, one emotion in particular: love."

"Love?" Harry asked.

"Love," Ollivander said. "Wielders of Willow wands often love deeply and fiercely." His pale eyes focused on Harry with disquieting intensity. "It is rare for someone to love as deeply and fiercely as Lily Potter." His eyes drifted to Harry's forehead. "And much rarer indeed leave behind such a remarkable testament to that love."

Harry shifted his feet uncomfortably. "That was something else I wanted to talk to you about," he said. "Could we… talk in the back or something?"

Ollivander frowned slightly, but nodded, apparently intrigued. He drew his own wand and flicked it. The blinds dropped over the door and the window. "Come with me," he said.

"Well, Mister Ollivander, it's about my mother. And how I got this scar, I suppose," Harry said, omitting to mention that it had quite a lot to do with how he'd got another one.

He told Mister Ollivander everything. Well, not quite everything, but almost everything.

The other man listened closely and carefully, expression fascinated.

"Remarkable," Ollivander said quietly. "I was right to expect great things of you, Mister Potter." Before Harry could reply, his tone became more focused. "You think that this Phoenix entity led to your being chosen by your wand," he said.

"I think so," Harry said. "It was Fawkes' feather and considering how she, the Phoenix, knew Dumbledore, how Fawkes found him afterwards and how he saved me in the Chamber of Secrets… I really don't think that it's a coincidence."

"Curious," Ollivander said. "Curious."

Harry waited patiently.

"I said that your wand was unique for entirely different reasons," Ollivander said. "Holly wands are rare, but Holly and Phoenix Feather is one of the rarest combinations of them all. Holly is a wood much like Willow, in that it is emotional. Unlike Willow, however, it takes it to the point of volatility, its wielders are often protective and they tend to need to overcome anger and impetuosity. They also tend to be the type to engage in quests, though whether those quests are physical or spiritual is another matter entirely."

"Why am I not surprised?" Bucky murmured.

Harry shot him a dirty look. "You mentioned the 'Holly King'," he said. "What's that?"

"Oh, an old legend that the forest is ruled by the King of the Oak in the Summer and the King of the Holly in the Winter," Ollivander said absently. "Evocative and, I suspect, connected to the Summer and Winter Queens of Faerie, perhaps mistaking them for the Winter and Summer Knights of the era. Then again, I have heard rumours of Summer and Winter Kings…"

"They exist," Harry said. "Apparently they represent the opposite side of the season – the Summer King is the Erlking, the Winter King is… well, no one's very sure about him, but I think he goes by Santa these days."

"Really?" Bucky asked, eyebrow raised.

Harry shrugged, and turned back to Ollivander. "I thought most people in the Wizarding World didn't believe in the Fae," he said.

"Any wandmaker worth their salt knows that the Fae exist, Mister Potter," Ollivander said. "Indeed, thanks to their connection to the natural world, aspects of wand-lore and aspects of faerie-lore are intertwined. Hawthorn wood, for instance, makes for complex and often contradictory wands as adept at healing as at cursing. It is also known to burn brightly and poison those creatures that owe their allegiance to the Winter Court." He sighed. "And more than one foolish young wandmaker or an apprentice has attempted to bargain with the Fae for knowledge of the best wand wood trees or for arcane woods from the Faerie realms. The Fae being what they are, such requests are to be made very carefully, if at all, which they usually aren't as making them is often a sign that the person in question is too lazy to learn how to find the trees themselves. More than one has found themselves transformed into or merged with the tree they sought, for instance."

Harry winced.

"But the Phoenix Feather is, by its nature, detached, independent and notoriously picky," Ollivander continued softly. "Where a Holly wand's wielder will throw themselves mindlessly into danger to protect someone else, a phoenix chooses its allegiances and actions very carefully. But once those allegiances are made, they are unbreakable. Together they are a formidable combination, often a mark of heroes and heroines born, renowned for their daring. Often rash, often solitary, but brave and true. You, Mister Potter, are more than adequate proof of that."

Harry shivered slightly under those unnerving pale eyes.

"Indeed," Ollivander added. "From what you have said of this Phoenix Force, I would say that you were chosen by a phoenix a very long time ago." There was a long pause. "Of course, legend has it that it is not the first time such a thing has happened," he said, after a few moments. "Stories of wands and staves created by gods and other powerful entities abound, bestowed upon worthy wielders. The legendary wand, Laevateinn, wielded by Prospero Slytherin, an ancestor of Salazar, is one. It is lost, of course."

"My grandfather mentioned it," Harry said, fingering the golden phoenix feather around his throat. "He didn't say much about it, though. I think it might be related to the Phoenix."

Ollivander inclined his head. "There are others," he said. "But few, in the Western world at least, carry the resonance of one wand in particular. The Elder Wand."

Inexplicably, Harry felt like the room had suddenly got colder. And darker. "Elder Wand?"

Ollivander nodded. "A wand supposedly made by Death himself, made to be the most powerful in all the world," he said. "A wand that could turn back time and rewrite history, a wand that could transmute the elements in a fashion that only the Philosopher's Stone could match, a wand that could even, it is whispered, bring back the dead. With the Elder Wand in hand, none of the laws of magic need apply."

A chill ran down Harry's spine.

"It was said to be one of the three Deathly Hallows, created by Death to reward, to entrap, three brothers who had defied him. It is a children's tale, but as with all tales, it contains a grain of truth. That tale also says that whoever owns all three shall be the Master of Death."

Harry was silent for a moment. "You think it's true?" he asked, not bothering to mention that Death was female and that he severely doubted that three magical objects would grant one 'mastery' over an entity that powerful.

"There is a grain of truth, I think," Ollivander said. "Its power is undeniable, its verifiable feats verging on the impossible, and from the very beginning, witches and wizards have slaughtered each other to possess it, leaving a bloody trail through history. While ordinary wands can change allegiance when they are taken by force, in earnest battle, the Elder Wand is said to only be passed on to a new master when the previous one is dead. Of course, it is more likely that those who steal such a wand are more inclined to kill a rival than to let them live, but one has to wonder… Along the way, it has acquired other names: the Deathstick and the Wand of Destiny prominent among them. But while it has many names, while there are other wands of elder, rare, very rare – they are considered unlucky, in large part because of the story – but they exist, most simply call it _the_ Elder Wand."

"Who was its last owner?" Harry asked, curious.

Ollivander paused, and, oddly, darted a glance at Bucky. "That, Mister Potter, is a piece of information that men have killed for," he said, sounding somehow hurried. "And it often drops out of history for centuries at a time. Putting a definitive location on it in the past is near impossible, let alone the present."

Harry was about to latch onto this suggestion that Ollivander did, in fact, know where it was, when Bucky's hand came to rest on his shoulder.

"I see," he said. "Okay. Thank you, Mister Ollivander."

Ollivander nodded and Harry and Bucky went to leave, heading back through the shop, towards the doors, outside which gathered the usual impatient first years and parents.

"Mister Potter."

Harry turned. "Yes, Mister Ollivander?"

"The days are getting darker, Mister Potter," Ollivander said. "Things are coming out of the shadows, things thought long gone. Things… and people. You would do well to be careful."

"I always am, Mister Ollivander," Harry said.

Ollivander fixed him with a piercing gaze. "Are you, Mister Potter?" he asked softly.

"No," Bucky said dryly. "He isn't. Come on, Harry."

Harry's gaze lingered on Ollivander, before he nodded and left.

Once they were outside and well clear of the shop, he turned to Bucky.

"Why was he looking at you like you knew where it was?" Harry asked.

"Because when we started going up against Grindelwald back in the War, Albus warned us to expect the impossible," Bucky said quietly. "That even the rules of magic might not apply. When Steve asked why, Albus explained about the Elder Wand, told us the whole story of the Three Brothers. And he said that Grindelwald had found it, taking it from a famous European wand-maker who had boasted of possessing it. It was part of why Schmidt, the Red Skull, was so eager to make an alliance with him."

"So Grindelwald had it," Harry said. "Which would mean…"

"Which would mean that it is currently owned by the person who defeated Grindelwald," Bucky said.

"Didn't Doctor Strange beat him?" Harry asked.

"I wasn't around for that part," Bucky said. "But from what I've heard, Strange wore him down and stripped away most of his extra power rather than beating him outright, probably by design. There's a reason he's not known as the one who beat Grindelwald, after all."

Harry's eyes went near impossibly wide as he put it together. "Whoa," he breathed. Then he frowned. "If he had the wand, why didn't he bring back Luna?"

"Even if it were possible, it could be that he didn't know how," Bucky said. "Do you knw everything you can do with your powers?"

Harry grimaced. "No," he said. "Not even close. But Dumbledore…"

"Dumbledore is a genius, but he isn't omniscient," Bucky said. "Besides, if I remember the story correctly, that power belonged to another Hallow, the Resurrection Stone. And it didn't end well."

"How do you mean?" Harry asked, frowning.

"According to the story, the brother who used it brought back his fiancée. She didn't belong in the world of the living, though, and it hurt her," Bucky said. "So in the end, he committed suicide to be with her."

"Do you believe the story?" Harry asked.

"I think it sounds like the fairy stories my mom used to tell me when I was little," Bucky said. "And it has moral to it. In this case, don't try and con a powerful magical entity."

"I don't think that's quite it," Harry said dryly. "And I don't think that Death would be trying to entrap them. Maybe she just gave them what they wanted and let it play out."

"You'd know better than me," Bucky said. "Now, we'd better do your shopping. And find your friends."

"Right," Harry said, eyes going distant as he focused. "I'll get on that."

OoOoO

While Harry and Bucky were in Ollivanders, the others had gone exploring, following Hermione. Wandering up the street, Carol and Jean-Paul drank in the sights of Diagon Alley, the former firing questions at Hermione at a million miles an hour, while the latter simply gazed at the surroundings, seeming to take in everything at once.

Hermione, for her part, was more than happy to expound and answer questions, so the arrangement sorted all three parties equally.

Soon enough, they wound up near the far end of Diagon Alley, which Hermione identified as leading into Knockturn Alley.

"It's a bad neighbourhood," she said. "As far as I know. Harry wound up there by accident a couple of years ago, and from what he said, it was fairly unpleasant."

"Who are they?" Carol asked, watching as a man and woman dressed in what looked like muggle combats covered by long grey cloaks, each with a scabbarded sword at their hip and a carved staff in hand, strode past. They were a grim and harsh looking pair and the denizens of Knockturn Alley seemed to subtly shrink away from them, melting into the shadows.

"Wardens," Hermione said quietly. "The combat troops and policemen of the White Council."

"White Council… Harry's mentioned that," Carol asked.

"Wandless wizards," Jean-Paul said.

"Right."

"The White Council is sort of like the UN for wandless practitioners," Hermione said. "Though membership is restricted only to the most powerful one percent of practitioners. The Wardens are their elite."

"Wait, so if you're not powerful enough, you don't get a say?" Carol asked, frowning.

"Not really," Hermione said unhappily. "Though they don't make laws as such, they just enforce the Seven Laws of Magic and act on behalf of wandless magical practitioners. For instance, if you're having trouble with vampires, you can go to your local Warden for help. They're stretched thin at the moment, though, what with the War."

"War?"

"The White Council is at war with the Red Court," Hermione said. "The Red Court, they're a kind of vampire from South America, Mayan blood demons that wear a flesh mask to conceal what they really are and have powerfully narcotic saliva."

"Ew," Carol said flatly.

"They're not quite as powerful as Grey Court vampires – Dracula, and his kind – but there's more of them, they tend to be better organised and reasonably up to date with modern technology," Hermione said. "The war started when a White Council Wizard called Harry Dresden killed a Red Court Noble. She had a grudge against him for some reason and tricked him into entrapping himself by the rules of courtesy at a supernatural costume ball, then half-turned his girlfriend, who'd snuck in."

"Half-turned?" Jean-Paul asked, eyebrow raised.

"When the Red Court turn someone, they remain human, but with most of the powers of the vampire," Hermione said. "Until they kill their first victim, they remain at least part human. But since the blood lust is very strong…"

"They don't stay human for long," Carol said.

Hermione nodded. "There's no cure," she said. "There are ways to manage it, but not a cure. Anyway, everything she'd done was technically legal under supernatural law. Dresden was officially her guest which meant that he had to abide by the Laws of Hospitality, which she technically hadn't broken. He's famous for not caring very much about rules, though – he advertises as a PI in the phonebook. He's also very powerful and he was very angry. So he incinerated the vampire and her coven. Since he technically broke supernatural law and was acting as a representative of the White Council as the time, the Red Court declared war on the Council."

"Sounds like he made the right call and put boot to ass," Carol said, sounding as if she very much approved. "And his name's Dresden, right? Harry Dresden?"

"Yes."

"Ridiculously tall, dark, kinda hot in an angular sort of way, wears a long black duster?" Carol asked.

"I… I think so," Hermione said, a little startled. "You've met him?"

Carol nodded. "He seemed pretty cool," she said.

"This war… who's winning?" Jean-Paul asked.

"The _Prophet_ doesn't say much about it, so I'm not sure," Hermione said, eyeing Carol. "But since there's not much news, I'd say that not much is happening."

"Well, here's hoping that they wipe the vampires out," Carol said.

"What about the Laws?" Jean-Paul asked quietly.

"If you break one, you're doing dark magic," Hermione explained. "With wanded witches and wizards it's bad enough, but wands serve as a kind of buffer. If a wandless Wizard starts using dark magic, they go beyond the point of no return very quickly and become fairly nightmarish. That's why the sentence for breaking any of the Seven Laws is death."

"No exceptions?" Jean-Paul asked, tone clipped.

"The First Law – thou shalt not kill with magic, basically – has a self-defence clause and the laws only apply to mortals, humans," Hermione said. "But the others, they're set in stone. There are grey areas, and they only apply to wandless magic, but beyond that, there's no flexibility. The best a Warlock, someone who has broken the Laws, can hope for is that someone on the Council decides to take them on and try and reform them. Then the Doom of Damocles is levied; they're on probation. But it's very rare."

"That's horrible," Carol said quietly.

Jean-Paul merely nodded silently.

"I think so too," Hermione said. "But having read some accounts about what a rogue Warlock can do… I think they might be necessary."

"Why?" Carol asked, frowning.

"Because wandless wizards can live for nearly half a millennium even when they don't delve into the Dark Arts to extend that, and they only get more powerful as they get older. One Warlock, Kemmler, engineered the First World War, using it as an opportunity to raise corpses by the hundreds of thousands," Hermione said. "He was killed – and not for the first time – but he resurfaced under Grindelwald's command in World War II. Grindelwald was a wanded Dark Lord, one of the most terrible in known history. Between them, they played a major hand in the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and later, the Red Skull, slaughtering millions. And, if you believe the stories, nearly bringing about Hell on Earth."

" _Mon dieu_ ," Jean-Paul said quietly. "Are there many as bad as that?"

"Only a few," Hermione said. "But they're more than enough. You've probably heard of one or two of them."

"Like who?" Carol asked.

"Morgana," Hermione said. "Also known as Morgan La Fey."

"The lady from the King Arthur legends?" Carol asked, surprised. "She was real?"

Hermione nodded. "She was," she said. "So was Merlin, Arthur, Camelot… all of it. Though I think that the histories made quite a few mistakes. The myths certainly did." She stared after the Wardens, frowning. "Back to the Wardens, though… what are they doing here? They're at war with the Red Court, the White and Black Courts too, I suppose, but Britain's almost entirely vampire free – even if no one's sure why. Even so, the only kind of vampire that's ever really turned up here is a few White Court vampires and one or two Grey Court, and they aren't even involved in the war. Maybe they're tracking a Warlock…"

She stopped, noticing that her audience wasn't paying much attention to this. Indeed, Carol and Jean-Paul both stared at her in mutual astonishment. "What?" she asked.

"The King Arthur legends. They're real," Carol said slowly.

"Well, they got a lot of things wrong…"

"Sword in the stone, Arthur and Guinevere, Knights of the Round Table?"

"Well, yes."

"So they're real," Carol said. "Oh my god, this is incredible!"

Hermione smiled. "I suppose it is," she said. "It's amazing how much witches and wizards take for granted. And how much I take for granted, really. It's just that there's so much to take in, so much to absorb, that you don't really have time to stop and think. Then once you do, it's normal."

Carol nodded. "I suppose so," she said. "Still…" She then paused outside a shop that seemed festooned with metal objects, varying from the apparently prosaic, such as a box the size of a desktop computer, to the incredibly intricate, including what looked like a tiny golden ball in a wire mesh cage.

The latter caught her eye not because it was flying; she'd seen enough strange floating things in the form of Tony Stark's robots or in just about every store in Diagon Alley and its environs that another didn't really stand out. It was the way it was flying, darting and hovering like a hummingbird, that caught her eye.

"Carol?"

"Oh dear," Jean-Paul said, looking around at the front of the shop, and at Hermione's puzzled look, elaborated. "Carol likes pointy things."

Carol absently gave him the finger.

There were quite a lot of pointy things on show, spears mounted on intricately carved staves, gleaming silver knives and swords with hilts of gold, silver and mother-of-pearl, inlaid with rubies, emeralds, sapphires, diamonds and pearls.

Hermione, however, followed Carol's gaze, to the tiny golden ball. "Oh," she said. "That's a Snitch."

"A what?" Carol asked, puzzled.

"A Golden Snitch," Hermione explained. "It's one of three kinds of ball in Quidditch."

"And it's the one that the… sneaker goes after."

"Seeker."

"Right."

"Harry told you?"

Carol nodded.

Hermione sighed.

"What's with that?" Carol asked.

"The existence of witches and wizards is _supposed_ to be a secret," Hermione said, a little anxiously. "It's the cornerstone of the laws of Wizarding society, thanks to the Statute of Secrecy."

"So… you're not meant to go around telling people that you're magical?" Carol asked. "Because, uh, he kind of invited me to the Quidditch World Cup."

Jean-Paul chuckled darkly. "Quite," he said. "Who knows what reaction you might get?"

"No," Hermione said. "And there's some very rigorous punishments if you do. Muggles, non-magical people, who do find out have their memories wiped. The only non-magical people supposed to know at all are the parents or guardians of muggleborn students, and there are some people who are saying that even they shouldn't know."

"Are you kidding me?" Carol demanded. "That's completely ridiculous!"

Hermione sighed. "Is it?" she asked. "How do you think humanity in general would react to finding out that they've got people with magical powers, their own laws and societies, living under their noses?"

"Badly," Jean-Paul remarked.

"Okay, fair point," Carol admitted grudgingly. "So… what about us? Is someone going to try and mind wipe us?"

"Does it mean that Harry's going to get in trouble?" Jean-Paul asked, voice crisper than usual. The prospect of obliviation clearly did not worry him. It didn't seem to overly worry Carol either, something that Hermione wondered at.

"No, Harry's basically untouchable, whether he realises it or not," Hermione said. "Something that has very little to do with who his father is. And no. You're Harry's friends and I think the general attitude is that if you've managed to get into Diagon Alley, you're meant to be here."

"What about Dresden? Does he not break this Statute?" Jean-Paul asked.

"The White Council doesn't have the same rules about secrecy as the various Ministries do," Hermione said. "Part of why is that it's not a formal government and another reason why is that they don't use mental magic, they can't."

"Why not?" Carol asked.

"Because wandless mental magic at the very least borders on dark magic," Hermione said. "Wands act as a kind of buffer, as I said, but wandless magic doesn't have that. Two their Seven Laws concern mind magic, and if you break them…"

"One way trip to the afterlife."

Hermione nodded. "Wandless dark magic, as I said, it snowballs very quickly," she said. "It's almost impossible to simply dabble in dark wandless magic, because it corrupts you very quickly, making you do worse and worse things until…" She trailed off. "Well. By the time a Dark Wandless Wizard, a Warlock, is found, they're usually completely insane. And by that point, there's no turning back. Believe me, they've tried. After a certain point, even if they're captured and seem to be improving, a Warlock will inevitably revert. And if they're left to keep going down the dark paths, you get something very much like Kemmler."

"That's cold," Carol said quietly. "I mean, how old are these kids when they get their powers? 11? 12?"

"Anywhere between 10 and 16," Hermione said. "It varies, though the stronger gifts usually manifest earlier."

"Just the right age for bad decisions," Jean-Paul said.

"But if they don't know any better," Carol began.

" _Ignorantia non excusat_ ," Hermione said quietly. "And no, I don't like it. I think it's horrible."

"But you can see why they do it."

"Even aside from what I said earlier, dark magic, dark wandless magic, nearly ended the world a couple of months ago," Hermione said. "So yes, I can. Can't you?"

Carol grunted and silence fell.

"What's that?" Jean-Paul asked, nodding at the apparently ordinary man across the street, one who had shrunken out of sight more than most as the Wardens had passed by. Closer inspection revealed a heavier, thickly muscled jaw and slightly inhuman proportions.

"Ghoul," Hermione said. "There are a couple of varieties – one is a fairly minor demon that lives in attics or cellars and eats rats and insects. They're all but harmless. That one, on the other hand… it's one of the other kind. And they're much more dangerous. They're shapeshifters and can pass as human quite easily. They're carnivores, going through forty or fifty pounds of meat a day and they like the taste of human."

"And they haven't been exterminated why?"

"Because they're sentient," Hermione said. "Because they don't have to be malicious and they can be quite civilised when they want to be. And because if they choose, they look exactly like humans until, suddenly, they don't. They're also quite hard to kill, apparently."

There was a moment of silence.

"God, this is depressing," Carol said, and looked around. "So... this place and creep-tastic alley are basically you guys' only streets," she said, looking around Diagon Alley.

Hermione shook her head. "They're the main streets, but not the only ones," she said. "There's a small network of streets branching off one another: Knockturn Alley, as mentioned, which is a little more... dubious, Internation Alley, where foreign embassies, businesses and travel agencies are found, Theatric Alley, which is basically the magical West End - or Broadway, Alchemic Alley, where the Alchemists tend to congregate, Aesthetic Alley, where designers, jewellers and artists live and Gastronomic Alley, which is the bar and restaurant area." She waved around at Diagon Alley. "The most successful businesses, though, are on Diagon Alley, because..."

"Most people come through here, at the very least to get to other magical places," Carol finished.

"Pretty much, yes," Hermione said. "Other large towns and cities have... magical districts, I suppose - Edinburgh's is particularly large - but London's is the biggest."

"Uh-huh," Carol said. "Question: is every street name around here a bad pun?"

Hermione let out a heartfelt sigh. "Yes."

"Well. So much for the famous British sense of humour, then."

After that, they moved on, taking in the wonders of Diagon Alley. Here, a magic lamp with light that supposedly never went out, there a magic box that was according to its seller 'unbreakable and impossible to open for anyone who isn't the owner. Like a mokeskin pouch, but bigger. Why, miss, you can even trap spirits in this one.' Then, a fob watch that with a crystalline face that displayed not only the time, projecting it into the air when opened, but the phases of the Moon, the season and the weather, note paper that transformed into origami birds and flew around the room, dancing around floating candles, even a customisable wig that seemed to swallow up hair and fit seamlessly onto the wearer's head.

There was more, so much more. There weremagical gardens, with small fountains that floated in the air, travelling steadily over the flowers to ensure they were all watered, magical plants with strange properties – and in the case of the Venomous Tentacula, a bad attitude. There was a floating and constantly moving vase of water, tiny homunculi of people, dragons and magical creatures that Hermione compared to robots,gloves that came when called, walking on two fingers, mugs that stirred themselves, pots and pans that warned in increasingly shrill tones when their contents was being overcooked, talking mirrors that advised on appearance, and small glass balls that Hermione said were called Remembralls that filled up with red smoke when their owner had forgotten something. Glass cats stalked along shelves with the liquid grace of the real thing, hats changed colour depending upon their wearer's mood and varieties of incense, some of which sent you to sleep, some of which relaxed you, and some of which even supposedly set you onto an out of body experience.

"Non-magical people have that," Jean-Paul observed.

"Really?" the shopkeeper asked, surprised.

"Oh yes. In tablet form," Jean-Paul said, entirely innocently. "It's called LSD. Ask any person without magic, they will know what you're talking about."

Carol looked disapproving, yet amused.

And there was still more. There were even glasses and goggles that could magnify vision and see into the infrared. Carol, wondering at all of these, muttered darkly about these.

"If magic glasses that can see in the dark are a thing, you can sure as shit bet that some pervert's thought of x-ray glasses," she said.

"I'm sure they'd be illegal," Hermione said, frowning.

Carol just snorted. "Like that's ever stopped anybody."

Then, finally, they came on to the magical musical instruments.

"So… these instruments play themselves?" Jean-Paul asked, examining the row of instruments.

"Yes," Hermione said. "They're enchanted to bring in air at the right times, in the case of the wind instruments, mimic bow and finger movements on the string instruments… it's fascinating, really."

"What's this one playing?" Carol asked, examining an intricately carved wooden flute that was playing a slow, sad melody.

"I don't know," Hermione admitted. "Music, especially wizarding music, isn't really my forte."

"It's one of the oldest songs in British wizarding history," a voice said from behind them. "Said to date from the time of Arthur himself."

All three of them turned to see Draco Malfoy, who smiled politely. "It has two names," he continued. "Based on how it's played. Fast, and it's known as Arthur's Triumph. Slow, like now, and it's known as Merlin's Lament. Legend has it that he composed it after the fall of Camelot."

"Wow," Carol said. "And you are…?"

"Draco Malfoy," Draco said. "Granger and I know each other, as you can probably tell by the fact she's staring at me as if I might bite."

"Malfoy," Carol said. "As in –"

"Lucius Malfoy," Draco said flatly. "Master of HYDRA. Which makes me the son of one of the pre-eminent monsters on the face of the Earth, who was in turn the employer of the very worst, something of which I am very aware." He turned to Hermione. "I did not make the best first, second, third… I did not make a good impression on you in our first two years at Hogwarts," he said, tone very frank. "I insulted you and called you vile names which, while I can blame their use on my upbringing, should not have been used. For that I am sorry and you are well within your rights to hate me. However, please don't treat me as a junior copy of my father, an evil overlord in waiting. I am many things, but I am _not_ my father's son. His deeds are not my deeds and his dreams are not my dreams."

Hermione said nothing, but gave him a long look that was somehow more considering than it had been before. "How are you out and about?" she asked. "I'd have thought that…" She trailed off.

Draco smiled a thin smile. "That SHIELD wouldn't let me out of their sight for fear my father would send someone to snatch me away and they would lose some of their potential leverage over him?" he asked, then jerked his head over his shoulder, indicating a group of otherwise ordinary looking witches and wizards, distinguished only by the air of watchfulness about them. "They don't. When I am out, my mother is kept in a kind of polite imprisonment and vice versa. Not in the Manor, naturally – that is still in ruins and in any case, it has been seized by the muggle government, along the vast majority of the Malfoy family assets, as compensation. And very rarely are we allowed to spend any length of time in the same place." He glanced again at his bodyguards-cum-jailers. "This is, I am informed, for our own protection, and I see the logic in that. I also see the logic of not keeping all your eggs in one basket."

There was an uneasy silence.

"Harry mentioned you," Carol said eventually, eyeing Draco. "A couple of times, actually."

"What did he say, Miss…?"

"Danvers," Carol said. "Carol Danvers. And he said that you'd been a massive jerk in the first couple of years, but recently you'd changed." She tilted her head and regarded him. "I got the impression that he actually rather liked you, following the attitude adjustment."

"Did you?" Draco asked, apparently genuinely interested and somewhat… hopeful?

Carol shrugged, noticing something familiar about the boy. Like her, Jean-Paul, and Harry when she had first met him, he gave a sense of someone not used to having many friends. "He said you'd grown up," she said. "And that you gave good advice."

Draco snorted faintly. "I try," he said, then paused and smiled. "May I make a suggestion? While Hermione knows everything there is to know about the Wizarding World that can be read in a book, I grew up living it, breathing it. For instance, I know Diagon Alley and its various off-shoots rather well. I could give you the tour."

Carol looked first at Jean-Paul, then at Hermione. The former shrugged, while the latter grimaced and gave her a look that said that it was up to her. "Sounds cool," she said.

OoOoO

"And over there is Mister Norrell's bookshop. A bit of a rarity, that one, a wandless Wizard who practically worships books," Draco said, indicating a rather staid and musty looking Georgian bookshop. Inside it was a small, elderly man in an old fashioned wig, arguing with a tall, lean middle aged looking man in fashionable clothing with grey in his messy hair. "As a result, he hardly ever actually sells anything, and never anything particularly valuable, which is why you don't see him challenging Flourish and Blott's for customers."

"And who's that man arguing with him?" Hermione asked curiously.

"That would be Mister Jonathan Strange, his former apprentice – no relation to Stephen Strange, as far as anyone knows," Draco said. "Though I believe that it is still a matter of popular speculation."

Indeed it was, something not helped by Jonathan Strange's own response when asked: "I do not know, for I have very rarely had the pleasure of his company. However, knowing the habit of the gentleman in question for travelling through the ages as an ordinary fellow would down a street, for all I know he could be my father, my son, my grandson, my brother, or even myself from another timeline."

This honest response, designed as it was to quell questions, merely spawned thousands more. Such is the way of gossip.

"Apparently, they've always been like that," Draco continued. "Strange is a more adventurous sort, much known for his communing with the Fae and his resultant mastery of illusion and of mirror magic."

"He's written books about it," Hermione said, nodding. "I remember seeing them in Flourish and Blotts."

Draco raised an eyebrow. "You saw a book you did not immediately devour?" he asked, lightly amused.

Hermione flushed. "I was already over-budget," she said.

"Ah," Draco said understandingly. "Some even say that he taught Margaret Le Fay the basics of the Ways of the Nevernever, before she eventually surpassed him."

"Who?" Carol asked, puzzled.

"A wandless practitioner of great power and notoriety, infamous for her dealings with the Fae and the darker sorts of magical creatures," Draco said. "She died in childbirth. Her son, Harry Dresden –"

"We've met," Carol said.

"You have?"

"A couple of months ago," Carol said. "During the battle. He was with Wanda Maximoff, Harry's godmother."

"They're dating," Harry said, causing Hermione and Carol to jump as he arrived. "Hi guys. Hi Draco."

"Harry," Draco said, nodding, then paused as he eyed Bucky. "Sergeant Barnes," he said, somewhat more guardedly.

"Mister Malfoy," Bucky replied, and inclined his head politely. Draco, after a moment, returned the inclination.

Before Hermione could voice her puzzlement, Carol broke in.

"Jesus fucking Christ, do I have to put bells on you two?" she complained. "Clint and Natasha are bad enough. Would it kill you to make some noise when you move? Loki manages it."

"Probably," Bucky said dryly.

"Does this happen often?" Hermione asked in an undertone.

"Sometimes, in recent months," Jean-Paul replied in the same undertone. "Harry learns quickly. In this case, from Natasha. He has reason." He smirked as Hermione sighed. "And not merely the one you would suppose."

"Sorry," Harry said, a little embarrassed.

"Where's your shopping?" Carol asked.

"Sent home with some portkeys uncle Loki made me," Harry said. "Saves carrying it around."

"Smart," Carol said approvingly.

"I thought so too," Harry said. "Anyway, Dresden; he's her apprentice."

"Which one?" Hermione asked, puzzled. "Boyfriend or apprentice."

"Both," Harry said.

Hermione looked shocked, but Draco, after a moment of surprise, cocked his head, as if listening, then nodded. "It happens in the wandless tradition on a reasonably frequent basis, particularly in the West. The whole legend of Merlin and Nimue, inaccurate as it is, started somewhere after all." He shrugged. "They have much less of a coherent community and are thus more vulnerable to those beings that would use… intimacy to get to them."

"Well, that's enlightening," Carol said. "How was the wand shop?"

"Enlightening," Harry replied, with a smirk.

"Smartass," Carol said, rolling her eyes.

"Blame Tony," Harry said, then looked at her. Carol blinked, cocked her head as if listening, then nodded.

Hermione was puzzled.

"You're doing it again, _mes chéris_ ," Jean-Paul said, amused.

"Oh, sorry," both said, in perfect unison, before giving each other a funny look, and bursting out laughing.

"What…" Hermione began.

"They have developed a psychic connection," Jean-Paul said. "It means that sometimes, they slip into speaking telepathically without realising it." His tone turned wry. "Or when they simply do not want to be overheard." He smirked. "I am sure it is for entirely innocent reasons."

Both rolled their eyes at him, missing the fact that Draco was watching them with a surprised expression that was somehow too convincing to be real.

"Sorry," Harry said. "It's a habit we got into, because… long story."

Jean-Paul's smirk faded into something gentler, more serious, and when Hermione was about to enquire further, he laid a hand on her arm. "Some stories are told only when they are ready to be told," he said.

And that, it seemed, was the end of that.

OoOoO

However, it wasn't the end of the strangeness. Conversation swelled up around them like a bubble, comfortably containing all six of them – if one counted the mostly silent Bucky. But like all bubbles, it was ever at risk of being popped.

"And this," Draco said. "Is where the seers gather. Well, supposed seers. Almost all of them are charlatans, little better than Professor Trelawney."

"Professor who?" Carol asked.

"Professor Trelawney," Hermione said. "She's the Divination teacher at school, and a complete fraud."

"Not complete," Harry said quietly. "She's got real power."

Hermione looked confused for a moment, then sighed. "Harry, those Tarot cards of hers were just responding to you," she said. "She's also an accomplished cold reader, and –"

"A lot of what those cards said came true," Harry said quietly. "Some of it, she could just have been guessing. But she said that I would rush into a situation and pay the price. Not too long after that…" His hand rose and he rubbed his chest. "Well. That was exactly what happened. Another card, the Magician. It looked like Doctor Strange, who I hadn't met yet, and who Trelawney didn't recognise. It warned of manipulation, strings being pulled. It also said that I should embrace and tap into my full power." He glanced at Carol and Jean-Paul. "Sound familiar?"

"That is exactly what Doctor Strange said," Jean-Paul said, frowning. "And he is…"

"The String-Puller Supreme?" Carol suggested.

"Fairly much," Harry said. "And then there was another one, about a clash between good and evil, that I was going to be at the heart of."

"Also sounds familiar," Carol said.

Harry nodded. "And an unexpected happy event in my family… she could have been talking about Jean," he said.

"That seems to fit, _mon cher_ ," Jean-Paul said. "What were the others?"

Harry explained, and the other boy nodded slowly.

"A red star in a golden field," he said. "Interesting."

"Care to share with the class?" Carol asked.

Jean-Paul shook his head. "It could be nothing," he said. "After all, _ma cherie_ , this was a prophecy aimed at Harry."

Hermione frowned.

"You don't really believe in divination, do you?" Draco said, looking at her.

"Well, no, it's so…"

"lllogical?" Bucky suggested dryly. "Magic often is. And seers are very real."

Hermione frowned. "With respect, Sergeant Barnes," she said. "How do you know?"

"I've met one or two," Bucky said. "Real seers, powerful seers, are incredibly rare. Trelawney's a real seer, with bucket loads of talent but very little control. Aside from things like that Tarot reading, she's made two real, solid prophecies that we know of." He nodded at Harry. "And they were both about him."

"One of them was why Voldemort went after my family when I was a baby," Harry said quietly.

"And the other?" Draco asked.

"She made it to me over the summer," Harry said. "Part of it has already come true." He snorted. "And naturally, it's a list of people wanting to kill me."

"I…" Hermione began, then shook her head. "Harry, I'm so sorry."

"Yeah, well, would life be like without a murder attempt here and there to liven things up?" Harry said with dark humour.

"Boring," Carol said. "Normal, but boring."

"Personally, I could happily go without," Jean-Paul remarked to Hermione. "But those two seem intent on having as many dances with Death as possible."

"I don't look for trouble," Harry said indignantly.

Jean-Paul and Draco raised identical eyebrows.

"… Much."

OoOoO

As they turned into Internation Alley, Draco began explaining the politics of the mystical world as opposed to the mundane one, with occasional interjections by Hermione.

The US and Canada, for instance, were historically a series of nations grouped together in loose and somewhat uneasy federation akin to the Iroquois Confederacy, with a mixture of primarily Native, Hispanic and North European influenced states in a constant state of flux, something driven by immigration, shifting demographics and mutual cultural influence. While the histories made a big deal about their differing origins, in reality, the cultural influences meant that they weren't so different as they liked to pretend. The black community also made its voice known, especially in the South and in the big cities.

More recently, this steady homogenisation had been somewhat forcefully accelerated by SHIELD, which had effectively forced them all together into something approaching a union.

Mexico and Central America were composed of more Hispanic states, with one or two pseudo-Aztec and pseudo-Maya ones thrown in, as well as any number of fiefdoms established by drug lords dabbling in the mystical. There, the influences mingled more freely, yet at the same time, they were all much more fractious, thanks to the Red Court of Vampires, which much preferred playing its various vassals off against one another to the possibility of facing a united front that decided it wanted to be top dog in the region. The picture was further complicated by the fact that the wandless community was taking the war between the White Council and the Red Court as an opportunity to deliver several centuries – even millennia – worth of payback, while the wanded one was trying to avoid getting involved or, sensing an upsetting of the apple cart, either scrambling to take advantage or actively impeding Council efforts.

South America was, naturally, a mixed bag, as might be expected when summarising an entire continent. On the highlands of the West coast, the Inca influence remained strong, while native peoples practising wandless shamanistic magic were common in the Amazon and other rainforests. Urbanised Latino populations, however, tended to mimic the wanded European model; albeit with a few twists.

Western Europe was an interesting situation – Britain was fairly obvious, the wanded community falling under the purview of the Ministry and the wandless under that of the Edinburgh based White Council. Ireland and France were similar due to the more centralised nature of their governments, though France had significantly greater regional differences. Spain was divided into the magical states of Aragon, Castille and Catalonia which consistently bickered over absolutely everything – much like their non-magical counterparts, while Italy was a wanded heartland and a pseudo mini Roman Empire with a strangely Catholic bent. Sicily, Sardinia and Naples were under Aragonese authority – this, as Draco remarked, gave muggleborns and half-bloods something of a headache and that the Schengen Agreement was pushed for, and immediately copied by, the various magical states of Europe.

Northern Europe followed a more tribal/feudal model due to a relatively small population spread over a very large area, with the Sami peoples of the furthest north practising wandless shamanic magic. However, wanded magic held a significant sway, especially in Denmark, and the cities of the rest of Scandinavia, especially among the old noble families thanks to Durmstrang.

Central and Eastern Europe was a complex situation – as Carol remarked somewhat acerbically, "what else is new?"

Germany was semi-unified thanks to Grindelwald, Poland was – to the surprise of Carol and the others – a considerable power, despite having had to endure half a century of Communist rule. Nations like Bulgaria were independent, and Russia itself remained a pseudo Tsarist Empire (Communism, after a rocky period in relation to the legacy of Rasputin, didn't really change anything other than encouraging the witches and wizards of Russia to keep quiet, particularly with the advent of the Red Room) with regional power centres and a significant wandless tradition centred around Archangel.

Unsurprisingly, magic thrived in Latveria thanks to it being ruled by a de facto sorcerer-king in Victor Von Doom, and more militant purebloods bigged up his rule as a result, conveniently ignoring the fact that he was a half blood at most. Romani tribes were a notable magical presence in most points east. A number of Ottoman Emirates remain in the Balkans, albeit largely in name only. The Greeks, meanwhile, still sort of clung to the whole city state thing and apparently never shut up about it, while magically Greek communities were prevalent in the Aegean and on the coast of the Black Sea.

As for the Middle East… Sykes-Picot didn't even make a dent. The Magical Ottoman Empire was broadly intact, but far smaller than its muggle counterpart was and very heavily influenced by its predecessor, the Byzantine Empire, despite the fact that the latter fell over five centuries ago. As Hermione explained, longer lifespans and lower reproduction rates, plus general inertia, meant that wizards changed rather slower than the rest of the world unless forced to. Magical Israel, meanwhile, was a bit less controversial simply because magical Jews never really left and immigrated to the Levant pretty much constantly, but perhaps inevitably, the position of Jerusalem was a touchy subject, and muggle politics are making it steadily more and more of an issue. Saudi Arabia and the related emirates were, due to their religious extremism, a bit of a magical dead zone, though some magicals clustered around Mecca. Majlis al Jinn, meanwhile, was mentioned as a notable thin place in the Nevernever and Way Nexus.

Central Asia was an interesting story, actually thriving where its muggle counterpart was – to Westerners at least – a blank spot on the map only intermittently distinguished, and usually for all the wrong reasons. Samarkand, however, was the centre of an independent state and was thriving. Iran was the formerly thriving Kingdom of Persia, the Islamic Revolution leading to people hopping across muggle borders in the face of militant anti-magic fervour. Now, some were slowly coming back, but cautiously and in small numbers.

China has been unified for millennia, then abruptly stopped being unified after the last Emperor was deposed and the era of the warlords began. The Communist Party was apparently rectifying this by force.

Japan was unified and still rather xenophic. North Korea's witches and wizards fled South as soon as they realised how crazy the new regime was and did their best to snatch muggleborns out from under the noses of the Kim regime. They aren't always successful and as a result, North Korea had a significant problem with Warlocks.

India, Kashmir, Pakistan and Bangladesh were composed of a series of powerful kingdoms, even more removed from muggle affairs than wizards in the West. Obsessive in pureblood sentiment and primarily wandless, as well as being advanced and monumentally self-centred, they seemed to view the muggle world as beneath their dignity, if not entirely beneath notice. Small but growing wanded communities originally founded via Roman/Byzantine/Arab/Persian trade contact fostered by colonial rule (the previously mentioned wandless didn't really care so long as they were left alone, which they broadly were), receiving new blood from muggleborns and half-bloods who tend to be ignored or ostracised by the purebloods.

As for the rest, South Asia consisted of prosperous kingdoms along the Indian model due to being in the same cultural orbit, while Thailand was surprisingly centralised, thanks to an enduring monarchy. North Africa had Carthage as a powerful state, while Bedouin handled their own affairs. Egypt was, unsurprisingly, centralised thanks to the lingering remnants of Nasser's iron grip.

Central Africa had mixture of powerful states and decentralised shamanic practise. Wands much more prevalent in coastal states, former colonies and urbanised areas. Wakanda _the_ regional magical power and influence of former Wakandan Empire felt in southern Egypt, Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia (a powerful state itself) etc. The many small Kingdoms and Emirates of Nigeria are still independent.

Southern Africa had a similar situation to the above. South Africa an odd one – previously in a kind of informal apartheid of the 'you leave us be, we leave you be' kind, separate states. It was now slowly unifying.

Australia had Western style states on the coast, while Aboriginal tribes used to practise wandless, now adopting wands brought by settlers.

As for the rest of Oceania, the Maoris and Pacific Islanders maintain their own traditions and nations.

It was all rather dizzying, a blizzard of facts and figures, stories and legends, embroidered by the blinding displays of colour and variety in the national costumes and accoutrements of witches and wizards from around the world.

It was also where things ended, for time was limited and both Draco and Hermione needed to get back. In the former case, he sighed, bade them all farewell, and made his way over to the escort of well-disguised SHIELD Agents shadowing him, but not before he spoke to Harry.

It was a muted discussion, but clearly quite serious.

As for Hermione, she was a different story, before she left to join her parents in muggle London, she too found herself being drawn aside. This time, by Carol as Harry finished speaking to Draco, then turned to speak to Jean-Paul.

"Hermione," the other girl said. "I need your help. But first, you need to understand something, and I'm going to be blunt here because diplomacy? Not my strongpoint. And I think you'll appreciate honesty."

"Okay," Hermione said. "What is it?"

"Harry's a fighter, a hero. He thinks in a different way than you do."

"I know that," Hermione said, frowning.

"I don't think you do," Carol said. "I'm trying to say this in the nicest way possible, but you have absolutely no idea what he's capable of."

"Actually, I think I do," Hermione said, hackles rising. "He's one of my best friends and I think I know him better than you do."

"Yeah? Maybe you do, in most things," Carol admitted freely. "You've spent years at boarding school together, after all. I've known him for about nine months, most of which he's been at school with you. And a lot of the times when we actually met up, supervillains attacked or the world nearly ended. Which kind of leads into my next question: you may know him as he normally is, but when did you last see him in a crisis? When did you last see him fight?"

"Last year, when Hogwarts was attacked," Hermione said.

Carol eyed her thoughtfully, as if reassessing her. "Before or after he pulled a Jesus?"

"... After," Hermione admitted, not adding that it was the single most terrifying thing she had ever seen.

Carol nodded. "That wasn't him in the driving seat," she said.

"What?" Hermione asked, startled. She'd suspected, of course, what with the way Dumbledore had reacted and the sheer power on display… then again, Harry had demonstrated that he had no shortage of that. But to have it so bluntly confirmed. "Who was it? _What_ was it?"

"That's for Harry to say," Carol said. "And he might not want to. It's a bit painful for him."

"It's about his mother, isn't it?" Hermione said. "Whatever she did that protected him from Voldemort, it protected him again."

"You're sharp," Carol said after a moment. "Scary sharp." She sighed. "Yeah, it's along those lines." She shook he head. "Anwyay. I've seen Harry fight, when it's actually him doing the fighting. And not just when he's fighting, when he's so angry that he comes out on the other side of rage. He gets cold, ruthless and, frankly, downright vicious. His normal morals go completely out the window. To give you one example, when we got into HYDRA's base last year, he switched HYDRA Agents off without blinking – not killed them, knocked them out," she added, at Hermione's suddenly horrified look. "Even so, I think you know as well as I do how he's normally really careful about not going in other people's heads without asking."

"He once told me that the very idea made him feel sick," Hermione said quietly. "It revolted him. And he's always been frightened of his telepathic powers."

Carol grimaced. "Yes and no," she said. "He's scared of them still, what they could do, but he's much more willing to use them. Use them for scary things, if he has to." She waved away Hermione's questions. "It's for him to tell, if he wants to – which he probably doesn't. Anyhow, during that fight I was talking about... it looked like I'd been killed by that necromancer, Gravemoss, and the others were in a bad way. This guy's a Loki level sorcerer, jacked up even further by the Darkhold and by our standards, got some serious physical superpowers. Plus, judging by how Diana reacted around him, there was something seriously off about his presence. Even _I_ could feel something was wrong about him and I'm about as psychic as a turnip. All of that, Harry wouldn't stand a chance, right? He'd be crippled by the bad vibes before he could even move and if he did, he'd be destroyed."

"Right," Hermione said. It sounded like a logical conclusion.

"Well, he didn't. He got mad. He got mad and he reached in with his telekinesis and ripped Gravemoss' ribcage open and tore his heart out," Carol said.

Hermione stared at her in horror.

"It didn't stick, he freaked out a little afterwards, and there was more to it," Carol said. "But that doesn't matter. What matters is that he was capable of doing something like that. You've seen him fight to survive, maybe, or to save someone. That's all well and good. I've seen that too. But when someone he cares about is hurt, though, a switch flicks in his brain and something scary happens: the brakes come off and the darkness comes out to play. I've seen him fight to kill and let me tell that it is one of the most frightening things I have ever seen."

"I can imagine," Hermione said quietly.

Carol let out a mirthless laugh, a disturbingly old and cynical sound for a girl who couldn't be more than sixteen years old. "Trust me, Hermione, you can't," she said. "And that's a good thing, because that's not the sort of thing you want in your head." Her expression turned grave. "I may not have known him as long as you have, or for very long in the grand scheme of things, but Harry is my best friend. We've been through hell together. And... I trust him. That's not something I'm used to or very good at doing. Part of why I trust him is because that rage, it scares him even more than it does everyone else and he's working on controlling it, something he's actually pretty good at now, even though it's really fucking hard since he's a psychic and where those powers are concerned, thought pretty much equals action. But he tries. He tries so goddamn hard. He watches his own thoughts every moment of every day, second-guessing each and every single one, because he couldn't bear the thought of slipping up and hurting someone."

"Are you trying to scare me off?" Hermione asked. "Away from Harry? Because it won't work."

"Good, because I want the opposite, actually. I'm trying to say that there are things about Harry that you don't know and that there's a dark side to him," Carol said. "It's like... all the experiences that should have fucked him up horribly, everything from having his mom's murder as his first memory, his horrendous abuse by those Dursley assholes and all the insane things he's gone through, stuff that that I can't even find the words for, like all of it got distilled into something dark. Something dark that he keeps boxed up in the back of his mind, probably because it's the only way he managed to stay sane."

"Harry's a good person."

"Exactly. He is one of the sweetest, kindest and best people I've ever met, an adorable dork who would do literally anything for someone he didn't even know without even thinking twice," Carol said. "I'm telling you this because I want him to stay that way. Because he can't do it alone, even if he thinks he can. I watch his back, the same way he watches mine. We cover each other's blindspots. And I can't do that while he's at school. Because sometimes, his dark side gets out of its box and you need to be ready when it does."

Hermione was silent for a while. "I will," she said eventually. "But tell me one thing first: the way you talk about what's going on his mind… you seem very familiar with it. Did Harry tell you about it?"

Carol was silent for a long moment. "Not in so many words," she said eventually. "But he showed me a thing or two about himself. Same way I showed him a thing or two about me."

Hermione's eyes widened. Did she mean… No. She couldn't, they couldn't, have.

Then again, she thought, Harry was a very handsome young man these days, even though he wasn't entirely aware of it, tall, leanly muscular and looking at least three years older than he was, his uniquely green eyes, scar and the newly developed lock of white hair adding a layer of mystery that Hermione knew from observation was often considered attractive.

Carol, in her own way, was of much the same mould: tall, muscular but curved in ways that drew the eye of men and boys alike, with golden blonde hair and warm blue eyes that nevertheless carried a glint that warned that this was not a person to be trifled with. Like Harry, her appearance belied her age, even more than his did.

Hermione didn't doubt that most people missed the glint in her eye and saw, frankly, a sex object. She equally didn't doubt that a) Harry didn't see her that way, b) he noticed that glint and if anything, was drawn to it. As far as she could tell, Harry's magnetic attraction to danger extended to his taste in women. He'd certainly seemed particularly drawn to the very dangerous Betsy Braddock, and as she'd seen when she visited the Tower late last year, to the ridiculously dangerous Natasha Romanova.

This, combined with the sense that they were somehow older than their chronological and biological ages would suggest, that their experiences had aged them significantly, and the indefinable but definite bond that existed between them, so strong that they slipped into telepathic conversation by accident, the level of trust that had been implied, made her wonder. Previously, she'd marked them down as entirely platonic, but after the things they'd been through together…

"No."

That jolted Hermione out of her thoughts, to see Carol rolling her eyes, obviously irritated. "I'm sorry?" she asked.

"I know what you're thinking and the answer is no," Carol said. "We're just friends. When I said showed, I meant psychically." She glanced over at Harry. "I mean, yes, he is hot and the poor boy will not know what has hit him when he gets back to that school of yours because the girls will be all over him, but we're just friends."

Hermione nodded. "To be honest, they'd already noticed him last year," she said. "One moment, he was just Harry to them, the next…"

"Yeah, growth spurts will do that," Carol said, voice more than a little bitter. Hermione could only surmise that she was speaking from personal experience.

"They won't bother him, though," she said. "I'll make sure of that."

Carol eyed her, and grinned. "I bet you will," she said. "But like I said: Me and him? Just friends." She gave Hermione a quizzical look. "What about you two?"

"What? Me and Harry?" Hermione asked, startled, before entertaining the thought for a moment. A moment later, she burst into laughter. The very idea was absurd. "He's handsome enough, I suppose, but we'd drive each other mad," she said. "Besides, Harry only very rarely remembers that I'm actually a girl." She smiled. "Like you put it: just friends."

Carol nodded.

Hermione's mind, meanwhile, was one that was rarely at rest. So it latched onto her hypothesis of, for want of a better word, Harry's type and ran with it. The result was that while Harry did tend to be attracted to frightening women, if you took that logic to its inevitable conclusion, Harry would have fallen for Professor McGonagall some time ago. She smiled and shook her head. Well, if that wasn't a lesson not to jump to conclusions, she didn't know what was.

Carol cocked an eyebrow, and Hermione said, "Just a funny thought."

Carol nodded. "We all get those," she said, then stuck out a hand. "Nice meeting you, Hermione."

Hermione shook it. "And you, Carol."

OoOoO

After Harry said his goodbyes to Hermione, it transpired that he had been talking to Jean-Paul both verbally, about unimportant things, and psychically, about something else.

He'd had a thought, a sudden flash of inspiration, from out of the blue. So he'd talked to Jean-Paul about taking him somewhere, without Bucky, a place he'd been meaning to go: Little Whinging, the neighbourhood in which he'd grown up. It was, he said, to get some closure, and he intended on going alone.

However, predictably Carol insisted that he didn't go alone. _Someone's got to watch your back,_ she said.

 _Carol, even if I did run into any of my childhood bullies and they tried anything, they wouldn't stand a chance,_ Harry said.

 _I know,_ Carol said. _That's kind of my point._

Harry's expression closed off.

 _Look, Harry, you're going to be going back to the place where you spent the worst years of your life,_ Carol said. _Which, if I'm honest, is most of it._

Harry snorted. _True,_ he said. _You think I might snap._

 _I think you'd have to be made of stone not to feel anything, and you'd have to be Natasha not to show it,_ Carol said. _And I'm not coming along as your restaining bolt or whatever. Well, not mainly. Mainly, I'm coming along because… I don't think this is something you should put yourself through alone, no matter what masochistic instincts you have going. If you really don't want me along, fine. I'll stay behind._ _But…_ She reached out a hand. _You don't have to do it alone._

Harry's expression softened as he looked at the hand. Then, he took it. "Thanks," he said quietly.

"You all ready to go?" Bucky asked, then smirked. "Or to do whatever you're planning."

All three maintained expressions of perfect innocence. Too perfect.

"Don't look so surprised," he began, then stopped. He didn't physically move, but his entire demeanour changed. One moment, there was a relaxed young man keeping an eye on his charges on a day out, the next moment, there was the Soldier.

"Bucky?" Harry asked.

"Go," Bucky said calmly. "Have your fun, then go back to the Tower. I've got something to take care of."

"We can help," Harry sad, looking him in the eye.

"Your standard weapon in combat is large energy blasts," Bucky said, without changing tone. "We're in a crowded street, full of people with magical powers. You cut loose, they'll panic, and soon a large chunk of London will be rubble. Again. Go. I'll handle this."

Harry grimaced, then exchanged looks with the others. "Fine," he said. "Jean-Paul."

And just like that, all three of them were gone. Bucky checked the bug he'd placed on Harry and nodded when he saw that they were heading out of the city.

"Okay, Victor," he said under his breath. "You want to play? I'll play."

Then, he checked his weapons and set off, while considering which one to use.

There was, after all, more than one way to skin a cat.

OoOoO

"What do you think that Bucky was going on about?" Carol asked, as soon as they stopped.

"I don't know," Harry said. "I didn't sense anything in particular. Of course, surrounded by lots of magical people and creatures and…" He made a face. "I wasn't looking."

"Creatures of great power usually have a distinctive mental presence, _non_?" Jean-Paul said. "Therefore, if you did not sense something out of the ordinary, it was not a being of great power."

"So Bucky can handle it," Carol said. "And he's taken on things big and bad enough to make your senses scream before, Harry. It's probably best we stayed back and let him work."

Harry nodded reluctantly. "We could have handled it," he said. "I mean, if it wasn't that powerful…"

"The Winter Soldier was not that powerful, and he nearly killed your father," Jean-Paul said bluntly. "And I believe that you did not sense him either, correct?"

Harry whirled on him, eyes blazing with anger. Jean-Paul held his gaze without blinking. After several long, tense moments, Harry subsided and nodded curtly. "You're right," he said.

"Wow," Carol said. "This place is so…" She looked around at the identical houses. " _Normal_."

"Yeah," Harry said quietly. "It is. Very normal. The people round here pride themselves on that. It's very normal, very quiet, and except for when Dudley's gang were playing 'Harry Hunting', very dull."

"You think anyone will recognise you?" Carol asked.

"I doubt it," Harry said. "Last time most of them saw me I was a foot shorter, thin and wearing glasses and Dudley's old clothes." His gaze swivelled up to the white locks. "And I didn't have those."

"You do look pretty different," Carol admitted. "Act different too."

"Really?"

"Yes," Jean-Paul said. "You are more confident. More willing to assert yourself. And your voice is rather deeper, too."

Harry grunted.

"What were you and Draco talking about, by the way?" Carol asked.

Harry was silent for a moment. "He knows," he said eventually.

"About what?"

Harry silently lifted the phoenix feather around his neck.

"Your mom?" Carol asked.

Harry shook his head. "Not in so many words," he said. "He knows about the Phoenix. He knows I have a bit of the Phoenix in me. I'm not sure what he knows about mum."

"Even so, how does he know?" Jean-Paul asked, frowning.

"Apparently, I'm not the only one with the Sight," Harry said. "Which isn't the most helpful thing to say, since most every wandless Wizard has it, along with every Asgardian mage and… you get the idea."

"Yeah, but isn't Draco wanded?" Carol asked.

"Yeah," Harry said. "That's what puzzled me. And his mind… it's shielded. Really, really tightly shielded. I was trying to pick up a stray thought or two, but I could barely even pick emotions."

"What did he want?" Carol asked.

"To let me know that he knew," Harry said. "And to be careful about using it, my Phoenix power."

"Wait, hang on, I thought that it was just a protection," Carol said.

"That's what I thought," Harry said. "But I tapped into it when Voldemort turned up."

"The giant firebird thing, huh? I should have guessed."

Harry shook his head. "No, that was just me," he said. "It was just before. Long story, Voldemort drew me, dad, and Tony into a clearing with the Dark Mark, a lot of Ministry witches and wizards too. It was chaos, everyone throwing everything at each other, while I was trying to protect Pepper in your body. And Voldemort nudged dad's mind, enough so that when he saw my psychic bubble go up, he lashed out. My shield wasn't going to be strong enough. But just as Mjolnir came down, I…" He shook his head. "It was like a fire in my mind. And suddenly, my shield went multi-coloured, Mjolnir hit it, and everything standing within a hundred yards suddenly wasn't, trees and all." He paused. "Also, my clothes went all red and gold and Phoenix shaped."

"Phoenix shaped?"

Harry grimaced. "It's hard to explain if you haven't seen it," he said. "They changed back afterwards."

" _Mon dieu,_ " Jean-Paul said quietly. "So, you can use the power of the Phoenix."

"I'm not sure how, maybe only when I'm in real danger, it's…" Harry said, then trailed off. "Yeah. Only a little bit. According to Draco, it's only a fragment, though how the hell he knows I have no idea. But yeah, I think so."

"That… is scary," Carol said. "I mean, no offence, but your powers are crazy strong enough to begin with."

"I know," Harry said unhappily. "Draco said that it was dangerous and that I shouldn't use it unless I really have to. Not just because it's hard to control, but because 'the power of the Phoenix isn't meant to touch the world for long in one place. Every use of it sends a ripple through the Astral Plane, opening cracks only barely closed, and opening doors that should never be opened.'"

"Well, that's creepy," Carol said.

"You say that he changed his outlook," Jean-Paul said suddenly. "Unexpectedly."

Harry nodded. "Just after dad came back," he said. "It was like he'd grown up overnight."

"So, he changed unexpectedly immediately after an event of great importance, he has an exceptionally well shielded mind, and he knows the Phoenix well," Jean-Paul said. "Far better than most, anyway." He looked grim. "I am getting a bad feeling, _mes chéris_ , a very bad feeling."

"Aw no," Carol groaned. "Don't tell me you're thinking what I think you're thinking."

Jean-Paul nodded.

"Damn. I was getting to like the guy."

"There's no proof," Harry said, frowning unhappily. He'd come to like the new and improved Draco. The concept that someone else had simply taken his place and simply acted his way into Harry's good graces was not a pleasant one. "And why would he risk revealing himself to me, of all people?"

"I do not know about you, _mon cher_ ," Jean-Paul said. "But with all respect to your mother, if I knew what the Phoenix was capable of and I were in his shoes, I would risk breaking my cover over even the tiniest fragment of her power." He shrugged. "Assuming that it is a cover in the first place."

Harry's unhappy frown remained in place, but he nodded, conceding the logic of this. "I'll talk to dad and uncle Loki about it," he said.

Jean-Paul nodded. "Then if you will excuse me, _mes ch_ _éris_ , I have an errand to attend to. I will be back in an hour."

And with that, he vanished in a blur of golden lightning.

"So," Carol said, after a moment. "This has been an interesting day."

Harry snorted. "Just a bit," he said. "You got on with Hermione?"

Carol nodded. "Yeah. Nice girl," she said. "Tougher than she seems. Maybe doesn't have your measure as well as she thinks she does."

Harry looked puzzled.

"She's never seen you in a fight," Carol said.

Harry opened his mouth.

"That thing with the troll doesn't count."

"She saw the fight at Easter, too," Harry said.

"Wait, what?"

Harry explained the entirety of 'the Pensieve Incident'.

"That… sounds horrendous," Carol said quietly. "God, the poor girl. And that Ron guy, too. That must have sucked beyond telling."

Harry nodded.

Carol squeezed his hand. "You know, this kind of proves what I was saying to her," she said. "About you. About your powers."

"What? That they're dangerous? That I'm dangerous?" Harry said bitterly.

Carol rolled her eyes. "No," she said. "That they're dangerous, yes, but that you know it, and that you work so hard to keep them in check, every second of every day. It's amazing, it really is."

Harry looked into her eyes and saw frank admiration, tempered with a fond irritation.

"It also shows how far you've come," she added. "I mean, from that, to performing emotional surgery on me."

"That didn't exactly turn out the way it was intended," Harry said.

Carol smiled. _I don't mind,_ she said.

Harry couldn't stop the smile blooming on his face.

 _There's the smile Diana was talking about,_ Carol said. _It really is kind of lovely, I can see what she meant. It makes you look like Jean, actually._

 _Really?_

 _Uh-huh._

 _Your smile's pretty lovely too,_ Harry said. _The real smile, I mean. Not the smirk._

 _There is nothing wrong with my smirk,_ Carol said defensively. _Besides, you smirk too – you probably picked it up from Tony._

 _Or dad. Or Loki. Or Natasha. Or Clint. Or Darcy. Or Sirius. Or even Wanda. It's not like there's a shortage of candidates._

 _True, true._

By this point, they had reached the swings in the park, settling down on them.

"So," Carol said aloud. "Small, dull park. More of the same, I guess."

"Yeah," Harry said. "I first met Wanda around here."

"Oh?"

Harry nodded. "She kept an eye on me for a while," he said. "Tried to send me cards and presents. The cards all got torn up or burnt and the presents all went to Dudley or were chucked out."

Carol glowered. "The more I hear about these people, the more I want to make them suffer," she said.

"They're already suffering," Harry said. "Apparently. Loki was a bit sketchy on the details when I asked him. Director Fury handled it."

"Handled," Carol said slowly.

"They're alive," Harry said. "Or were when I last asked. I think Fury just locked them away somewhere nasty. Dudley went into foster care."

"I'm surprised he didn't," Carol began, then stopped.

"You're surprised Loki didn't kill them," Harry said quietly.

"Yeah. Sorry."

"I can't blame you. I was a bit surprised too," Harry said. "He said to me that he'd happily have done it. Dad was certainly considering it – Tony had to hold him back, in full armour, and talk him down. Personally, I think Loki just preferred to let them suffer for the rest of their lives."

There was silence.

"I wonder how Bucky's doing," Carol said.

"Probably fine," Harry said. "Bucky can handle himself."

Carol snorted. "There's the understatement of the century," she said, then looked up sharply.

"Carol?"

"Listen," she said.

Harry did, and he heard mocking jeers, carried on the late summer breeze. He closed his eyes briefly and extended his psychic senses, almost immediately detecting a group of minds, four oozing petty malice, one hurt and afraid.

"Come on," he said, setting off at a jog, Carol following. Barely a minute or two later, they found four boys their age surrounding a fifth, one notably smaller than the others. And with a jolt, Harry recognised them.

"Piers, Malcolm, Dennis and Gordon," he said. "Why am I not surprised?"

"You know these ass-clowns?" Carol asked, as the four turned, puzzled.

"Unfortunately," Harry said.

"Who the hell are you?" Piers asked, then leered at Carol. It only compounded his resemblance to a rat. "And who's your friend?"

"So not interested," Carol said contemptuously.

"Maybe I can change your mind," Piers said.

"I really doubt that," Carol said.

At that moment, the younger boy they'd been tormenting made a break for it, but was grabbed by Gordon.

"Let him go," Harry said.

"Or what?" Gordon asked

"I make you," Harry said.

"You've got some big balls on you," Piers said, striding over and trying to bully Harry backwards. Unfortunately, he was an inch shorter and thinner, so didn't quite manage it.

"And you've got terrible breath," Harry said.

Piers grabbed him by the front of his shirt. "Okay, I don't care who you are, but I think you should apologise, before you start having to pick up teeth."

"Interesting suggestion," Harry said, then moved in a blur. There was a crunch and Piers let out a cry of pain, clutching his nose. Harry had nutted him.

"Nice," Carol said. "Where did you learn that?"

"Sif," Harry said.

"Cool."

"Thanks," Harry said, then raised his voice as he sauntered forwards, Dudley's old gang watching him warily as their leader spat blood. It had been quite a comprehensive headbutt. "I suppose I can't blame you for not recognising me. Last time we met, I was a lot smaller. I didn't have white in my hair. I had glasses, too. And I was your old leader's favourite punching bag."

There was a long moment, then the blood began to drain from their faces – and in Piers' case, down their faces too.

Harry smiled a smile with lots of teeth and no humour. "Now, going by how much it was in the papers and the fact that you're all just about able to read, I think you know who I am. Who my dad is. Maybe you've even figured out why Dudley never laid a hand on me after I turned eleven."

"Y-y-you're not human," one of them managed.

"Half-human," Harry said. "On my mother's side. I'm still related to Dudley, more's the pity." He leaned against the wall, arms nonchalantly folded and legs crossed. "I've also got anger issues. Who knew? And hanging out with my family, their friends – you know, the Avengers – means that I've picked up a trick or three. So, unless you want me to work out those anger issues on you, you're going to let the kid go."

"Or what?" Gordon said, and sneered. "Maybe you got a bit bigger, but it's still four against one."

"Two," Carol said. "Though, honestly, I'm just inclined to sit back and watch him kick your asses. Do you know where to get popcorn round here?"

Her tone, though, was belied by her eyes, which were watching Harry carefully.

"I got a whole lot more than that," Harry said, and his eyes flashed. Gordon's hand released the boy's arm and flew up to punch himself in the face. The boy, eyes wide, scarpered.

"What the…" one of the others, Malcolm went, edging backwards.

"You're a freak," Piers managed, through bloodied lips and a broken nose. "Just like Dudley and his mum and dad always said. A freak!"

"A freak with about ten years worth of punching bottled up and superpowers," Harry said. "Whereas you're the one who always held people's arms behind their backs for Dudley to punch. Never did it yourself, never looked anyone in the eye, you were always the small one, the one with the ideas, the one they kept around because you had more imagination than they did and you made yourself useful. You're a coward, Piers, you always have been."

Piers let out a yell of anger that turned into a wheezing whimper, as Harry easily blocked his wild haymaker and delievered a hammer blow into his plexus, then kicked his ankles out from under him, dropping him like a sack of potatoes.

"Stay down," Harry advised.

Piers glared at him, then looked at the others. "Guys," he hissed. "What are you waiting for?"

The others, large, bulky boys, all Harry's height or taller, and most definitely wider, hesitated.

Harry smirked and beckoned. He was starting to enjoy this. "Come on," he said. "Tell you what, I'll make it fair. I won't even use my powers."

After another moment, they charged.

Normally, three against one is something that will end very badly for the one, especially if the three have some faint knowledge of teamwork. This one, however, was a good deal stronger than any of the three, a trained fighter, and much, much faster.

So in the end, the fight was swift, savage and very one sided. One wild punch caught Harry on the cheek, but the puncher, Malcolm, caught a knee to the stomach and a punch to the eye. Gordon took an elbow in the throat. Dennis was most unfortunate, since Harry hit him with the nearest thing that came to hand – Piers.

Less than a minute had passed, and Harry, bloody knuckled, slightly bruised and barely breathing hard, was the only one left standing. Dudley's gang, his childhood tormentors were in a groaning heap on the floor.

It wasn't a satisfying as he'd expected, as he'd hoped. Once, he'd have loved to be able to do this. Not out of any real desire to make them suffer. He just wanted, like most bullied kids, to turn the tables. Just once. Now, having fought monsters and murderers, dark lords and demon gods, it just felt… kind of pointless, really.

Admittedly, even now he'd still dearly love to go a few rounds with Dudley, because some scars didn't fade that fast. But this lot… all they'd ever been were the me-too-ists, the ones who'd followed Dudley because he was the biggest, strongest and thickest bully in the area. The only real reason they were still bullying now was because that was all they really knew how to do, the only way they could feel like big, strong men. It was kind of pathetic really.

"They're not worth it," he said aloud.

"You're right," Carol said.

"Why didn't you step in?"

"Because you weren't doing anything permanent and I figure that assholes like this could do with being given a taste of their own medicine," Carol said.

Harry nodded. "It won't change them, though," he said. "It won't make them better. I found that out with the Ravenclaws. With Luna."

Carol put a hand on his shoulder. "Yeah," she said. "There's not much you can do about that."

Harry paused. "Maybe I can," he said slowly.

"Harry?" Carol asked carefully. "Are you doing what I think you're doing?"

"I'm not rewriting brains," Harry said. "Just…" He hauled up Piers, who groaned and focused on him, then cringed, expecting another beating.

" _Look at me_ ," Harry said, voice echoing with command. Piers did. "You are an arsehole," Harry said, voice still still strange, but with different, subtler harmonics.

"I am an arsehole," Piers repeated tonelessly.

"You will stop picking on other people."

"I will stop picking on other people."

"You will go home and rethink your life and be a better person."

"I will go home and rethink my life and be a better person."

Harry then turned to the others. "You will all do the same."

"We will all do the same," the other three mumbled, in that same toneless voice.

Harry nodded. "Good," he said, voice normal again. "Now go. And take your mates with you."

Piers nodded, and started dragging the rest of Dudley's old gang upright.

"Jedi mind trick," Carol said, tone neutral. "Cute."

Harry nodded. "More a strong suggestion than a command," he said. "Maybe they will change. Maybe they won't. It's up to them." He shrugged. "But at the very least, it should make them a little less inclined to go around beating up little kids for the next couple of weeks."

"I'd have thought that having the crap kicked out of them would do that," Carol said, watching them go.

Harry turned to her. "You don't think it was the right thing to do?" he asked. "It's just… well, I tried the beating people up approach on the Ravenclaws. Their Quidditch team, to be exact. But it didn't make them stop what they were doing with Luna, hiding her stuff. It just made them hide it better." He watched Dudley's old gang stagger away. "Same thing would have happened here. So… Jedi mind trick. Non-invasive, just, you know, a suggestion."

Carol watched him for a moment, then smiled. "And you wonder why I say you're basically Luke Skywalker," she said, linking arms with him.

"I am not."

"Oh, you so are."

OoOoO

Such lightness could not last forever.

As the hour wound down, and they wandered along the streets of Little Whinging, passing Harry's old school and heading towards the doctor's surgery.

"I'm guessing you saw the inside of that a lot," Carol said.

"Not as much as you might think," Harry said. "Though the doctor, Doctor Milbury, was nice."

"Milbury," Carol said, and snorted.

Harry frowned.

"Sorry," Carol said. "It's just, seriously, can you sound any more posh English?" She saw Harry's expression. "Sorry."

Harry nodded. "He talked to me a lot," he said. "Didn't just ignore the bruises and stuff like everyone else did. He was pretty serious about his check-ups, actually. And he gave me sweets. Dudley ate them, of course, but it was the thought that counted."

"Why'd he never report it to social services?" Carol asked.

"Maybe he did," Harry said. "He disappeared before I started Hogwarts."

"You think that he asked too many questions and the big bad telepath disappeared him?"

"Maybe," Harry said grimly. "Or… maybe not."

"What makes you think that?"

"Well, the fact that he's walking towards us is a definite clue."

"Huh," Carol said, and eyed the man walking towards them. He was a well-dressed man in his early fifties, with greying dark hair, brown eyes and an astonished expression.

"Harry?" he said. "Is that you?"

"Doctor Milbury," Harry said, shaking his hand.

"I knew it was you," Milbury said in a rush. He looked nervous. "When I saw you, just now. I thought that it couldn't be, that you'd never come back here – after all, why would you? This is fortuitous, very fortuitous indeed." He turned to Carol. "And who is your friend?"

"Carol," she said, shaking his hand. "Carol Danvers."

A spark of interest seemed to appear in his eyes, before vanishing. "Lovely to meet you," he said.

"Likewise," she said. "Why did you say that it was fortuitous? Isn't that British for lucky?"

"It is," Milbury said, before flicking glances left and right. He was definitely nervous.

"Doctor Milbury," Harry said. "Are you okay?"

"Fine," Milbury said. "Just fine. I –" He stopped. "Perhaps we should talk inside."

Harry and Carol exchanged a look, then followed him into the surgery, and into one of the offices. "Are you working here again, doctor?" Harry asked.

"Oh, no, just collecting a few files," Milbury said. "A few pieces of data. One or two things that I managed to hide."

"Hide?" Carol asked.

"The telepath," Harry said quietly. "That's why you left. They came after you."

Milbury started. "You know?" he asked, then shook his head. "Of course you would, a psychic as powerful as you, it would be impossible to conceal it forever."

"You know I'm a psychic?" Harry asked, surprised.

"Of course," Milbury said. "I've known for a very long time that you had the potential, and now, well…" He let out a strained chuckle. "It's like standing next to a generator, no, a nuclear reactor!"

" _You're_ a psychic?" Harry asked, astonished.

"Makes sense," Carol remarked. "If you're going to try dodge a psychic, it probably helps to be one in the first place."

"Quite, Miss Danvers," Milbury said, rummaging through the back of his filing cabinet. He picked at the back of the drawer for a moment, before a panel came away, revealing… nothing. "Ah, here we are," he said. Then, he pressed a hand to the panel, and suddenly, part of the wall slid away, to reveal an alcove, containing several files.

"What are these?" Harry asked, as Milbury pulled them out.

"My medical data on you, Harry," Milbury said. "Complete with analysis of your M-Gene, which allows you to perform magic, your X-Gene, which gives you your psychic abilities and, well…" He looked down at the files and lowered his voice to a whisper. "I even believe that I isolated the traits that you have inherited from your father. That make you Asgardian."

"I… I didn't show any sign of dad's side of things until last year," Harry said, frowning.

"Nothing overt, perhaps," Milbury said. "But there were little things, here and there. You healed faster than most boys would in your position, more than can simply be ascribed to magic. You were a little tougher, too, quicker. And, well." He smiled. "DNA does not lie, even when it is the DNA of a demigod."

"Harry's dad was mortal when Harry was, you know, made," Carol said. "And not just stripped of his powers, but in an actual mortal body. Doesn't that change things a little?"

"It does," Milbury said. "Which makes this research so important."

"Why?" Harry asked.

"Because, Harry, it, combined with further analysis of your current state, could contain the secret to something that makes the super soldier serum look like a play thing," Milbury said, excited and nervous at the same time. "A road-map of the process in which someone entirely mortal steadily becomes a _god_." He poked Harry in the chest. "The secrets to understanding divinity is in you, Harry."

There was a long moment of silence.

"I'm guessing that that's what the telepath wanted," Harry said eventually, voice quiet. "That's why they kept me here. So they could study me. That's what that lab was for, to find out what made me tick."

"Not entirely," Milbury said. "I think that the interaction of your M-Gene and your X-Gene was also of interest, let alone the complexities of how those factors interacted with your incipient divinity. Your psychic abilities alone, and their development as compared to those of your cousin, provide enough material for a lifetime of papers."

"Back off the scientific obsession, doc," Carol said. "Harry?"

Harry had frozen, staring at Milbury. "How did you know that my cousin was a psychic?" he asked quietly.

"Well, you mentioned her," Milbury said. "Mentioned what she did to your other cousin, Dudley, even if you did elide the details somewhat. As a psychic myself, I could hardly miss it."

"No," Harry said slowly. "I didn't tell you. The next day, after she left, I forgot she even existed for years afterwards."

"Maybe your aunt and uncle, then," Milbury said.

"No, they didn't take Dudley to hospital, I remember that much," Harry said slowly, advancing on Milbury. "They were scared of having to explain what happened, of looking mad. They wouldn't have told anyone. Unless…" His eyes narrowed. "You did house calls, didn't you, Doctor Milbury. If that's even your real name. You're not here by chance, are you? Somehow, you _knew_ that I was coming."

Milbury's expression had been even more nervous and deeply confused. Then, the expression simply vanished, fading away to be replaced by one of cool detachment. He nodded. "I made sure that you did," he said. "That thought, that sudden inspiration to come here. Don't you wonder where it came from?"

Harry's blood ran cold.

"I have invested a lot of time and effort into you over the years, Harry," Milbury said. "I will not see it wasted."

Carol struck without warning, putting all her super soldier derived power behind a punch that would have smashed through concrete.

Milbury caught it without even looking away from Harry, responding with a swift and savage punch of his own, one that dropped Carol like a ton of bricks.

"Just because I disdain physical combat," he said coolly. "Does not mean that I am not good at it."

Harry snarled and lashed out with a psychic blast that should have torn Milbury's mind to shreds. Instead, it was batted away by another mind, with almost contemptuous ease.

As Harry whirled to face the new presence, the new and strangely familiar mind, Milbury remarked, "And just because I am here does not mean that I am here alone."

The new presence emerged, and Harry stared in shock.

" _Jean?"_ he whispered.

Then, she reached past his defences with a tendril of blue-white power, as easy as breathing, and sent him to sleep.

"It's done, Doctor Essex," he heard her say, as everything faded away.

Then, all was darkness.

 **Well, well, well. Isn't this interesting? Sinister has finally revealed himself, and he's not alone. Alongside him is a young lady, identical to Jean, who happens to be the mysterious person whose eyes were glowing with blue power at certain points during this book and the last. I wonder who she could be…**

 **And more to the point, what could Sinister and the Red Room want with Harry? Why have they taken him now? Just how screwed are they going to be when the Avengers and Wanda find out?**

 **Wait and see (hopefully not as long as last time).**


	8. Chapter 8: Forever Red - Part II

**Right, ladies and gents, here we are again – and rather quicker than last time. I've mostly sorted out how I'm going to arrange this arc, which is mostly what held me up last time. Of course, it might be a little rough – I've chopped and changed a lot and I've had about six and a half hours sleep in the last… oh, thirty-six? Forty? Something like that. Plus, finals are coming up.**

 **In any case, now we get into the meat of this particular mystery. Questions are answered, including ones you didn't even know you had, while many more, I think, will be raised. A few unexpected characters will make (re)appearances. And this is where things start to get darker...**

Avengers Mansion was, unsurprisingly, in chaos.

Thor had, predictably, reacted badly to his son being kidnapped again. The fact that one of his son's friends had been snatched as well only made it worse. Loki, also looking severely displeased, had stayed for long enough to ensure that Thor's anger wouldn't result in New York being consumed by a colossal hurricane and that he would stay put for the time being, then vanished to check his sources.

The rest of the team was similarly furious: Bruce, eyes glowing green, had gone into the specially installed quiet room to calm down, Tony was simultaneously scanning every CCTV camera in the city and beefing up the Mansion's security to hitherto unimagined levels in a truly epic fit of paranoia, Clint had embraced the sort of calm usually seen in snipers about to take a shot and Steve had, after being persuaded not to immediately suit up and head out, gone to the gym to destroy some heavy bags.

Of the rest, Pepper had been profoundly worried, but had largely maintained her calm by doing what she usually did and ensuring that the Avengers remained functional while keeping Ada either in her arms or within arm's reach at all times, Jane was providing moral support for Thor and by her presence, forcing him to remain in control, and Darcy was scowling and toying with her taser.

In short, the Mansion was on a knife edge and teetering, something not helped by the arrival of a furious General O'Neill, whose joy at being called out of a budget meeting had been severely curtailed when he'd found that his beloved niece had been kidnapped. The Avengers were only spared the sharp end of this fury because of the timely arrival of Ivan Petrovitch, Natasha's old mentor, who had been retrieved from his quiet retirement by Loki.

He had calmly and bluntly explained that if whoever was behind this had not wanted Carol for a specific reason – taking it as read that they would want Harry – they would have killed her either as a witness or the moment that her usefulness as a hostage had expired. And though Loki's tracking spells couldn't get a fix, his divinations via her shield, gifted by Odin and mystically connected to her, revealed that she was alive, if not necessarily well.

"Your family's heritage has been discovered before, General," Petrovitch said. "When the Red Room kidnapped your mother. While her mother, Peggy Carter, very thoroughly destroyed and salted the earth of that particular base, it is not impossible that some information survived. Some people who remembered certainly did, myself among them."

"You think that the Red Room are behind this?" Steve asked tensely.

"They are one of my suspects," Ivan said.

"HYDRA could have done it," Clint said.

"It is far too soon. Following the events of London, Lucius Malfoy will have crawled under the largest rock he can find, and he will not emerge any time soon," Thor said bitterly.

"HYDRA does not have the resources to do this," Ivan said.

"The same way that they couldn't have infested SHIELD and made inroads into half the NATO armed forces?" O'Neill demanded. "How do we know we aren't dealing with some HYDRA splinter cell?"

"It's possible," Ivan admitted.

"Do we have any other suspects?" Clint asked. "Anyone else powerful enough and crazy enough to do it?"

"It depends on the motive," Ivan said. "If they want him for his DNA, or for what he could become, that would be different from those who would want him for use as a hostage and bargaining chip, or from those who would simply want to eliminate a threat – though I think that is by far the least likely, since he is not dead yet. Of the two that remain, then: in the former scenario; the Weapon X program, HYDRA and the Red Room. In the latter, I would assume mostly supernatural threats; the Red, Grey or White Court, the Order of the Blackened Denarius, the Winter Court, a representative of one of the old pantheons… there are many possibilities."

"It is not the Winter Court," Thor said. "Queen Mab is cold and cruel, yes, but she is calculating. She knows that a war with Asgard would be one that she would lose, and that an offense such as this could only be answered with war." He drummed his fingers on the table, cracking it in the process. With a grimace, he went on. "The vampires would seek to eliminate him outright, and the Red and White Courts are already at war. They neither want nor need more enemies. The Fallen are mad enough, and they would certainly desire Carol as a host. But Harry is, I believe, too much trouble for them to consider worth the effort, limited as they are, and they have never sought open war with Asgard, which is what such an act would inevitably cause. As for one of the old pantheons…"

"Any suspects?" Clint asked.

"Avalon and Olympus," Thor said shortly. "Avalon and Asgard have a long-standing enmity and Avalon is intimately tied up with the land of Britain. The gods of Avalon will be awake and active. As for Olympus… Hera despises demigods. She has encountered Harry before and the encounter ended with her public humiliation. It would be within character for her to arrange this, to avenge her pride and prove that demigods do not belong in this modern age."

"From what I heard, you scared her pretty good," Steve said. "When she and Harry met, I mean."

"Aye," Thor said. "And Lily had words with her too, through Harry." He sighed. "That could be part of the problem."

"How is Hera in keeping up with the times?" Clint asked. "Because I've gone over the tapes, what we've got, and whoever it was, they were operating with very well trained and equipped extraction team, human trained, using a jet with no manifest from a nearby airfield to get out of the country. It vanished off the radar shortly after it got over the North Sea."

"I do not know," Thor said. "Though I doubt that she would think to do so. In any case, she is used to acting with impunity."

"Dark Ages mindset, then," O'Neill said, with a sardonic smile. "Oh joy." The smile vanished. "Look, let's assume that since we're dealing with people who're using human tech, human know-how and going dark as soon as they can, they're human based and not backed by some major level supernatural badass."

"A valid assumption," Ivan said. "Mostly only the vampires truly employ human forces, and it is unlikely to be them. They cannot afford more enemies. And the fashion these days is for superhuman weapons, which makes me think of the Red Room – HYDRA are too recently diminished and Weapon X are still clawing their way back to relevance. Neither would go for an Omega Class being, even if that being is still a child and not fully realised, much less risking crossing the Avengers, on MI13's territory as well. They would start with weaker, more vulnerable targets." He shrugged. "Of course, I cannot be certain, but I believe that only the Red Room would dare."

"Which still leaves the question of how they subdued him in the first place," Clint said. "And am I the only one who's noticed that Nat and Barnes aren't here?"

A sudden, chill silence descended as the implications set in. And not all of what followed was worries for their well-being.

Tony was roused from his preparations to check the transponder beacon in Bucky's metal arm. It had been in London, as expected, moving slowly in Diagon Alley, before suddenly moving fast across the city, as if he was chasing something. Or being chased.

As for Natasha, there was no sign, there hadn't been for days. And that in itself spoke volumes.

"It is the Red Room," Ivan said, now with certainty. "With that spread of targets, all Red Room associated… they are resurrecting old projects." He stroked his beard. "Natalia and Comrade Winter are missing," he said. "If they have been taken, then perhaps the Red Room has made these two moves in concert because it believes that they know something about Miss Danvers and the Serum. Or perhaps it is the priority is punishment."

"Punishment?" Bruce asked quietly.

"For their defiance, the Red Room will break them," Petrovich said. "Perhaps study them both: Comrade Winter's enhancements were never replicated and I believe that Russia's Infinity Formula was a casualty of the post-Cold War upheaval." He looked grim. "Then, depending on the whim of who is in command, they will either force them to serve once more, or they will kill them as an example." He sighed. "If I had to guess, Natalia would be considered too much of a liability and be executed. As for Comrade Winter… the Winter Soldier would rise again."

"What about my son?" Thor asked. "What about Carol?"

"They will both be studied," Petrovich said plainly.

"Studied," Tony said flatly. "As in, experimented on." Bruce was regulating his breathing, trying to stay calm.

Petrovich nodded.

"Wait, how are they all Red Room associated?" Steve asked. "Bucky and Natasha, yes, but Carol and Harry…"

"Are associated with more than you know," a voice said from the door.

Everyone turned. Alison Carter was standing in the doorway, a cold, hard expression on her face. "Incidentally," she said in a voice of steel as she strode in. "I am not inclined to being kept out of the loop, _especially_ where my family is concerned."

Steve and O'Neill both winced.

"Mom," O'Neill began.

"We will be having _words_ later, Jonathan James O'Neill," she said dangerously, and O'Neill winced. "And with you, dad." Steve also winced. "As I will with my godson," she added, eyeing Tony, who was too engrossed in his computers to notice. She turned to the rest. "Carol is associated through me. I was kidnapped by the Red Room as a child, for the serum in my blood. While that was part of a partnership an alien who is long dead, the Red Room were looking to get a viable version of the serum out of it. I suspect that they did – the Infinity Formula. At the very least, it probably helped perfect it."

"What about Harry?" Clint asked.

"A room, the walls dripping with blood'," Thor quoted. "Trelawney's prophecy. She also spoke of a being within it, 'the Ageless Kingmaker, a Thief with a Thousand Faces'. The Red Room. And a creature within it."

"Interesting," Alison said mildly. "But that wasn't what I was referring to." She looked at Ivan. "Hello, Mister Pietrovitch; and yes, I know very well who you are."

"I would expect nothing less, _Vasilisa,_ " Ivan said, moustache twitching in a faint smile.

"Flatterer," Alison said wryly. "I think that I have a theory or two that you might be able to confirm."

"Screw theories, where will they be?" O'Neill demanded. "I'll put a team together and be there within four hours." His tone and expression left no doubt as to the fact that he'd be leading it.

"Any team you could put together wouldn't be a match for the Red Room," Alison said. When O'Neill looked about to protest, she gave him a hard look. "No, Jack. Trust me on this. I've spent the majority of my life fighting these people, I know what they're capable of."

"She is right," Petrovich said. "The Red Room is where monsters live and where they are born. Currently, I believe it is the source of Russia's more successful Iron Man imitations. Whatever they have available, it was sufficient to handle an Omega Class entity, if one still growing into his power. Without at least significant experience of superhuman opponents, your soldiers would be dead men walking."

"How do you know?" O'Neill asked.

"Because I used to work there," Petrovich said. "I defected with Natalia, Natasha. I would rather die than go back, as would she, as would Comrade – as would Barnes. Some have described it as Hell on Earth, General. They are wrong: it is worse. So much worse."

That chilling pronouncement silenced the room.

"He's right, General," Steve said, apparently ignoring the fact that he was talking to his grandson. "Back in the War, I saw brave men who'd fought the Nazis tooth and nail simply be unable to handle fighting superhumans and the supernatural. It takes a different skill set and more importantly, a different frame of mind. You either learn those in training or on the job and your team, whoever you get together, won't have either."

O'Neill opened his mouth to issue a hot reply, thought for a long moment, then, grudgingly, closed it. "Fine," he ground out. "But I want in. And before anyone says anything, this is not my first trip to the world of the weird."

Alison's lips thinned, but when the remaining Avengers looked at her, she nodded.

"What about Carol's parents?" Pepper asked softly.

"I will handle that," Alison said.

"Marie is not going to take this well," Jack predicted. "As for Joe…"

"Joe will know precisely what he needs to and no more," Alison said.

"You're not going to tell him?" Steve asked, frowning. "I know that Carol and he don't see eye to eye, but surely he deserves to know."

"Marie knows the score, Joe doesn't," Alison said bluntly. "And we don't have time to explain it to him." She looked grim. "We have very little time, in fact, if my fears even approach fact."

"And it gets worse," Tony muttered. "Of course it gets worse."

"How?" Thor asked. "How can this possibly get worse?"

"It can always get worse," Alison said, then turned to Ivan. "Tell me, Mister Pietrovitch: what do you know of Project _Krasnyy Syn?"_

Ivan went deathly white, then nodded slowly. "Of course," he said faintly. "I had not thought of it before. I should have realised."

"What is _Krasnyy Syn_?" Steve asked.

"And why do I get the feeling that we're not going to like the answer?" Clint added.

"The short version?" Alison asked. "It's a ghost born of the death throes of the Cold War, one that could never have realistically been made to work. Until now. The long version? Well…"

Alison explained.

Clint was right. They didn't like it.

And if it were at all possible, they liked her proposal of who they were going to talk to next even less.

OoOoO

"I do not like this," Thor growled.

"You've said," Alison said. "And I understand why. Alexander Pierce is a vile, traitorous little worm. However, he is the most likely to know where to find them."

"Remind me why," Thor said, in tones that said he knew perfectly well why.

Loki answered anyway. "Pierce ran the HYDRA within SHIELD, but he also played a significant part in the running of SHIELD itself," he said. "The Red Room was an enemy to both HYDRA and SHIELD, a powerful one, even if it was in the process of rebuilding. and therefore an organisation that he would have watched very carefully. Moreover, brother, we do not have the time to be picky."

Thor ground his teeth and nodded.

After some argument, the composition of those visiting Pierce had been determined based on those for whom this was personal, who had the relevant expertise, and could be trusted not to murder Pierce with their bare hands as soon as they got within reach. While Thor would be sorely tempted, that was an advantage – he was present as a looming potential threat. After all, even Loki could hardly be expected to be able to stop his brother in time if he decided to splatter Pierce across his cell, and, indeed, the surrounding states. And that was if he actually intended to try. Pierce would know that, and it would make him wary.

Of course, he didn't show it.

"You know," Pierce said, as they faced him across the table of the visiting room. "When I was told I was going to have visitors, I really wasn't expecting you three."

He was shackled by hand and by foot, dressed in a standard set of orange prison coveralls, a little thinner than he had once been, a little greyer of hair and wrinklier of skin. And yet, he still looked as confident as he had when he had been one of the most powerful men in the world, the sort of person who could topple a nation with a few words and, were it not for Fury successfully decrypting a desperate phone call from Lucius Malfoy, who he had left to swing in the wind, he still would have been. Indeed, he'd likely have become even more powerful, reaping vast gains from the chaos Malfoy's HYDRA had caused. This would have left most ruing their luck, bitter and irate at best. Pierce, however, was not most.

"Who were you expecting?" Alison asked, eyebrow arched.

"Oh, the usual. Interrogators of all sorts, people wanting me to tell them everything I know about HYDRA," Pierce said. He chuckled, sounding for all the world like the genial grandfather he appeared to be. "I mean, I've told them everything, but they insist on trying to wring more out of me." He shrugged. "What can you do?"

"Liar," Alison said evenly. "You know as well as I do that if you'd given up all your secrets, you would have been executed for treason already. You hold as many you can back, and let them slip out from time to time, enough to convince your interrogators that you're still a potentially valuable resource and therefore worth keeping alive."

Pierce simply chuckled. "You always were a sharp one, Alison," he said. "One of the sharpest SHIELD ever had. Still not quite up to your mother's standard, of course. But then, who is?"

Alison didn't even blink. "Let me cut to the chase," she said. "I know the games that you're playing. For now, I have been content to let you play them. But now, I need information."

"And these gentlemen are here for what purpose? To intimidate me into playing ball?" Pierce asked, then tutted. "You must really be up against it. Though I suppose that having your granddaughter kidnapped for the serum enhanced genetics that you bequeathed on her would make you desperate." He glanced at Loki and Thor, the former of whom was expressionless, the latter of whom was angry, but unable to hide a hint of shock. "Along with her young demigod friend too. Goodness me, a lot has been going on since I was shut away."

Alison didn't flinch, or show any overt sign of surprise. But her expression tightened ever so slightly. And she blinked.

Pierce smiled like a shark. "Oh, I know your little secret," he said. "I always had my suspicions, but I confess, I wasn't certain until Easter. You covered your tracks very well. But once I saw the footage Lucius' people recorded of the fight in the Rockies on that botched acquisition mission, it all fell into place." He sat back. "So: our delightful young couple have been kidnapped by person or persons unknown. And you want my help to find them. What makes you think I'll give it?"

Now it was Alison's turn to smile a predator's smile. _"Krasnyy Syn,_ " she said.

Pierce went pale.

"Yes," she said. "The Red Room are back. And I think we both know that if they get that project off the ground, your days will be counted in _very_ small numbers."

Pierce grimaced. "Fine," he said. "What do you want to know?"

"Know thine enemy," Alison said. "The Red Room was one of the most dangerous enemies of both HYDRA and SHIELD, and if I was hearing whispers about their resurgence in my cosy retirement, I think that you'd have heard a lot more. Where are they operating out of? Who's running it? And who or what might they have at their disposal?"

Pierce grimaced, then nodded.

"Oh, and Mister Pierce," Loki said, breaking his silence and slipping around the table with disturbingly serpentine grace. "I should add that if I don't think that you've been entirely open or honest with us, then I will take what you know from your mind by force. Considering your position, you'll have psychic traps and defences, ones that will probably turn your brain to soup if they are tripped. The only reason I haven't already done so is because we don't want to run the risk that we might miss something."

He smiled a smile that had last been seen in the depths of his madness. "However, if we think for one moment that you are not being entirely… open, then we will run that risk. And on a personal note, may I add that it would be my _very_ great pleasure." He leaned back. "Also, do be concise. Thor's getting impatient."

Thor growled for emphasis.

"You know," Pierce said, pale but still maintaining his calm. "You can knock off the threats. I've already agreed to talk."

"And I understand that, Pierce," Alison said. "However, when dealing with a treacherous worm that'll squirm any way that suits it, I feel that it's best to be unambiguous. And to provide an incentive."

Pierce grunted. "Very well," he said. "Let's get started."

OoOoO

In the meantime, that was not the only confrontation taking place. And this one was rather less civilised.

Carol had, after an uncertain amount of time, come to, with a throbbing headache. For a creepy psychic doctor, that Milbury guy had one hell of a right hook. In any case, the knowledge that she'd been kidnapped with her best friend, did not improve her mood. While Harry himself was nowhere to be seen, she knew he was around for two reasons.

First, to kidnap her, they'd have had to subdue him, and that Milbury guy had seemed more interested in Harry anyway. Second, she could… well, not precisely feel him, as such, but there was a certain awareness, one she thought was connected to their psychic link. It was decidedly muted, but it was there.

How Milbury had subdued Harry she didn't know. Hell, she was a little bit surprised not to be waking up in medical care, with worried Avengers and/or relatives hovering around her, about to receive the news that Harry had done something fatal to Milbury – who, while she didn't exactly approve of killing, especially not where Harry was concerned, what with his understandable issues, she felt that this particular asshole more than had it coming.

So, she thought, looking around the Spartan… well, it sort of looked like a cell. She was certainly lying on some sort of flat bed, surrounded by armed goons.

"Hey," she said, sitting up. As she moved, so did the guns, all of which were now pointed at her. Slowly, she raised her hands. The atmosphere in the room relaxed, but only a little. These guys were taking no chances.

One of them snapped something at her in something that sounded vaguely like Russian. When she looked puzzled, he impatiently gestured at her to stand up. It was only when she did so that she realised that someone had stripped and changed her, underwear included. A feeling of sick violation crept over her.

"Okay," she said. "If it wasn't a lady who changed me, I'm not going to be happy."

That just got the impassive, blank look of a watchful goon waiting for the next thought to arrive.

"Hey, do any of you know where my friend is?" she asked.

This query was ignored, and the guards started chivvying her along. Carol stood her ground. "No, tell me first," she said.

A gun was shoved in her face and an angry stream of language followed close behind.

Right. Time to gamble. "No," she said. "Answers first, then movement. You need me alive."

The gun was jabbed in her stomach and was followed by another stream of angry probably Russian.

"Yep, alive," Carol said, glad that her guess was right. "Right, where's my friend."

The angry Russian grew louder.

Right. Time for another gamble.

"HEY! I _SAID_ : WHERE DID YOU TAKE MY FRIEND?" Carol yelled. She got no answer, and one turned, baton raised threateningly. "Oh?" she said, and settled back into a fighting stance. "I need to beat it out of you? That I can do. Come on then!"

The guard lunged, baton crackling with electricity. He was fast. Carol was faster, swaying to one side and driving a brutal elbow into his cheek. There was a crack and the guard staggered away, swearing foully, in ways that Carol did actually understand. Her grandmother and uncle had given her a comprehensive education in that regard.

Before she could shake some answers out of him, however, the room was suddenly swarming with black clad guards pointing guns at her and shouting angrily. Raising her hands again, Carol backed off.

"So," she said. "Care to tell me who you guys are?"

"They wouldn't, even if they understood you," a woman's voice, low and almost accent-less, said.

"And you do. I was kind of hoping that someone who did would come along if I shouted loud enough," Carol said, as the guards parted to reveal the speaker. She was a woman of above average height, though shorter than Carol herself, with bob cut pale blonde hair and icy blue eyes. She was dressed in a close-fitting black combat suit with a strangely familiar red hourglass on the belt.

"They might have shot you," the woman said.

"I figured that if I was still alive, you want me to stay that way," Carol said. "I took a risk."

"An unusual calculation," the woman said, arching an eyebrow. "For one of your age to make."

"I'm not your usual teenager, as you've probably figured out," Carol said. "Who the hell are you, anyway?"

"I am the Black Widow," the woman said.

Carol arched a brow. "Yeah, hate to break it to you, but that name is taken," she said. "And its owner is probably going to be kinda pissed that you're ripping her off."

The woman's eyes narrowed and her face contorted with anger. " _I_ am the Black Widow! The _real_ Black Widow!" she snarled, accent thickening. "That old woman, that _traitor_ , is nothing but a fraud!"

Carol smirked. "Keep telling yourself that, Black Rip-Off," she said. "Pro tip: the real Black Widow keeps her temper. And she doesn't speak English with an accent." She shrugged and her smirk widened. "Looks to me like you're nothing but a wannabe. Did you find mommy's clothes in the wardrobe and decide to play dress up?"

The woman spat something acidic in Russian, then her hand flickered. On instinct, Carol ducked, barely dodging the knife that had previously been heading for her throat, only in time to take a brutal kick to the face, followed by several lightning fast blows to the throat and the stomach, followed by a series of vicious, bone cracking blows.

Carol, staggering under the onslaught, blindly lashed out, something that resulted in her arm being used as a pivot to slam her into the ground with jarring force, before her arm was hauled up behind her back and used to press her into the floor.

"Not smirking now, are you, little girl?" the woman hissed, voice full rage.

"Well," Carol managed, teeth gritted against the pain. "I kind of am."

The woman drove a knee into her back. "And why is that, you arrogant little bitch?" she snarled.

"I'm guessing that you guys know a bit about me," Carol said. "I mean, if you're who I think you are, you wouldn't have dragged me along as a hostage or something, not if you thought I was just an ordinary girl."

The woman snorted. "So, there is a brain in that pretty little head," she sneered. "Yes, we know who you are, Carol Susan Jane Danvers, a pampered, arrogant little American whore with no concept of hardship. And you are right: we know what you are. We know that you are a super soldier."

"Great," Carol said. "Thought so. Just one thing you didn't take into account."

"And what is that?"

"What being a super soldier really means," Carol said, before she flipped her legs up, scissored them around the woman's throat and as the older woman reached up to try and pry them loose, brought them back down hard.

While the blow was somewhat blunted by Carol's own legs, it stunned the woman for a moment and allowed Carol to scramble to her feet.

The guards had their guns up again and were shouting, but this time, the woman called them off with a few harsh words in Russian, before glaring at Carol, who smirked.

"For one thing," she said. "Being a super soldier? It means killer flexibility."

"That trick won't work twice," the woman said, voice slightly raspy, eyes now burning with hatred.

"The thing about tricks is that they only have to work once," Carol said. "I'm willing to bet that you're a _way_ better fighter than me. But I'm also willing to bet that I only need to get in one good hit. Just one, and you're down, lady."

"You assume that I'll let you get in even one," the woman said, readying the bracelets Carol recognised as modified versions of Natasha's Widow's Bites.

"Belova!"

Everyone looked up to look at the speaker. He was a tall man, with the lean muscle tone of an acrobat and boyishly handsome good looks, with slightly wavy brown hair. A long and shabby brown trenchcoat swirled around his ankles. After a moment, Carol realised that she was giving him a rather lengthy once over. Too lengthy.

Judging by the sly smile on his face, he'd noticed it and had been expecting it. Everything about him said, 'here is a bad boy. A very bad boy, who you should stay away from. But wouldn't it be fun to find out why?'

Since Carol had never been particularly disposed to stay away from things that people thought she should, she was more inclined than most to find out. Her libido heartily seconded this suggestion.

She was not, however, distracted enough to miss four things. First, there was a foot long metal pole holstered inside his coat, one he looked like he knew how to use. Second, his eyes were black, with red pupils. Third, his accent was Cajun. Whoever he was, he was a very long way from home. And fourth and most importantly, he carried authority around here, wherever here was.

"This is none of your business, Gambit," the woman, Belova, spat.

"Doctor Essex t'inks differently," Gambit said calmly. "He ain't gone to the trouble o' bringin' the lady here t' be y' punchin' bag. An' I'm sure dat you've got other things t' do." A deck of cards dropped into his hands. To Carol's puzzlement, the guards, a dozen Russian special forces hardcases, all tensed up. Even Belova's eyes widened slightly, zeroing in on the cards. "Don' you?"

Belova looked up at him and glared. Gambit met her gaze and raised an eyebrow, then fanned the cards with a twitch of a finger. The guards flinched again.

Then, with one last glare at Carol, she stormed out, snapping in Russian at the guards, who followed her.

"Thanks," Carol said. "I could have taken her, though."

"No, y' couldn't, _cherie_ ," Gambit said. "You'd have pissed her off even more an' she'd have killed you. I've seen it happen."

"Really?" Carol asked.

"Really," Gambit said. "Gambit have a liking for beautiful women, beautiful, dangerous women, but that one…" He shook his head.

"Lady's got a screw loose," Carol said. "Yeah, I'd noticed. Now, who the hell are you, where the hell am I and where the hell is my friend?"

"Most call me Gambit, ma _cherie_ ," Gambit said. "As f'r where we are…" He shrugged. "Truth be told, I never asked. Some things, it's safest not to. Even if I knew, I couldn' tell y', somethin' which just breaks mah heart. As f'r where y' friend is, I t'ink 'e's been sent to de Beast."

"Right, and who or what is 'the Beast'?"

"Someone who some prisoners get sent to, right down at the bottom of the prison. That's where y' go if you're causin' trouble. Or if y' one of the ones dey want to test," Gambit said.

"What is it?"

"Not what. Who," he said grimly. "A mutant, a powerful one. Ah've seen some pretty powerful mutants go in and when dey came out, _if_ dey came out, dey were a _real_ mess."

"What's he look like?"

A smile flickered across his face. "Now, _cherie_ , why would I know somethin' like that?"

" _Parce que_ _vous êtes quelqu'un qui sait des choses comme ça,"_ Carol replied evenly.

That earned her a pair of raised eyebrows and a smile. "A pretty lady who speaks French and damn near perfectly if ah say so myself," he said. "Well damn me if it not my lucky day. Is dat your power, _cherie_?"

"No," Carol said curtly. "And stop changing the subject."

He sighed. "Fine," he said. "'e's a big white boy. About your age, maybe a little older. Big – and I mean _enormous_ \- but faster than he look, and _strong_. The guards like him because 'e's a bully, just like them. 'e gets privileges for what 'e does." He glanced down the hallway. "Ah'm sorry to say this, _cherie_ , but your friend is in a lot of trouble."

"Could you help him?" Carol asked.

"Could, maybe," he said. "Or maybe, I could end up on wrong end of de Beast's fists. Or on the wrong side of the bars." He smiled. "And while that would mean bein' in your company, that is a pleasure I must sadly decline."

"Bars," Carol said. "So, you've been sent to take me to some part of this… whatever this is, probably some kind of base, where people are locked up. Super-people."

"Well, actually, it mostly a dormitory," Gambit said.

"With bars," Carol said.

Gambit grimaced. "Wit' bars," he said. "Y' comin'?"

"What if I don't?"

"Then I knock you out an' carry you," Gambit said. "And I will feel mighty torn up about dat, and I will try to make it as painless as possible, but I'll still have t' do it."

"You think you can?" Carol asked, though mostly for form. She hadn't really fancied herself against Belova alone, let alone a bunch of Russian special forces hardcases armed to the teeth. And yet this guy had had them all on edge and been pretty confident that he could take them all by himself, with nothing more than a metal pole and a deck of cards. Cajun charm notwithstanding, it didn't take a genius to realise that she was dealing with a serious badass.

"What d'y' think, _ma cherie_?" Gambit asked.

Carol wrinkled her nose. "Fine," she said. "Take me to your leader."

Gambit laughed. "Dat ain't where y' goin', _cherie_ ," he said.

"I know," Carol said, following him. "But hey, how often do you get kidnapped by a bunch of bad guys out of an 80's thriller?"

That didn't get a laugh. Instead, it got a serious look. "First t'ing, _cherie_ ," Gambit said. "Don' underestimate these people. Dey're as scary as it gets. Y' friend is probably findin' that out right now."

"Harry can look after himself," Carol said.

Gambit looked politely sceptical. "Maybe," he said. "But if y' cross them, den y' aren't too valuable to give to Belova. Or to de Beast."

"I've fought big scary monsters before," Carol said.

Gambit looked grim. "I didn' mean as 'is punchin' bag, _cherie_ ," he said quietly. "Like I said – 'e gets privileges."

Carol went pale as she processed this. "And you work with these people?" she managed.

"Every man has 'is price, _cherie_ ," Gambit said quietly. "An' this man has 'is debts to pay."

"Money?" Carol asked, disgusted. "Seriously?"

Gambit snorted. "No," he said.

"Then what?" Carol asked, then glanced around. She couldn't see any security cameras. "I mean, you know who and what I am, the way that crazy Belova lady did?"

"I got the gist," Gambit said.

"And you know who my buddy is?" Carol asked.

"Actually, no, ah didn' catch that," Gambit said.

"Harry Thorson," Carol said, and watched with some satisfaction as Gambit stopped in his tracks. Interestingly, though, he seemed not to be so much afraid as thinking furiously.

"Well," Gambit said slowly, after a long moment. "Dat changes t'ings."

"You don't say," Carol said dryly. "Look, you seem like a decent guy, even if you are working for the bad guys. If –"

"If I help y' an' your friend, the Avengers will help me out?" Gambit said.

"Yeah," Carol said. "I mean, your debt to that doctor guy – I'm guessing he was the same one who brought me and Harry in? – whatever it is, they, we, can help you with that."

Gambit regarded her. "Y' really mean that, don' y'?" he said thoughtfully. "Even though y' don' know me at all, y' willin' to offer me an out." His lips quirked into a smile. "F'r one thing, y' really confident that the Avengers will find y' two and get y' out."

"It's kind of what they do," Carol said. "And like I said, you seem like a decent guy. You certainly don't seem to fit in round here."

"An' how d' y' know that I'm not actin', to get y' confidence?" Gambit asked.

"I don't," Carol admitted. "I don't have much of a baseline to compare your behaviour against, either, being that I only met you ten minutes ago. I still kind of suspect that you're up to something, that you might be playing me. But I saw Belova. She wasn't acting. She was genuinely out for my blood. Those rent-a-mooks were following her orders – and I'm guessing that you don't get to be the Black Rip-Off without the ability to pull some serious rank. You faced down all of them at once without blinking, and I'm willing to bet you're not bullet-proof."

"An'?" Gambit asked, watching her.

"And I figure that someone as sharp as you – and you seem pretty sharp – could come up with a dozen reasons for not getting involved," Carol said. "You say that Belova would have killed me. You took a risk getting between her and me. And since I wasn't exactly top priority for processing or whatever, the way Harry was, since I was basically an after-thought, I doubt I'm _that_ valuable."

She folded her arms. "Point being, you got involved when you didn't necessarily have to. If you were just a soulless douche out for himself, only here to pay off a debt, you wouldn't have. You're also American and you can't be more than twenty, meaning that you aren't a soldier here and you're a bit young to be a mercenary. You _really_ don't fit in, either with the psycho Russians or with the creepy doctor guy. So maybe you're just a better actor, a pretty face to open up to. But… call it a leap of faith. I think you're a decent, or part-way decent, guy in a bad situation. Whoever you really are, Gambit, I think that this debt you owe, it's something big that this doctor's got hanging over you."

Gambit watched her for a long moment, then smiled and inclined his head. "Where are my manners?" he asked rhetorically. "The name's Remy, Remy LeBeau."

"Remy the Beautiful?" Carol asked, eyebrows raised. "Wow, you think a lot of yourself, don't you?"

Remy laughed. "It's my real name, _cherie_ , and ah'm adopted," he said, then grinned. "But it fits, _non?_ "

Carol rolled her eyes. "Yeah, by the way, I get the 'cherie' thing a lot," she said. "From one of my best friends. Who's very, _very_ gay. It's safe to say that it doesn't work as a seduction technique, so don't bother. Or a distraction technique. You dodged my question."

"Well, dat's a real pity," Remy said. "Anyway, I may be Remy, but most call me Gambit. And you are…?"

"Carol," Carol said. "Again with the question dodging. And I thought you knew my name?"

"I didn't quite catch it, and now I'm glad I have: a lovely name for a lovely lady," Remy said gallantly.

Carol gave him a flat look. "Pretty words don't impress me," she said. "Nor do pretty men."

Remy grinned a grin that would have been rated eighteen in most countries of the world and banned in most of the others. "Well maybe one day I change y' mind," he said, then stopped as they reached a locked door, flanked by two guards.

"Prisoner?" one of them asked, in heavily accented English.

Remy nodded, and one of them used his key card on the door panel, opening it. It was, Carol noted, most of a foot thick. Not, in other words, something that could easily be punched through.

"Remember what I said," she said.

"A lady such as you is hard to forget," Remy said. And before she could stop him, he reached out, took her hand and laid a kiss on the back of it, neither fleeting nor lingering.

Carol flushed bright red.

"But for now, unfortunately," he said. "I must say _au revoir._ "

"For now?" Carol asked. "You're planning on coming back?"

To her own disgust, that sounded a lot more hopeful than she'd intended.

"Trust me," Remy said. "Just… trust me."

Then, he sauntered off down the corridor and Carol was bundled through the doorway.

OoOoO

"What's happening, Andrei?" one of the guards asked his colleague, who was boredly watching the security screens.

"Same old, same old, Alyosha," the other said. "LeBeau's flirting with a pretty prisoner." He eyed the camera. "Can't blame him, though – I'd have her on her back first chance I got."

Alyosha gave him a look of mild distaste. "She is beautiful," he admitted. "But also dangerous. She went toe to toe with Belova and she didn't look scared at all. Only time she did was when Grigory and Sergei dragged her friend away."

"So?"

"So she'd rip your balls off and make you eat them," he said. "Besides. The doctor is interested in her."

Alyosha's colleague sighed. "True. Should we report LeBeau?"

"No point. He's the doctor's man, he'd never get punished," Alyosha said. "Besides. It's not like he's done anything."

OoOoO

Back in the dormitory, Carol casually looked around, picking out the cameras and calculating their angles, before strolling into a blindspot and opening her closed hand. Inside was a key card and note. Scrawled on it were the words, 'for the right moment'.

"Remy LeBeau, you are full of surprises," she murmured, then slipped the card into her pocket and looked around.

What first struck her was that in the room with her were five other teenagers, two boys and three girls. What next struck her was that some of them looked palpably inhuman.

"Well," she said. "This should be interesting."

Indeed it was.

Soon enough, introductions were done: primarily, name and powers.

Noriko was a Japanese electrokinete who spoke flawless English, had a very bad temper and a set of gauntlets designed to keep her powers from flaring out of control.

Nehzno was a half-Wakandan boy who had metallic looking tatoos designed to control his super-strength and a soft Russian accent. He'd been surprised to say the least when she'd mentioned that she'd met T'Challa.

Jono was a British boy with a strange sort of turtleneck that covered his mouth. This was apparently because when his mutation had manifested a couple of years before, it had blasted off his lower jaw, as well as a considerable chunk of his torso. In its place was a chamber of burning psionic energy, which apparently at least had the benefit of allowing him to speak telepathically and fire energy blasts.

Kurt was a German teleporter, and looked by far the least human of the lot. He was blue, had yellow eye, pointed ears and a spaded tail, as well as three fingers on each hand and two toes on each foot. He was also irrepressibly good natured and the only one of the other teenagers in the 'dormitory' who'd immediately felt like sharing anything beyond a basic introduction. He was, for instance, apparently a devout Catholic in spite of his demonic appearance. Carol found herself liking him.

And then, finally, there was Lorna. She had green hair, an Australian accent and considering her stated magnetic powers, what Carol suspected was probably a very interesting family tree.

None of these powers were demonstrated, however, as their captors made them wear bracelets that prevented them from using their powers outside of specified training sessions. Attempts to do so, or to remove the bracelet, were punished by an automatic electric from the bracelet, which only got stronger as time went on. Eventually, it became lethal.

Sooner rather than later, she found out the name of her captors: the Red Room. She also found out what was planned for them, something that both chilled her to the bone and didn't surprise her in the least. They were to be super soldiers.

Or at least, most of them were. Jono was being trained too, but he mostly seemed to be regarded as a scientific curiosity more than anything else.

And she found out something else too. Time did not move normally around here, and in a more fundamental way than all the days seeming to blur into one. Her fellow prisoners said that they had, by and large, been here for at least six months, up to three years in Jono's case. Their predecessors had been there for longer. When Carol had cautiously enquired about those predecessors, the answer had been blunt.

"You get out of here in one of two ways," Noriko had said. "In a uniform or in a coffin."

Carol couldn't exactly say that she was surprised. And then matters got more complicated, because when they asked her what the date was in the outside world, it didn't match up with the time they'd been imprisoned. By that measure, even Jono had only been away for a year. Moreover, the time dilation seemed to be variable – going by the dates Jono had scribbled down for her on the pad of paper he used to communicate, and after doing a little arithmetic, she found the answer.

"The time difference is increasing," she said eventually. "When Jono came in, it was basically one day in here, wherever here is, one day out in the rest of the world. Now, it's three days in here to every one outside."

"Why not just make it a month in to every day outside?" Lorna asked, frowning. "I mean, not that I'm complaining, but…"

Carol shrugged. "Don't look at me, I just got here," she said. "But if I had to guess, it's one of two reasons. First, screwing with space and time is really difficult. I've seen HYDRA stick their entire base in a pocket dimension, but they had ludicrously advanced tech and insanely powerful magic backing them up, and as far as I know, time passed at the same speed in there. Could be that they can't make it go any further. Harry, a friend of mine – he's here too, actually. Apparently they've taken him to this 'Beast' guy."

Every single one of the other teens paled, and Kurt rested a hand on her shoulder. "I am sorry," he said.

Carol arched an eyebrow. "Thanks, but he'll be fine," she said. "He always is, one way or another."

The others gave her odd looks, ones that shifted to pity.

"Carol," Lorna said. "Anyone sent to the Beast… they don't come back."

"Then he'll be the first," Carol said, unable to quell a sense of unease. Harry was powerful, incredibly so. But the Red Room _had_ managed to capture and subdue him in the first place, when he'd been on his guard. That said something. A bad something. And not only that, but that sense she'd had of his presence? It had disappeared some time ago, shortly after she'd arrived in the dormitory.

"He's one of the most powerful people I know and he's basically indestructible," she said after a moment. "Like I said, he'll be fine." Her expression shadowed. "Honestly? I'm more worried about what'll happen when he loses his temper." She shook her head. "Anyway, he knew someone with a time travel device – it was magic and it only went back a few hours, at most, because it was limited. Like I said, screwing with time is hard."

"And the second reason?" Nehzno asked.

"The second reason is something I more sure of," Carol said. "The people in charge of this probably have massive egos. Higher ups in the government or the military generally do; trust me, I've met loads. Evil douchebags, even more so. Hell, if they're going after Harry, their egos must be insane. Point being? They'll be quite old and they'll want to see this through. Somehow I doubt that they're going to want to sacrifice their lives making us into weapons and not see the pay off."

Jono scribbled something. "'You can't be certain,'" Carol read aloud. "You're right. I can't. But those are my best guesses and I think that they're pretty good ones." She folded her arms. "And personally, I intend on getting out of here before it starts to matter."

"Really?" Noriko asked. "How? By batting your eyes at the guards and asking nicely?"

"Sure," Carol said. "I wasn't planning to, but if picking my moment, sneaking out, and beating the shit out of anyone in my way doesn't work, then I'll try that." She drummed her fingers on the bed. "And a great help in getting out would be, oh, I don't know, a super powerful psychic. Which means that step one is figuring out where the hell my best friend is."

OoOoO

Said best friend had himself been wondering about where on Earth he was– if he was even on Earth.

When he was unceremoniously tossed into the large cell, he immediately rolled to his feet and looked around. The barrier that rose up behind him was humming with power of more than one kind – if he touched it, he'd be fried.

It was a big cell, too. In fact, a more accurate word would be 'stadium' or perhaps, 'arena'. And there was another door on the far side. As Harry watched, it opened and something huge lumbered out.

Cautiously, he reached out with his telepathy to get a sense of what he was dealing with, then froze in shock. His telepathy wasn't responding. He tried, several times, but nothing happened.

"What the…" he whispered, then tried his telekinesis instead, reaching out, trying to move the dust around him. It didn't respond. The power was there, he could feel it, but every time he tried to reach out, it didn't respond.

He checked his magic, and puzzlingly enough, that seemed to respond just fine. He tried his psychic powers again, to see if it had been a psychological thing, but no dice: they weren't working.

It was then he realised that he'd been stripped, his clothes replaced with a tight leather body-suit all in black, with red lines inset.

He cast his memory back to how he'd got here. He and Carol had met Doctor Milbury, who'd turned out to be the mysterious telepath who'd been keeping him at the Dursleys, and proved able to flatten Carol with a single punch – something that set his temper burning, but most of all made him very worried indeed. Where was Carol? Where'd she been taken, what had been done to her? Was she being set up the way he was?

He shook his head. He couldn't think about that now. First, he had to get out of here. Then, he could find out where Carol was. He quickly reviewed the rest of what had happened: just as he'd gone for Milbury, someone else had stepped in. Someone else, someone who was Jean, yet wasn't.

It was a puzzle, he thought. In any case, whoever he was dealing with, they had the ability to shut off his psychic powers – or at least, prevent him from using them – something he hadn't even known was _possible_ , and they had thrown him in this… well, he thought as he looked around. It was a bit big to be a cell. And he wasn't in here alone, either. Which meant that he had an uneasy suspicion that the word to describe the structure he was in now was 'arena'.

All the while, the huge, indistinct figure moved closer. And he was huge, taller than Harry himself, taller than anyone Harry knew who wasn't the Hulk or Hagrid, and massively wide – though going by the way he moved, it didn't seem to slow him down much.

Still, he knew not to judge by appearances. "Hello?" he said. "Look, whoever you are, I'm guessing you've been sent in here to fight me. You don't want to do that. It won't end well for you. We don't have to fight."

Inwardly, he wasn't so sure about that. He had his magic to call on, yes, and he didn't feel much weaker, meaning that he was probably still a great deal faster and stronger than anyone who wasn't a super soldier or similarly enhanced. But equally, he somehow doubted that anyone or anything being sent up against him wasn't at least tougher than human.

Indeed, whoever or whatever he was facing didn't seem so convinced by his claim either, going by the deep, mocking laughter that echoed out of the darkness.

"All right," Harry muttered. "If that's the way you want it..." He snapped a whip of fire into the space in between them, cracking the concrete floor with the heat. It was intended as a warning shot, but it didn't slow the advancing behemoth one jot.

So Harry took a deep breath and with a snarl drove a spear of fire at his opponent that would have burned straight through an oak tree. On this creature, however, it simply splashed over his huge chest, scorching the clothing, but no more. That wasn't what struck Harry, though. It was the face, the face he'd seen in the brief flash of light from his strike. It was… familiar.

He summoned a brighter ball of flame, setting it burning in his hand and held it up for a closer look. And froze, in utter horror.

That face. It was bigger, now, higher up, attached to a body that was now as much bulk as fat. The hair had changed, on top a mohawk, below, the beginnings of facial hair. Most everything around it had changed. But the face, that stayed the same. The face that he had spent his entire pre-Hogwarts life associating with pain, with just about everything he hated and feared, until he went to Hogwarts and left that face and its owner behind in the dust, as an insignificance, and after he'd rediscovered his father, he'd thought that that face would be gone from his life for good.

But it wasn't. Impossibly, Dudley Dursley was back. Back and with superpowers, while Harry himself was stripped of his greatest weapons, superpowers that seemed to be capable of shrugging off whatever he had left.

Slowly, Harry began to back away, panicking.

Logically, a small part of Harry knew that he shouldn't be frightened of Dudley, that it was absolutely ridiculous to panic. Powers or no powers, he'd faced far worse than Dudley, and with far less at his disposal than he had now – the Disir, for instance. Monsters that had destroyed Asgardian armies, that had taken an Allfather to banish, and he'd only had his wand and a bit of luck on his side. Well, and some help from Uhtred and Diana, but even so. And before that, the troll, Voldemort through Quirrell, Riddle's Diary and the Basilisk. He'd faced them too.

Of course, that same logical part of him pointed out that with the troll, he'd had Ron and Hermione's help, with Riddle's Diary and the Basilisk he'd had Fawkes and the Sword of Gryffindor. And while he'd been alone with Quirrell, he'd also had his mum's protection, which had conveniently fried Quirrell. Somehow he doubted it would have the same effect on Dudley.

It also occurred to him that he didn't have his wand, either.

So, unarmed, in an arena with the super-sized and super-powered version of his childhood bully, with the only powers he had at his disposal ones that said bully seemed to be able to shrug off easily.

Was it any wonder that the logical part of his brain wasn't in control?

"Hey freak," Dudley sneered. "Long time no see."

"Hey Dudley," Harry said, circling away. "You've… grown. Mostly sideways, admittedly, but grown."

Dudley simply sneered at him.

"How've you been?" Harry asked, staying on the move, frantically running through his options – and wishing that he'd learned more combat magic. While focusing on his psychic powers had made sense at the time, it was fuck all use now.

Dudley snorted. "You mean, how've I been since your freak dad and your freak friends took all my stuff and destroyed my house? Since they took my mum and dad away?" he asked, tone thickening with anger.

"… Sure, let's go with that."

"Not bad," Dudley said. "The government sent me to this house, with a bunch of losers. I spent a few weeks there. Then, the doctor came and took me away."

This gave Harry a very strange mental image for a few moments. "I'm guessing he didn't have a blue police box," he said.

Dudley's piggy face screwed up in confusion. "What?"

"Never mind," Harry said. "It was Doctor Milbury, right?"

Dudley grinned. "Right, freak," he said. "Yeah. Old Doctor Milbury. I thought he was just a dumb loser with some good sweets, but it turns out that he's something more. Turns out, he saw potential in me. He always knew I was special."

Harry's heart dropped like a stone and he gulped. "Let me guess," he said. "You had powers, powers in you, just waiting to be activated. And he activated them."

Dudley laughed. "Clever, freak," he said. "Yeah. He made me strong, strong like I was always should have been. Stronger than you. He's spent years making me even stronger, strong enough so that I can do whatever I like."

"Years?" Harry asked. "It hasn't even been a year since I first met dad again. Even if, admittedly, it feels quite a lot longer." He paused. "Also, your powers make you special, but mine make me a freak. Right. How does that work exactly?"

Dudley's face wrinkled up in confusion. "No," he said. "It's been years. Three years. He told me. And I know. I'm not stupid, I can count."

"You can?" Harry said. "That's good to know. I always had doubts, you seeee!"

This last was yelped as he ducked Dudley's massive fist, which whizzed overhead with a hiss of air and snarl of rage, missing Harry by a literal hairsbreadth.

"You can laugh," he snarled. "But you won't be laughing much longer. I'm gonna sort you out for good, like I should have when we were kids. I always let you get up and run away and –"

"Then got scared because I got magic?" Harry suggested, weaving away from another punch. "Hate to break it to you, Dudley, but I still have magic."

And with that, he flashed a blast of incandescently bright fire into Dudley's eyes. Instantly, Dudley stumbled backwards, howling with pain. He was quickly propelled even further back by as powerful a kick as Harry could manage, though most of its force was soaked up by Dudley's ample blubber. In the meantime, Harry extinguished his flames and darted back into the darkness, breathing in deeply, focusing and summoning up as much power as he could.

"I'M GONNA KILL YOU, FREAK!" Dudley screamed, enraged. "I'M GONNA TEAR YOUR ARMS OFF AND BEAT YOU TO DEATH WITH THEM!"

Harry, tempted to reply, said nothing, instead continuing to draw in power. Going by how tough Dudley seemed to be, he was going to need as much as he could get. As a result, he was going to need as much time as he could get to charge up. Most of all, however, when he was dealing with this much power, this much fire, he couldn't afford to slip for an instant. He was going to need every bit of his concentration.

"YOU THINK THAT YOU'RE THE FIRST?!" Dudley demanded, furious. "I'VE BEEN BREAKING BIGGER AND TOUGHER THAN YOU FOR _YEARS_ , FREAK! _YEARS!_ I BROKE THEM AND I'LL BREAK YOU! EVERY SINGLE BONE IN YOUR BODY, I'M GONNA BREAK THEM! DO YOU HEAR ME? BREAK THEM!"

Of course, he noticed vaguely, this had the side-effect of making him glow with the banked heat of a furnace, the air around him rippling with heat, but that couldn't be helped. He poured all his anger, all his fear, all his panic into the inferno within, stoking it up, making it hotter and hotter.

Dudley, meanwhile, howled and thrashed about in pain, shattering large craters in the floor, sending chips of concrete flying as he did. Sooner rather than later, however, he was glaring out through scorched, streaming, but very much functional eyes. "Where are you, freak?" he managed.

Harry's breath hitched as the sudden quiet disrupted his focus and he nearly lost control of the raging storm of power within him, so strong that he felt like he was going to fly apart.

Dudley's head whipped around, and he bared his teeth as he saw the deep red glow around Harry. "There you are," he snarled. "Hold still, Freak, and it won't hurt much."

"You don't have to do this, Dudley," Harry said quietly. "It's like I said before, it won't end well if you do."

Dudley snorted. "Nice try," he said. "But I'm not scared of you."

"Really? Becaue I'm scared of you," Harry said frankly. "Scared of what you could do? But do you what I'm afraid of more?"

"What?"

"Me. I've had most of my powers turned off. If I hadn't, you'd already be down and out," Harry said bluntly.

Dudley snorted his disbelief.

"Even without those powers, I'm still more scared of what I might do to you, than of what you might do to me," Harry continued. "So. One last chance, Dudley. Stop this. Stop this now, and this doesn't get messy."

Dudley said nothing, instead letting out a roar and charging.

"Fine," Harry said. "I was kind of hoping you'd say that."

And he brought up his right hand, turning side on to Dudley, levelling it, palm out. In his palm, something as bright and white as a star formed. Then, when Dudley was only twenty yards away, a bar of thick, white-hot fire shot across the gap between them and slammed into Dudley with enough force to shake the arena, sending out a wave of expanding super-heated air that kicked up huge waves of dust and chipped concrete across the arena.

After a few moments, Harry could smell the bacon cooking smell of roasting flesh and with a surge of horror, cut off the flames sharply, retching and staggering, partly from the sudden wave of tiredness and partly from disgust. While a very large part of him had wanted to give Dudley a good beating – and if he was honest, still wanted to now – there was a significant difference between giving Dudley a beating and roasting him alive, no matter how much of a superpowered monster he'd become.

He peered at the blackened patch where Dudley had stood, all soot and cracked concrete, the reddish-black hulk of Dudley himself, hunched in on himself. He was also, Harry noted with relief, breathing heavily.

"I warned you, Dudley," he said quietly. "I warned you and you didn't listen."

Dudley slowly unfolded himself, with the sound of crackling skin. Then, he said, in a quiet, disbelieving voice, "That hurt."

"Yeah," Harry said. "And I've got more where that came from." He hesitated, then against his better judgement, strode over.

"That _hurt_."

"Yeah, you'll get over it," Harry said, offering a hand down. "I know doctors, some good doctors who can fix you up. They can probably even grow your hair back." He looked Dudley over. He could see some pink skin showing beneath the burns. "Look, you're healing already."

Dudley looked up at him and glared, eyes burning with rage. "That," he snarled. "Hurt."

Then, faster than Harry would have believed, he reached out, grabbed Harry's outstretched arm in one giant, meaty hand, and crushed it with a sickening crack.

Harry let out a gurgling scream of agony, one that only intensified as Dudley squeezed harder.

"You hurt me, Freak," Dudley said. "No one does that. _No one!"_

He lifted Harry up by his broken arm and slammed him to the ground with bone breaking force.

"No one hurts me!" Dudley snarled, then repeated the trick three more times, before hauling the semi-sensible Harry up to eye height. "You hear me?"

Harry coughed up some blood.

"I'm gonna kill you," Dudley said, voice rising. "I'M GONNA KILL YOU TO DEATH, FREAK!"

Then, he slammed Harry into the ground once more, like a rag-doll, before leaving him there.

And as Harry lay on the floor, something poked out of the shooting silvery agony of the breaks, the deep throbbing of his muscles. Something hot and furious, something that blazed.

Fuck this, it said. Fuck going out like this. Even if I don't stay dead, even if he doesn't go through with it, I am _damned_ if I'm going to go down in history as having been beaten by _Dudley Dursley_. I outgrew that when I was eleven. Since then, I've taken on horrors he couldn't even begin to imagine and what has he done? Been given some super steroids to wake up his X-Gene, been used to beat up some poor bastards who couldn't defend themselves. He's never ever been _hurt_ until now, he said it himself. Me? I've spent all my fucking life being hurt. Unlike him, I know how to handle it.

So I'm damned if I'm letting him be the one who beats me.

So what if he's stronger than before? So am I. I'm stronger than I was, I can take pain better than he can, and I'm much, much smarter than he is.

So how can I use it? Harry asked himself. I can't use my psychic powers…

Can I?

He paused and thought, cudgelling his brain into working. His psychic powers didn't work. But they were still there, he could feel them. He could even summon them up, he just couldn't extend them beyond his body. And why was that?

Then it hit him, and he wanted to smack himself it was so obvious. The suit. The suit was keeping his powers in, somehow. It meant that he couldn't use them outside it.

But.

He could use them _inside_ it.

He'd never tried using his telekinesis on himself before, except maybe for flying, and even then, it hadn't really been an in-depth use, as it were. But, he supposed as he saw Dudley looming over him with a chunk of concrete, there was a first time for everything.

"Oh, you're getting up, Freak?" Dudley taunted, as Harry struggled got to his knees, spitting blood. "Don't bother. Because I'm just getting started."

He dropped the concrete, raised a massive fist, then drove it down towards Harry's head with unstoppable force. It met an immovable object.

Harry's left hand had snapped up in a blur and Dudley's fist met it with a thunderclap. The enormous boy stared at it in incomprehension. And as he did, Harry began to laugh.

It was soft, low and mocking, a fey laugh that echoed around the room and sent chills down Dudley's spine.

"That's a funny coincidence, Dudley," he said, getting to his feet, holding Dudley's fist in a vice grip, pushing him backwards. "Because so I am I."

He regarded his arm. "First things first, though," he said, regarding his right arm. It was most definitely not in the right shape for an arm. Still, he mused. That was easily enough fixed.

Dudley chose that moment to snap out of his shock and try to break free. This had the side effect of jarring Harry and his arm, sending white hot pain surging through him. Harry whipped around, glaring at Dudley and clamped his left hand tighter, driving his fingers into Dudley's fist like pitons, causing Dudley to let out a stifled howl of pain.

"And the tables are turned," Harry said, with a dark satisfaction. He returned his gaze to his right arm and frowned. Now, how was he going to go about this? He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. You never knew until you tried.

There was a hot, grinding sensation sensation, followed by a feeling of coolness, almost like water running over his bones. Then, the pain was gone. He wiggled his fingers at a dumbfounded Dudley. "See?" he said. "Good as new. This is what I can do now." His hand burst alight. "Now, let me show you something else I can do."

And with that, ignoring the still present agony in his ribs, he brought his right hand up and around, trailing white hot flame, and punched Dudley square in the gut with enough force to pulverise concrete. There was flash of light, a roar of fire and a vast thump of displaced air as Dudley flew across the cell and into the stone wall with enough force to crater it. Wheezing, he struggled to his feet as Harry advanced, bloody teeth bared in a fighter's grin, eyes glowing gold, pausing only to heal his ribs – or rather, use his telekinesis to force them back into place. It was a rush job, far from perfect, but it would do for now.

"Here's the thing, Dudley," he said, voice soft and dangerous. "You're not the threat you like to think you are. You aren't some beast in the dark, some great monster. You aren't something to be feared. You're not the big bad. You're just an overgrown bully who stumbled onto what he thought was power. And you used it to do what you always did, to push around anyone you thought was weaker than you." His hands ignited with fire and furious psychic energy. "But this time, it's different. I'm not just your little freak cousin any more. I'm not weaker than you, not any more. I'm a Prince of Asgard, an Omega Class psychic, and I'm going to teach you what _real_ power is."

Dudley lunged forward, swinging a clumsy haymaker. Harry contemptuously slapped it aside. "Lesson the first," he said coldly, as Dudley stumbled forward into an uppercut that cracked half his teeth. "Part of real power is the ability to use what power you have effectively. Martial arts are good for this."

Dudley lashed out blindly, but Harry easily darted back, then in again, landing a brutal stomping kick to the side of Dudley's knee, smashing it inwards with a snapping crunch, drawing a scream of pain, dropping Dudley to the other knee.

"Play to your strengths, that sort of thing," Harry continued, tone unchanged. "For instance, I'm faster than you are, more agile too. Stronger? With my telekinesis, maybe yes, maybe no. What I am, though, is strong enough to make my speed count."

With that, he charged in again. Dudley made an a desperate grab for him, but Harry flipped over his head, landing gracefully, before spinning and deliving a brutal rising kick to Dudley's jaw, snapping his head to one side, breaking bone and sending him reeling.

"Lesson the second," Harry said. "Associated with the first, attack your opponent's weaknesses. Once you have an advantage, exploit it."

Then, before Dudley could gather himself, he struck with a vicious rabbit punch to the back of the skull, before unleashing a hail of lightning fast, powerful and ruthlessly precise blows, drawing on a combination of all he'd been taught; savate, krav maga, sambo, pankration, karate, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, a few Asgardian tricks that didn't have names and what could simply described as street fighting.

All of it was ruthlessly focused on joints, exposed soft tissue like the throat, and just about any area that wasn't protected by a thick layer of blubber and muscle. It was designed to disable. And not just to disable – to hurt, humiliate, and make incontrovertibly clear that the tables had turned. A large part of Harry desperately wanted Dudley to know how it felt to be helpless, to be broken, to be unmade.

And so he made did exactly that.

After less than five minutes, Dudley was on his shattered knees.

"Lesson the third," Harry said coldly, body singing with power and the thrill of vengeance. In the long run, he knew that revenge wasn't really all that satisfying, that this kind of savagery would rightly horrify him later. But in the moment, in this moment, when he had one of the people who had made every day of his childhood a misery… it was utterly intoxicating.

"Other knowledge helps too," he said. "Such as a little basic physics." Dudley looked up, in too much pain to say anything, do anything more than let out a rasping whimper. Harry waved a hand. _"Wingardium Leviosa."_

Dudley twitched and struggled feebly, but he could barely move. Harry looked him in the eye. "Once you're off the ground, it doesn't matter how strong you are – you're just another case of mass times acceleration _._ "

Then, Harry drew back a fist, pouring every ounce of telekinetic power he had left, winding up for something absolutely colossal. "Let me demonstrate," he said, and beckoned with his left hand. " _Accio_."

OoOoO

Carol looked up as the huge roar of vaporising concrete echoed through the complex, in near perfect synchrony with a shockwave that shook the entire building and everything, and everyone, in it. And outside it, going by the muffled Russian cursing from the door.

She scrambled to the high, barred window, hauling herself up to see a vast cloud of dust rising up from the other side of the complex - itself surprisingly cold and snowy for high summer in what was presumably Russia. There were soldiers too, some in what looked like Iron Man/War Machine rip-offs, all running around like bees around a kicked hive as flashing red lights started up, swearing and panicked shouting overlaid by wailing sirens.

"What was that?" Lorna asked. "What's going on?"

"If my guess is right, and it probably is, _that_ would be Harry losing his temper," Carol said.

"Who?" Lorna asked.

"That friend of mine I mentioned," Carol said. "The one who was brought in with me and was sent to the Beast. Like I said, he was always going to snap at some point."

"You're sure it's him?" Noriko asked.

"Trust me," Carol said. "I've seen it before. It's kinda like _Carrie_ as directed by Michael Bay." At a number of puzzled expressions, she elaborated. "He's sort of a force of nature when he really gets going, with the result being lots fire, screaming – none of it by him – and him showing off his super psychic powers. Super psychic powers which he uses to cause _massive_ fucking explosions."

Oddly enough, her fellow prisoners didn't look especially reassured.

Just because one was a captive of the devil, after all, did not mean that the deep blue sea was any more pleasant a prospect.

OoOoO

Harry followed Dudley's flying body into the courtyard, satisfying himself that he could still fly in the process. On an afterthought, he tried ripping the suit apart via his telekinesis from within, but whoever had made it – probably Doctor Milbury, or Essex, as his real name apparently was – had done so well, and psychic energy ran off it like water off a stone. Magic too, it seemed.

He took a sharp breath as touched down and felt the Arctic cold wind slice into him and saw the eddying snow all around him. Wherever he was, it wasn't somewhere with natural weather conditions. And reaching out… well, he hardly had his uncle's senses, or even his father's, but it certainly didn't feel like Earth. There was too much magic everywhere. That, at least, he mused, explained the weather.

A quick look around told him that he was on a mountain, in a large and strange combination of concrete complex, vaguely resembling HYDRA's headquarters – before he and Carol had reduced most of it to rubble – and a castle that was somehow… gaunt. Hollow. Primal.

Well. This could be complicated.

Oh, and troopers dressed in what looked like Iron Man knockoffs were swarming out of the buildings and from around the perimeter. Dudley was… well, from what could be seen through the trail of destruction his flying body had left, punching a large hole through a couple of hundred feet worth of buildings, he still seemed to be breathing, but he was definitely down for the count this time. Unfortunately, flattening him had left Harry rather drained.

Hmm. Definitely complicated

OoOoO

Maddie watched the boy in the skintight suit as he prepared for a fight, apparently willing to take on all the available Red Room soldiers at once, something that she thought frankly unwise. It was, she knew, a creation of Doctor Essex. The boy… well, she didn't think he was. Doctor Essex didn't lose control of what he created.

But it was the strangest thing. Around him, she could feel a kind of resonance, a paler, weaker version of the one that had struck her several times over this last year. More than that, he had the same colour eyes that she did, a shade of emerald green that until now she had thought was unique to her. Remy had certainly told her so, and while he was flattering her, there was some truth to it.

In any case, when that boy had seen her, he'd said something very puzzling. "Jean." It was a name, she knew that much, and he'd sounded confused, as if she looked like someone he knew. And that was impossible. Wasn't it?

Not only that, but he had the same powers as she did. Not entirely – that trick with the fire was clearly not telekinesis, she could feel the difference. No, it felt more like magic; unpredictable, dangerous and ever so slightly alive.

Other than the magic, though, she feel his powers, and she'd felt them before. He was powerful, the most powerful telepath she'd ever met, even more so than Doctor Essex. More powerful than anyone. Anyone, that was, but her. She'd crushed him, yes, but she hadn't been able to hold back.

Thinking back, it certainly explained a couple of things – she'd felt some absolutely massive pulses of psychic power recently, ones that caused ripples in the Astral Plane, ones that she'd have thought that only she could cause. Well, maybe that other presence, the one she very occasionally felt spreading its awareness across the world like a web, could do it, but that one felt different.

But what it didn't explain was who he was. Where he'd come from. Why he'd had that young woman, that girl, with him, and what purpose she served – perhaps she was his equivalent of Remy? If she was, she was a poor substitute going by the rashness she'd displayed in attacking Doctor Essex. And then there was the matter of who'd made him, because it couldn't be Doctor Essex. He'd made her, yes, but this boy was different. He fought differently to her, using his psionics in ways she'd never even considered – the internalising of his telekinesis to work within the limitations the suit imposed on him, imitating superhuman physical attributes and flight, that was inspired.

And his use of that strength and speed had been ruthlessly effective, semi-reminiscent of Agent Belova, the Black Widow, but more brutality than grace. No one before had defeated Doctor Essex's latest project, the one that many in the compound, even Remy, called 'the Beast' – though in private, Remy sometimes called him 'the Blob' instead, to make her laugh. The Beast was a title with dignity and power. The Blob was not. Her expression turned to one of distaste. He certainly looked, and acted, the part. In any case, there was no denying his raw power – usually he was able to shrug off anything thrown at him and crush his opponent.

And yet, despite seemingly being on course to do exactly the same to the boy in the suit, crushing his arm when, astonishingly, the other boy went to check on his welfare after apparently disabling him. Of course, as expected, the Blob had crushed the boy's offered arm, having endured the firestorm unleashed upon him, and beaten him to a pulp, in a rage at being actually hurt for once. At that point, General Lukin had felt both disappointed and seriously worried and made to call the Blob off, while Belova had sneered and said something contemptuous about soft Westerners. Doctor Essex, however, had shown no such worry.

Then, something astonishing happened. The boy, nursing multiple broken bones, had internalised his telekinesis, repaired the worst of the damage, then proceeded to unleash an absolutely savage beating on the Blob, demonstrating his unquestionable superiority in skill and speed.

In short, he was a talented and powerful telekinetic, and a very skilled fighter, skilled in the sorts of arts that Doctor Essex had never felt the need to teach her. Remy had taught her some of his skills, but they were nothing much. Certainly, nothing compared to this. And yet, in contrast to this, his telepathic skill left a lot to be desired. He knew the basics, certainly, and his shields had been some of the better ones she'd encountered, but he'd resorted to raw power to try and destroy Doctor Essex – something, naturally, which she could not allow. He was her maker, after all. Even if she sometimes felt like she wanted – no. He was her maker. She existed to fulfil the purpose he'd created her for. That was that.

She shook her head slightly. Anyway, his use of his telekinesis had been positively inspired, but his telepathy had been crude, relying on raw power in a way that she hadn't in years. Thanks to Doctor Essex, she knew better than to waste power like that. He'd made sure of it.

He certainly wasn't stupid, she thought. Poorly taught, perhaps, but not stupid. For instance, he'd accepted that with his psionics constrained and his power drained by the fight he'd just been in he was never going to be able to fight his way out of the armoured Red Room Agents that surrounded him, raising his hands over his head in surrender.

And then there was something that baffled her even more. Around his neck had been a chain, on which hung a beautiful golden feather. There was a resonance there too. Resonance, a strange familiarity, and most of all, a sense of power. It felt like something she'd felt before and she didn't know why. Doctor Essex did not encourage curiosity, or introspection, or questioning. For him, it was necessary. He was a scientist. For her, however, it was a flaw, an impediment to what needed to be done, and was only to be exercised if he ordered her to be curious on his behalf.

However, it was one flaw that she still had, one that Remy, as curious a person as she had ever known in multiple senses of the word, had encouraged.

So she'd taken it. It would have been stolen anyway, and she wanted to investigate it. So now it sat in her pocket, digging into her side.

And this was particularly pertinent, because now it felt like it was heating up.

Yes. Definitely a puzzle.

And then things got complicated because the boy seemed to grin, before suddenly snapping the fingers of both upraised hands. The snow on the ground sublimated into boiling steam, before vanishing into the sudden fog bank in something just short of a blur.

Lukin started cursing and snapping orders at his subordinates. Doctor Essex, meanwhile, simply arched an eyebrow, looking mildly impressed, then turned to her. "Bring him in. Undamaged."

Maddie stood up straighter. It was time to fulfil her purpose.

"Yes, Doctor Essex," she said.

OoOoO

Harry breathed a sigh of relief when he discovered that keeping his telekinesis running through him protected him from being burnt by the still hot, if no longer quite boiling, steam. Or at least, he thought, it protected him from being burn too badly.

All around him, there was a lot of angry, confused and agonised shouting in Russian. Harry, who'd picked up a little Russian from Natasha, added a couple of shouts in his best Russian accent, mostly of theme of "he's over there," adding to the general confusion.

Unfortunately, he didn't entirely manage to avoid the Red Room soldiers, as one in armour loomed up ahead of him. Ah well. Time to find out how well telekinetically enhanced fists stood up to titanium.

The Red Room soldier shouted in surprise, setting himself and launching what looked like an ersatz repulsor blast at Harry, who jinked right, then darted left. The Red Room soldier responded by drawing a large, nasty looking knife, more of a machete really, designed as a close combat weapon, and only Harry's Quidditch reflexes saved him from almost being gutted.

"Didn't your mother ever tell you not to play with knives?" he taunted. The Red Room soldier, about to shout again, seemed to stare at him, puzzled. "It's a joke about… oh forget it, it probably wouldn't work in Russian," Harry muttered. " _Expelliarmus. Accio_ knife."

The large blade came zooming through the air and Harry's reflexes came to the rescue again as he snatched it out of the air. The Red Room soldier let out a cry of dismay, then tried shift back to his fake repulsors.

"Yeah, no," Harry said, then used a purposefully super-charged banishing charm. "Bye-bye," he said, as the soldier zoomed off into the fading fog, then hefted the chunky knife, grunting slightly. It was clearly designed for someone with superhuman strength. Good thing he qualified. A swipe of his hand sharpened it. "Now, let's see if this works," he muttered, and carefully pressed the tip into the suit at his hip. It went through like butter, giving Harry a nasty scratch in the process, but any pain was replaced by euphoria. As quickly and carefully as he dared, he swept it around his body at his waist, before up the middle of his body, leaving him with a de facto leather coat and trousers, and most importantly…

"Now this," he said with definite satisfaction. "Is much more like it."

… full access to his psychic powers.

"Y' know, _homme_ , that ain't a good look for y'," a man with an accent he'd never heard said.

The man, Harry thought, had a point. He looked ridiculous and the shirtless look was going to go get rather uncomfortable sooner rather than later, but that he could live with.

Of course, the other man couldn't exactly talk. Close-fitting casual clothing over a tatty brown trench-coat wasn't exactly a fashion statement, as far as Harry could tell. That said, the other man – boy, really, he was no more than five years older than Harry himself – wore it with total confidence. And more to the point, he stood with total confidence too, a metal bo staff in hand, and expression that said he could more than handle himself. Plus, the red and black eyes suggested that he wasn't just human.

"It's going to be temporary," Harry said. "And so will this." He focused, ready to knock out the strange accented, French speaking man, but before he could, his Quidditch reflexes kicked in again, making him duck and saving him for the third time in as many minutes as something small and fast shot overhead, glowing pinkish-purple, before it exploded. He blinked in shock. He'd barely seen the other man move, and speaking of which, he was moving again, bo staff discarded, a whole pack of cards gleaming in mid-air between his spreading hands.

He smirked at Harry's expression. "Want me t' deal y' in, _homme_?" he asked.

"Uh, no thanks," Harry said.

The man shrugged. "Pity," he said, before a hailstorm of cards came shooting at Harry.

Harry instantly threw up a shield, the cards exploding against like grenades, a constant stream of pinkish-purple flashes of light that forced him to squint, a thunder of noise against his ears.

As a result, he didn't see or hear the man take a run up and vault over his shield, didn't even notice him until he glimpsed movement out of the corner of his eye, and reacted with a glancing telekinetic blast that sent the man spinning.

As soon as he had an inch of breathing space, Harry went for his mind, and found a shield, a very well constructed shield.

The man smirked. "Tryin' to get in here?" he asked, tapping his skull. "Nice try. But I've had some work done."

"I can see," Harry said with a grimace. It was a good shield. A very good shield, actually, constructed by someone who really knew what they were doing. Milbury/Essex, maybe? Or had it been not-Jean? He could get through it, hell, he could smash through it relatively easily. But doing so would probably leave this man comatose at best, and he wasn't going to do that. Not unless he absolutely had to. That left only three options: work his way through it, fight, or run. The former would take too long, the latter might take too long, and the latter…

He shook his head. He had a job to do. Find Carol, and get them both out of here.

"So," he said, as he started to circle the other man. "You seen a blonde girl anywhere? About so high, blue eyes, smart mouth, right hook that could drop an elephant? It's just that she's a friend of mine, and I'd like to find her without having to pull this complex around down your ears." He shrugged. "Of course, in the mood I'm in, I might just do that anyway."

"I may have done," the man said, feinting at Harry. "Can't tell y', though. Against my contract."

"I see, because professional integrity is of course more important than displaying a scrap of human decency," Harry said sarcastically. The fog was definitely fading now, and the shouts of Red Room personnel were getting closer.

The man shrugged. "A man's word is his bond, _homme_ ," he said. "An' some of us ain't got much else." He looked Harry in the eye. "Besides. I think that even y' would have trouble gettin' to the dormitory. Someone like y' on the loose, powerful, rep for rescuing pretty girls in trouble, every guard that ain't chasing y' or protectin' the big men would be goin' to secure the assets." He snorted mockingly. "Good luck, _homme_. Y're goin' to need it."

Harry started to angrily say that Carol and whoever else was there weren't just assets, they were people – and that knowing Carol, she was less likely to need rescuing, more likely to be the one causing people to need rescuing, from her. Then, he stopped, and replayed what had just been said. And then, he met the man's gaze, seeing a knowing look there.

"I fancy my chances," he said, and hammered a telekinetic blast at the mysterious man. And it might just have been his imagination, but the man seemed to purposefully move just an instant too late, taking the full force of the blast to the chest and hammering him into the wall, stunning him.

Then, he looked up, scanning the complex with his mind. Sure enough, there was a definite cluster of minds, wary and by the sense of it, ready to open fire any moment, surrounding an area that was almost suspiciously blank to his powers.

"Bingo," he muttered, and took off.

OoOoO

Carol had, following the increased intensity of the explosions, prepared to leave, figuring that Harry would probably be heading her way and leaving a large trail of destruction towards the exit of this hellhole, taken the opportunity to eat the note Remy had given her. While this was a strategy taken from watching one spy film too many as a kid, she thought that it might be a good idea.

Logically speaking, if these assholes had managed to take down Harry once – no mean feat – then there was every chance they could do it again. Not only that, but they'd contained a whole bunch of teenage superhumans, some of them quite powerful, and felt able to let them out for training.

Moreover, after Carol had explained that the noises of destruction were almost certainly Harry escaping, Lorna had said something in a subdued voice that had made her blood run cold.

"He's not the first to try," she'd said, with a glance at one of the dormitory's empty beds. The implication had been clear.

In other words, there was at least some chance that if they tried to escape, they'd be recaptured. And if they were recaptured, odds were that the key card Remy had slipped her would be discovered, as would the note. Which, of course, was why she'd eaten it. Logic also dictated that if they got recaptured, or at the very least – if Harry didn't even reach her block – she was investigated on principle, and if Remy wasn't discovered, he could help them again. Or if they didn't survive the escape attempt, maybe he could get the chance to help someone else.

She'd also set herself, waiting for the moment, and advised others to do the same. "Okay," she said. "Hands up who here has a power that's any use in a fight."

Everyone raised a hand, some more hesitantly than others. Somehow, Carol wasn't surprised. After all, if you were training up super-soldiers, why would you waste your time with people whose powers were of no use in combat?"

"All right, better question," Carol said. "Who here actually knows how to use their powers in a fight? And who here will fight?"

There was a moment of silence.

"Come on, people, odds are that we'll have to fight our way out," she said.

"If we fight," Nehzno said quietly. "We could die."

There was a murmur of agreement from the others.

"We could," Carol said bluntly. "But what's the alternative? From what I've heard, the only options if you stay are to become some kind of psycho super soldier for the Red Room, or to die." She cracked her knuckles. "Take it from me, if it comes to it, it's better to go out fighting."

There was shouting from outside, followed by the rattle of gunfire and the howl of energy blasts.

It lasted less than five seconds. Then, there was a moment of silence, before the door, a foot or more of reinforced titanium with, according to Lorna, what felt like a lot of electricity running through it, crumpled like tin foil.

Carol folded her arms and raised an eyebrow. "And what time do you call this?" she asked.

"No idea, someone pinched my watch," Harry said, sauntering in. The other teenagers peered past him, to see a lot of unconscious Red Room personnel.

" _Mein Gott_ ," Kurt whispered. Noriko let out an impressed whistle.

"I'm no one's god," Harry said. "I'm…"

"Just your average ordinary everyday super psychic Prince of Asgard," Carol said dryly.

Harry rolled his eyes. "Yeah, right," he said. "Making new friends?"

"A few," Carol said. "And what the hell are you wearing?"

"This?" Harry asked, glancing down at what had once been a black leather suit and was now, essentially, a leather jacket and trousers. "Oh, a little something I picked up. I think it'll catch on."

"Catch on fire, maybe, that thing's a crime against nature."

"I think it makes me look dashing."

"It makes you look like an escapee from a 90's music video."

"Do you always talk this much when there are more important things to do?" Noriko asked, irritated.

Harry and Carol exchanged a look.

"… No."

"Then let's get going," she said. "Do you know the way out?"

Harry glanced at a guard. "I do now," he said. "And so do you," he added a moment later, as the knowledge quite literally appeared in their brains.

And just like that, faces that hadn't dared hope let themselves believe that this nightmare might be about to end, that they were going to get out in one piece.

So, naturally, that was when it all started to go wrong.

Because as soon as they made to go, hope in their hearts, they saw someone standing in their way. For the most part, she looked fairly innocuous; dressed in grey combats, a tight banded long sleeved grey shirt, with a dark overcoat to finish it off, she wouldn't have been out of place on the streets of most cities in the Northern hemisphere.

"Who the hell…" Carol began. "Harry?"

Harry had tensed up, eyes narrowing. "You," he said warily, staring at the young woman opposite them.

"Me," she said, voice mild.

There was a moment of silence as she stared at them, or more accurately, at Harry. Carol barely got a glance. The others didn't even seem to rate notice.

"Seven against one?" Lorna said, voice low. "Even without our powers and your friend, I'd fancy our chances."

"I don't," Carol said, staring at the young woman opposite them, real, primal fear running through her for the first time since the World Cup. Because now, she knew how the Red Room had subdued Harry. Thugs with guns, psychotic Black Widow wannabes, even creepy psychic doctors who could throw a punch, she could fight them. Maybe not win, but she could fight them. But this… this was way out of her league. "I really, really don't."

Because, the young woman was facing them down with not a shred of fear in her eyes. And save only for a couple of harsh triangular tattoos on each cheek, a bob cut hairstyle and an unnervingly calm expression, she was the spitting image of Jean Grey.

 **And that, I think, is an apt point to end the chapter on. Questions are answered, and all new ones are asked. For instance, what's happened to Bucky? Where's Jean-Paul? Where's Natasha? What's happened to them? Alternatively, who have they happened to? (Well, in Bucky's case, it's Sabretooth, but why waste a perfectly good line) And what is Gambit up to?**

 **Most importantly of all… What's the story with Jean's mysterious mirror image? And what in the Nine Realms is Project** _ **Krasnyy Syn**_ **?**

 **All these questions and more will be answered… next time.**


	9. Chapter 9: Forever Red - Part III

**And now, part III. Sorry it's been a while, I've been a tad busy.**

 **In any case, this is where the pieces start to fall into place. It was going to be longer, but I decided that there was more than enough in this chapter already to take in. There's going to be a lot of talking, and perhaps a little less action than some of you might hope (though still a fair chunk of action), but the bulk of the action will be over the next two chapters, where everything starts to come to a head.**

 **Also, I have a dissertation to finish and I wanted this out of the way so I could put out a chapter this month and focus on the damn thing – not to mention my upcoming exams.**

Meanwhile, the Avengers were collating evidence and extracting the remaining data from the tapes.

"What does it matter?" Thor demanded, patience finally running out. "All we need is to have some idea of where they are likely to be, then Heimdall can find them, and then we will crush them and get Harry and Carol back."

"I do not think that that will be so easy," Loki said quietly. "And I believe that Mister Petrovitch believes so as well."

Ivan nodded. "I recognise the man in some of the footage that has survived," he said. "The one who corresponds to the prophecy you mentioned."

"Why did you not say?" Thor demanded, striding over to loom over Petrovitch, face darkening with fury.

"Because it would not help you," Ivan said calmly. "For one thing, the only names I know for him are obvious aliases or superstitious nicknames – believe me, I have checked each one. Sinister is the one by which he is most often called. For another, as this prophecy hints, he is a shapeshifter of immense skill. He could be another person in an instant. What I do know is that he possesses technology that is unlike any I have seen, much of which is explicitly designed for concealment."

"How would you know that?" Loki asked quietly.

Ivan's lips thinned. "He told me, over forty years ago," he said. "The Red Room had attempted to either kill or capture the inhabitants of the White Council's Archangel base. The attempt failed miserably, and the White Council hit back. Our friend in the footage said that his technology would conceal us even from the finest magical tracking."

Loki nodded slowly. "It would explain why Strange said that he was unable to find him," he said.

"Surely Heimdall would be able to pierce such veils," Thor said, frowning.

"Perhaps," Loki said. "For all Heimdall's near omniscience, there are ways to hide from his sight for those with the skill. I have managed it myself. And technology, very select kinds of technology, can duplicate that feat. Celestial technology, Asgardian, Atlantean, Kryptonian, perhaps even Deviant… all are present on Midgard, in one form or another, and if this creature had access to any of them, it would explain a lot. And while I doubt that it would be of sufficient sophistication to hide completely, it would mostly probably be enough to make them rather harder to find."

"Yeah," Clint said. "Speaking of explaining a lot, so might this." He swivelled one of the screens to public view, revealing an image that JARVIS had just finished enhancing, rendering blurry pixels into something useful. "I think I just figured out how this guy subdued Harry."

On the screen was a young woman. While the image was still somewhat unclear, she quite clearly had ruby red hair.

"It can't be," Thor said. "Jean would never –"

"Jean would never," Loki said. "And it is not her. The style of hair is wrong and…" He pointed at a small part of her face, barely visible. "Look. Tattoos. Or perhaps scars."

"Then what are we dealing with?" Steve asked.

Loki grimaced. "I cannot be certain," he said. "But if this creature has access to the kind of technology I believe he does…"

"Cloning," Alison finished quietly. "It's not unheard of."

"What, Dolly the Sheep style?" O'Neill asked.

Loki suddenly froze. "Oh, I have been a fool," he said softly. "Such a fool."

"Brother?" Thor asked.

"The presence that kept Harry at Privet Drive," Loki said. "MI6, what remains of it, investigated on behalf of Fury. They hit a dead end, but one of the things that they turned up was that the Dursley family doctor, a man calling himself Nathan Milbury, showed an unusual degree of interest in Harry and frequently took blood samples. That doctor later vanished shortly after Harry started Hogwarts. A highly advanced lab was found there by SHIELD, albeit one long disused. Harry was kidnapped from Little Whinging, the neighbourhood in which he grew up."

He began to pace. "It all ties together," he said. "Milbury was our mysterious telepath and shapeshifter. He was studying Harry, likely having discovered him through an interest in Jean, and what better way to do so than to pose as the benevolent family doctor? When Harry started attending Hogwarts, he vanished, not wanting to risk attracting the attention of Albus Dumbledore, perhaps deciding that he had discovered all that he needed from Harry. But then, in this last year, it was revealed that Harry was Thor's son, and his Asgardian heritage has started to shine through. During that period, his X-Gene also activated. And for a brief period, the world got a glimpse of his full adult potential at Easter."

"And suddenly a project that was more trouble than it was worth becomes worth the risk," Bruce said, speaking up. "Harry's genetically unique, and power wise, he's all set to win the lottery."

"The Red Room would slaughter entire nations to access that kind of power," Ivan said. "They would give this creature anything he asked for. An extraction team would be nothing."

"And in Jean's apparent clone, he's got the firepower to subdue Harry," Tony chimed in. "By the way, can I state how unbelievably messed up that is?"

"You can try," Alison said. "But I'm not sure if words can cover it."

"You know what's bothering me?" Bruce said. "It doesn't make sense."

"How do you mean?" Steve asked. "What doesn't make sense?"

"Well, cloning Jean," Bruce said. "I mean, aside from Harry's mom, there's no obvious history of superhuman powers in the Grey family."

"Someone with cloning technology would also presumably have the ability to detect the X-Gene," Alison pointed out.

"Yeah, but how would they know to look?" Bruce asked.

"I did my research into Lily's family," Loki said. "When she and my brother were first married. I focused more on the direct ancestry, since Jean's line showed no signs of superhuman abilities at the time. There were legends, rumours, whispers of superhuman powers appearing intermittently throughout the Grey bloodline, but nothing solid or consistent. I assumed it was the occasional outbreak of magical potential in the bloodline and thought little of it."

"Exactly," Bruce said. "Why would someone with that kind of technology be drawn to Jean's family in the first place?"

"Could he not have taken the sample after Jean manifested her powers?" Thor asked. "Even if he did not have the ability to accelerate the clone's ageing, there are places where time travels swifter than in the material world."

"No," Bruce said. "That doesn't fit. He'd have had to beat Xavier to her."

"He could have taken a sample in the holidays, when she was home from the Institute," Steve said.

"No," Clint said, shaking his head. "This is a guy who's spent a long time getting good at avoiding being spotted. Even Strange can't find him. He wouldn't risk Xavier picking up on him." He turned to Thor. "And remember what Strange said? He said that even he couldn't track him. He also said that he didn't put Harry with Jean because he didn't want Sinister to go after her, more or less."

"Yes," Thor nodded. "I remember."

"Which complicates things," Bruce said. "The records say that he became the Dursley's family doctor in early 1995. That and what Strange apparently said implies that he was interested in Harry back when he was a baby. Harry wouldn't even have turned two yet, and Jean would have been four at most. Her powers didn't manifest until she was six. Harry was the kid of, no offence Thor, an apparently ordinary witch and wizard. What would attract him to Harry?"

"The whole stopping Voldemort thing?" Tony suggested. "I mean, to a scientist, that might suggest buried powers. Buried genetic powers. Maybe he was testing for some super power that allowed Harry to survive Voldemort, not knowing about super-mom, stumbled on his X-Gene, and decided to stick around."

"But that still doesn't fit," Bruce said. "He's got the technology to clone people. Why not just take a sample of Harry and clone him, when he's clearly willing to do it? Why go to all the trouble of watching him up close and risking being spotted? I mean, Dumbledore's people were keeping an eye on Harry, and this guy went out of his way to alter their minds. That's risky."

"Especially since Dumbledore's a legilimens," Steve said, then added, "A magical telepath. He's not even close to as strong as Xavier or someone like that, but he knows what he's doing."

"Indeed he does," Thor said.

"Right," Bruce said. "He's risking detection. Not only that, Harry's being watched by other people. Wanda looked in on him, Loki looked in on him, Huginn and Muninn looked in on him, Strange was almost certainly keeping an eye on him..."

"I also had people keeping an eye on him," Alison said, then, at various looks, half shrugged. "His grandparents were SHIELD, and Fury was close to his mother. It was a professional courtesy." She grimaced. "I had several people roasted over a slow flame after Harry turned up at Hogwarts and it became obvious how he had been treated. I think I owe them an apology."

"You were supposed to be retired," O'Neill said accusingly.

"So?" Alison asked, amused.

Her son sighed.

Bruce nodded. "That just adds to my point," he said. "This guy is taking an insane risk, right from the beginning. He knew Harry's significance from the beginning, but for some reason, he didn't clone him."

"Or he did, and we haven't seen it yet," Clint put in.

"Or he couldn't," Loki said. "Harry's genetic history is complicated, to say the least. He is part magical human, part mutant and part Asgardian, with the Asgardian influence steadily altering the human genes. And then you have to consider the fact that he was imbued with the chaotic energies of a probability altering blessing, and with the powers of the Phoenix."

"That still doesn't explain how he knows about Jean's genetic significance," Bruce said. "Something set him onto Harry, and that had to be knowledge of Jean's X-Gene and its power, despite the fact that it hadn't manifested yet."

"It couldn't be the other way around?" O'Neill asked.

"No," Loki said. "Xavier found Jean in less than a day, and once she was awakened, she was removed to his care within hours, with Doctor McCoy being the practising physician. After that, he kept her in close care. The only way this creature could have beaten him there is by teleportation or already having been there, and if he could teleport, he would not have needed a plane to remove Harry and Carol. It had to have been before."

"Yeah," O'Neill said impatiently. "But he could have found out that the kid had an X-Gene, then tested her before she got powers and got the DNA sample long before Xavier rolled up."

There was a thoughtful silence.

"That could fit," Bruce admitted.

"It could," a new voice said. "Unfortunately, your theory is completely wrong. The truth is much worse."

Everyone twisted sharply to see Fury. He was carrying a briefcase and wearing a grim expression. He was also accompanied by Coulson.

"What do you know," Clint said after a moment. "It really can always get worse."

"How?" Thor asked shortly.

"Earlier this year," Fury said. "We received a letter from the past, written by someone from our future. Harry, to be precise, addressing it to his younger self. Most of it was carefully written so as not to give too much away, while still giving out hints. One thing that stuck with me was that the section on Jean. 'You'll get another nice surprise along with'."

"The clone?" Thor said, surprised.

"It would be like Harry to sympathise with and effectively adopt a clone raised as a living weapon by someone who made his life a misery into the family," Loki mused.

"Your theories are based on a mistaken assumption," Coulson said.

"What's that?" Steve asked.

Fury opened the suitcase and removed an official looking document, sliding it over. Thor took it. "Jean's birth certificate," he said. "What of it?"

Fury pulled out another document, and slid it over. It was another birth certificate. Everyone crowded around it.

"Rachel Grey," Steve said. "Who…"

"She's Jean Grey's twin sister," Fury said. He slid a third document over. This one was different to the others: it was a death certificate. "And she died the same night she was born. However." He glanced at Coulson.

"The night Jean and Rachel Grey was born, a junior doctor at the hospital reported seeing a man he didn't recognise in a smart lab coat with a large shoulder bag heading down to the maternity ward," Coulson said. "A few moments later, another man came in, wearing scrubs, and demanded if he had seen someone heading down to maternity. The junior doctor confirmed that he had, and the man thanked him and ran down to maternity. The junior doctor, curious, followed him. As he did, he heard a loud bang from the hospital nursery and was in the room less than ten seconds later. There was a scorch mark on the wall, the babies were awake and crying, and the window was open. He went to the window, and saw the tall man in hospital scrubs looking around and cursing. There was no sign of the other man. He reported this to Hospital Security, who passed it on to the local police, but they didn't look particularly hard, especially once it transpired that neither man appeared on CCTV. The scorch mark was put down to an electrical fault, despite the fact that it didn't match the imagery of an electrical burn. It was too confined, too controlled, too focused. All of the babies were present and healthy, except for one, a baby girl with no discernible cause of death. That baby was Rachel Grey. At first, the shock of the explosion was blamed, but that was ruled out by the post-mortem. The coroner found SIDS – Sudden Infant Death Syndrome."

"One of the men was Milbury," Thor said. "Or whatever his real name is. Who was the other?"

"The description given fits that of Doctor Milbury," Coulson agreed. "Caucasian, approximately six feet tall, clean-shaven, slim, and dark haired with dark eyes. As for the other man… Caucasian, approximately six feet tall and lean – slim, but larger than Milbury. Goatee beard, blue eyes and dark hair. Dark hair." He took a deep breath. "Dark hair with distinctive white wings at the temples."

"Strange," Steve said. "Which means…"

There was a moment of silence, then Thor spat an epithet so foul that it actually seemed to make the air twist.

"A changeling," Loki said quietly.

"Oh dear god," Alison said softly.

"Yeah," Fury said. "Rachel Grey didn't die that night. She was stolen and replaced." He looked around the room. "Ever since Jean Grey's powers manifested, I have had nightmares about what might have happened, what might still happen, if she fell into the wrong hands. Now we know. The girl who disabled Harry isn't a clone or a copy, she's the real thing."

"Why didn't Strange just track her down?" Bruce asked. "I mean, he's meant to be the Sorcerer Supreme. Shouldn't he be able to do that?"

"Maybe he chose not to," Tony said darkly. "Think about it. Strange is preparing us all to fight this Thanos guy. He needs an army, more than that, he needs soldiers. And he takes the long view. Jean's been trained by Charles, and Strange knows how that works. Charles is nice guy, he's gentle, he coaxes her along, unaware of how powerful she really is until she's ready. That's well enough, but Strange wants to cover his bases."

"You're suggesting that he let Milbury take Rachel," Steve said.

"Why not? Our bad guy is a telepath, one who really knows what he's doing," Tony said. "He trains her in the psychic dark arts, gets her really good at what she does. Then Strange, knowing that this guy wants Harry too, knowing that he won't be able to resist the temptation to get a closer look at him and how he's changed, slides him under our bad guy's nose. The bad guy takes the bait and grabs Harry, not knowing what Strange does about Harry's mom, Harry's personality and not realising the significance of Harry knowing Jean. He's banking on Harry to get under this girl's skin, to show her the life she could have, should have, had. A revelation like that, after a life that she's probably had, as a cross between enforcer and experiment? Combine that with Harry's all-loving family first approach offering her an out and that might just make her turn on our bad guy."

He sat back, a bitter smile on his face. "And so, end result: one bad guy who knows too much about Harry is taken out and the Red Room is probably nothing more than a pile of rubble. Meanwhile, the good guys get a new Omega class psychic who knows how to play hardball, who can teach Harry and Jean how to do the same, and crucially, owes Harry everything."

"That's a nasty mind you've got there, Stark," Fury said.

"Tony," Pepper said, brow furrowed. "He wouldn't…."

"I am not so sure, Lady Pepper," Loki said quietly. "It is a compelling theory, one that fits how Strange operates."

"If he is behind this, then I don't care how many fancy outfits he owns, I'm shooting him," O'Neill said flatly.

"The theory fits Strange's MO, it's not what happened," Coulson said.

Tony raised an eyebrow. "Are you saying that Strange wouldn't do that?" he asked. "Because if you are, I have a bridge to sell you."

"I think it's entirely possible that he would do that," Coulson said. "But I'm also pretty certain he didn't."

"And why is that?" Thor asked.

"Strange's personality," Coulson said calmly. "Strange is a control freak. He's not always obvious about it, but it's what he is. While he's been known to disappear for decades at a time, he's always seen around specific crisis points. Which means that he needs to be in moderately good standing with those fighting the crises, like the Avengers. If he'd actually done it, I think it's reasonably certain that he'd get smote or smashed the next time he showed his face. And everything we've seen, and everything he's said, indicates that we're going to be seeing more crises over the next few years. Which means we'll be seeing more of Strange – he can't afford to stay away. And that's not it."

He looked around. "Strange might seem like a gambler at times, especially this summer, when he boiled everything down to Harry making a choice to reject Chthon. But he's not. He arranged everything very, very carefully. He knew who would do what and when, and he arranged circumstances so that they did exactly what he wanted. He couldn't be certain of what would happen, but he stacked the deck as high as he could in his favour. And I can't think of many bigger gambles than allowing a Red Room affiliated scientist and powerful telepath unfettered access to Jean Grey's identical twin, who apparently has all of her powers, for over sixteen years."

"Strange has constructed a well-earned reputation based on a certain mystique," Fury said. "The sort of mystique that let him throw down the gauntlet to the entire White Council, knowing they would never dare to pick it up. That mystique is so pervasive, that you're all forgetting one really damn important thing: Strange is not omniscient, nor is he infallible. He's made a career out of projecting that impression, and it's undoubtable that he's as close to omniscient as we're ever likely to see. But he's still human. He can make, and does, make mistakes. I think that we've just seen one of them." He looked around the room. "There's something else about Strange – he covers his tracks incredibly well and he never, ever lets you see him sweat. It's part of the mystique. And yet here, we've got an account of Strange looking panicked, of being caught cursing, of being _caught offguard_. Tell me, when was the last time you saw Strange look anything other than completely in control?"

There was a long moment of silence as everyone pondered this.

"He looked a little off when he said that he thought he might be about to die soon," Thor said.

"According to Wanda Maximoff, he said that because he wasn't entirely sure if he would survive the Battle of London," Fury said. "Which I think is true. However, look at the results of what he said. It put us all on our toes and it got Maximoff back in the game again, selecting a new apprentice that Strange pointed her towards, Dresden, whose life Strange had already saved. Dresden took part in the Battle of London, and played a vital role in crippling Gravemoss, forcing him to draw on Chthon to survive fighting Strange, bring the bastard into the open. Not long after, Beaubier hit him hard enough to either vaporise him or blast him into the middle distance, resulting in Chthon jumping ship and winding up in Harry. _That_ was calculated. _This_ was not."

"How do you know?" Loki asked. "I mean, Strange is a master manipulator. How do we know that he hasn't arranged this uncertainty, so we are not to blame him?"

"I don't," Fury said. "Not for certain. But I have a pretty good guess. If Strange had arranged for Rachel Grey to be stolen by this scientist, he wouldn't have been seen. He made sufficient preparation to ensure that he didn't show up on CCTV, but he didn't remember to wipe the memory of the doctor who saw him, or even erase the scorch mark he left behind. He got sloppy. Which means that I think we can take Strange at his word when he said that for whatever reason, he couldn't track this asshole." He focused on Loki. "And I'm guessing that you've been having similar problems."

Everyone turned to Loki, who grimaced and nodded. "I have tried," he said. "Ever since I heard of this telepath, I have tried to track him, both here and in the Nevernever, as well as in various other closely interlinked dimensions. Each time, nothing. It is as if he does not exist."

Fury nodded. "And that's why I don't think that Stark was completely wrong," he said. "Strange can't track this guy. He's tried. But he also can't afford to leave an Omega Class psychic in his hands or the Red Room's, it's far too damn dangerous."

"So he's just throwing Harry in and hoping he makes friends?" Clint asked, eyebrows raised.

"Harry knows Jean. We already know that he's got a psychic connection, a resonance of sorts, with her," Fury said. "A spontaneous one. I would be very surprised if he didn't have one with this girl too. That'll make her curious. And even if he doesn't, the fact that he's the closest thing to someone on her level that she's ever encountered will. After that, even if he assumes she's a clone, Harry's got a hero complex. He's going to try and save Rachel, and in the process, she is going to find out about Jean. Since the best method of controlling someone is through ignorance, I somehow doubt that our bad guy has ever told Rachel the truth about where she comes from. And then there's the new prophecy."

"Look, I don't give a damn about whatever prophecy mumbo-jumbo is going around," O'Neill broke in. "All I care about is the fact that there are two kids stuck behind enemy lines, one of whom is my _niece!_ So can we please save the speculation until after we get them home safely?"

"I am of a like mind," Thor growled, and O'Neill made a 'see?' gesture.

"Jack," Alison said. "I've been through this before. Much as we might want to, we can't charge in until we know as much as possible, or we could get them killed as we're trying to rescue them. We need to know as much as possible before we go in, or we could get blindsided. If it's some scheme of Strange's, we should be able to get in and out relatively easily. But if this guy is smart enough to slip both Strange and Loki's tails, if Strange has nothing to do with this, we could end up wasting time on a wild goose chase in the wrong place entirely. Or worse: we could be walking straight into a trap."

O'Neill grumbled, but didn't disagree. Thor looked grim, but nodded curtly.

"The prophecy," Bruce said after a moment. "What about it?"

"She's in it," Fury said. "' _He shall find the lost, rallying them to him. One, a beacon in an ocean of fallen stars, that waits to be lit. Another, a hound in chains, that waits to break free. A third, a memory in a cocoon of frozen time.'_ I've got a shrewd idea who the first is. The third, I don't have a clue. But the second… I'm pretty sure that that's Rachel Grey. I can't be certain, but the fact is that Jean Grey is the most powerful psychic in recorded history, and I don't think that a prophecy is going to skip over her twin sister. Not when it's already mentioned her boss, the 'Thief with a Thousand Faces'. The text of the prophecy heavily implies that Harry's going to turn her. I think that Strange set him in her path for precisely that purpose, since he can't find and rescue her himself."

"Well that's just great, since we have no idea where they are," Tony said.

"My words exactly," O'Neill said.

"Actually, we do," Coulson said. "You've probably been wondering where Natasha is."

"You could say that," Clint said.

"She's been looking into some contacts, two in particular," Coulson said. "One is an ex-Red Room prisoner. The other? He's inside the Red Room right now. And he works for our bad guy."

There was uproar. Most of it was on the theme of 'and you waited to tell us this why?'

"Natasha's been feeling out this contact for weeks," Coulson said. "Even now, she's not entirely sure of him, not certain that he isn't a Red Room Agent trying to trap her and deceive us, but the situation's forced our hand. What makes it worse is that he's jumpy, which you'd expect – the Red Room are hard enough people to cross when they don't have telepaths working for them."

"If he is in earnest, he must be brave indeed," Loki said quietly.

"I'll say," Alison said. "What's his stated motivation for wanting to leave?"

"Our contact is Remy LeBeau, otherwise known as Gambit," Coulson said. "He's the adopted son of Jean-Luc LeBeau, head of one of the biggest crime families in Louisiana and ruler of the New Orleans underworld. Supposedly he was a street kid who gained a reputation for light fingers and, when he was around seven, nearly managed to pickpocket Jean-Luc himself. LeBeau took a liking to him and adopted him. He's young, believed to be under 20, but prior to his disappearance last year, he had a growing reputation as one of the best thieves in the America. He has a literal calling card, the Jack of Hearts. He also has an advantage: powers. No one's ever got a clear idea of what they are, though the best guess some kind of ability to make things explode. It might seem counterintuitive for a light-fingered thief, but it fits. According to the FBI, he was being groomed as the heir to the LeBeau crime family, though apparently he wasn't interested in being in charge. He also supposedly fell for Bella Donna Boudreaux, daughter of Marius Boudreaux, head of a rival crime family. It was all very Romeo and Juliet. Her older brother, Julien Boudreaux, didn't like it and went after Gambit. He was found dead shortly afterwards, found with injuries consistent with close proximity to a large bomb, but no traces of explosive were found at the scene. Gambit was implicated, and considering his likely ability, was probably guilty. But there was no evidence, and he left town as soon as his father paid bail. Going by the fact that the last people who saw Gambit before he disappeared said that he looked afraid and was staying clear of people as far as possible, the FBI figured that he'd been murdered in revenge for Julien's death."

"Apparently, he wasn't," Alison said dryly.

"Right," Coulson said. "Natasha's got the DNA evidence to prove it. According to Gambit, his powers were developing out of control and our bad guy, who Gambit calls 'Doctor Essex', performed a life saving operation on him. This operation came with a price: Gambit had to work for him to pay off his debt. And until recently, he did."

"He doesn't have the stomach for some of the things that this Essex and his Red Room friends get up to?" O'Neill asked.

"It seems that way," Coulson said. "He was feeling out Natasha for help getting out at first, but according to her, that suddenly changed to help running a rescue mission. Apparently, Harry and Carol aren't the first young people with powers the Red Room have kidnapped."

"He must be brave," Steve said. "Does he have any information to offer us?"

"And how do we know he isn't spinning us a line?" Tony asked. "How do we know that he's even on the same base as Harry and Carol? I presume that they have more than one."

Coulson slid a couple of photos across. They were taken with a button camera. One was of Harry being carried away on a snowy backdrop, while another was of Carol, bruised but defiant looking, facing down a mussed, bruised blonde woman in what looked like a version of Natasha's suit. The other woman's face was contorted with fury.

"The woman is Yelena Belova," Coulson said. "Twenty seven years old, born in Ukraine, chosen for a Soviet ballet school at the age of five, one that was a front for the Red Room. She's one of the deadliest spies and assassins on the planet, and she's been linked to fourteen deaths in the last three years alone. A lot of them are believed to have been former Red Room personnel who refused to cooperate with the revived version of their former employer."

"They are," Ivan said. "I was surprised that it was not her sent to try and… recruit me."

Coulson nodded. "She's also been calling herself the Black Widow," he said.

"Hasn't she heard that there's already one?" Clint asked.

"Going by what we know of her, she does and she wants to claim the title for herself," Coulson said. "Her presence indicates that the Red Room are pulling out all the stops for this, as you might expect."

"This won't be their only base, though," Loki remarked. "I've been hearing whispers of Red Room activity all over Central and South Asia, as well as Eastern Europe."

"Also true," Fury said. "But this one seems to be where they're concentrating a lot of their resources. Which just one loose end before we kick their door down. Barnes."

There was a sudden storm of golden lightning, one that resolved itself into three figures: Bucky, a huge, hairy man in dark, durable and bloodied clothing, and Jean-Paul. Except that unlike usual, his lightning hadn't vanished as he'd come to a stop. Instead, it danced over his skin like motes of dust in a sunbeam. And he wasn't wearing his usual suit, the one given to him by Odin to help contain his power.

"Make that zero loose ends," Fury remarked. "Barnes, Beaubier and unless I am very much mistaken, Victor Creed. What a surprise."

"Who?" Thor asked, puzzled.

"Sabretooth," Clint said. "You've met Logan? Creed's like him, but bigger, uglier and minus the house-training."

"More or less," Alison remarked. "He lacks the adamantium, but he makes up for it in raw strength."

"And you brought him into my house?!" Tony demanded, infuriated.

"Have no fear, Tony," Loki said, watching Sabretooth, who was watching the room with a flat, empty predator's eyes. "He is incapacitated for now, and if he even breathes the wrong way, he will be instantaneously dismembered. Not killed – with a healing factor such as his, that would require decapitation." Those soulless eyes flickered up to him, then, without a word, drifted down to baby Ada in Pepper's arms. Lips rolled away from sharp canines in a parody of a smirk. The entire room tensed up at the implied threat. And Loki's fingers… twitched.

For a moment, nothing happened, then Sabretooth let a muted howl of pain as a deep horizontal gash appeared, destroying his eyes.

"Consider that a warning," he said coldly. "If you wish to be allowed to regrow your eyes, which we do not need, you will be on your best approximation of good behaviour. If you do not comply, I will remove your nervous system from your body, leaving only an attachment to your brain. I will then use it to string a harp and play it, accompanied by the sound of your screams."

There was a deathly silence as Jack looked uneasy. "Are you _sure_ he's not evil any more?" he asked his mother in an undertone.

"Just because you stop walking in the shadows doesn't mean that you forget how," Alison said.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"It means that he can speak the sort of language that Sabretooth understands," Alison said. "Now hush."

Loki crouched down in front of Sabretooth. "Now, let us get down to business," he said. "I presume that you did not simply attack Sergeant Barnes on a whim. I am aware that you are something of a mercenary, one in high demand. I therefore presume that you are employed either by the mysterious 'Doctor Milbury' or the Red Room. Am I correct?"

"And why should I tell you?" Sabretooth asked, in a deep and despite his situation, somehow laconic growl.

"Because my nephew and his friend have been kidnapped," Loki said. "Because I am therefore very angry, like my brother and our friends. Do not let my calm demeanour fool you: I am positively _burning_ with rage. You understand rage, don't you, Mister Creed? You understand that it needs to be released, to be pointed at something and unleashed, before it consumes you."

Sabretooth snorted. "Yeah," he said. "I understand."

"Good," Loki said. "Now, you are a mercenary, and considering the natures of your potential employers, they have likely already cut their losses. Considering the calibre of opponent they sent you up against and their intended targets, you were likely never expected to escape."

Sabretooth let out a snarl, but said nothing.

"You are not my target, Mister Creed," Loki said. "Not my true target. I want to unleash my rage on those who deserve it, those who have offended me. But if I cannot find them, if my nephew and his friend are hurt in the meantime, then I will forced to choose a nearer target. You."

Sabretooth snorted. "Do your worst, pretty boy," he said. "I'm not afraid of you."

Loki… smiled. Or rather, his lips drew back from his teeth, curving upwards. "Oh my dear Mister Creed," he purred. "You assume too much. You assume that I am simply going to hurt you. You assume that pain is my only weapon. But pain is the natural condition of the universe, Mister Creed, and I have had thousands of years to refine my techniques. And my period of insanity helped great deal when it came to thinking outside the box."

Then, he leaned in, and whispered something in Sabretooth's ear.

OoOoO

"Well, Mister Creed was _very_ cooperative," Loki said, as the SHIELD transport took a cuffed and heavily guarded Sabretooth away.

"What the hell did you say to him?" Fury asked.

"I'd like to know that too," Alison said. "Last time SHIELD had Sabretooth in, our best interrogators couldn't break him. Honestly, I thought we were going to have to resort to Charles' services."

"Everyone has a breaking point," Loki said, mildly. "And I made an accurate guess at his. All it took was the right words… and perhaps an illusion or two."

"In any case," Steve said. "We have a location. We can't know for certain that it's true, but we should check it out."

"I will speak to Heimdall," Thor said.

Steve nodded. "That's probably our quickest bet," he said. "Tony, Loki, Bruce, Alison, Fury, Coulson, Clint, pool what information we've got on the Red Room and their ally. I want to know what we'll be getting into. Pepper, call Jane, see if you can dig up the technology you guys used to bring HYDRA's base into the open a few months ago, I get the feeling we might be facing something similar. Bucky, Jean-Paul, we'll debrief. I want to know what happened with Sabretooth and how Harry and Carol wound up in Little Whinging."

"And I'm to stand around, looking ornamental?" O'Neill asked.

"No," Steve said. "I want you to get onto the Pentagon and the White House. If this lead doesn't pan out, then I want the Russian government to know that if they don't tell us where our kids are, we'll be kicking down the doors of the Kremlin."

O'Neill smiled a vindictive smile. "Half the Chiefs of Staff'll have an orgasm when they hear that," he predicted. "The other half will have a heart attack."

"Not my problem," Steve said. "Get on it."

O'Neill nodded and strode towards the door, pulling out his phone.

Finally, Steve turned to Jean-Paul and Bucky. "All right, he said. "What happened?"

OoOoO

The short version was that Bucky had become aware of the fact that they were being stalked, and, suspecting who it was and knowing Harry's proclivity for what could kindly be called overkill, decided to get the kids out of there. And if they made a stop along the way, as they seemed to be intending to do, that didn't really matter so long as it was well away from here. Besides, between them, they were more than strong enough to hold off anyone who came for them for long enough for Jean-Paul to whisk them away again if they got into trouble.

Further to that, Harry had previously demonstrated his ability to defend against high level psychic attack and return fire, sufficiently to overpower his opponent. Therefore, odds were that they would be fine and he would be able to handle Sabretooth without having to worry about the kids who, powerful as they were, weren't ready to go up against some like Creed, who was a) much smarter than he let on, b) more than happy to slaughter civilians for fun, let alone to incite a reaction, or simply use them as hostages. They might win a fight, but it would get incredibly messy.

And on any other occasion, he would have been right.

OoOoO

It wasn't too hard for Bucky to follow Creed's trail, affirming his belief that Creed had been trying to get his attention for whatever reason. Which meant a plan. Which meant that it was a very good thing that the kids were nowhere near here.

Unfortunately, however, that didn't mean that everything was going to run smoothly. For one thing, Creed was stalking through the shadows and the crowds like the predator he was, and almost none in those crowds had even the faintest idea of what was roaming among them. Oh, they knew something was off; you could tell by the way that parents drew their children in closer as he passed, how eyes tracked him as he moved, then ducked in an instant rather than meet his gaze, and the faintest relaxation and sigh of relief as he moved on past.

But even so, with all those instinctual premonitions of danger, none of them knew what Creed was, much less what he was capable of.

Then again, Bucky mused, as he watched Creed apparently disappear in front of his eyes, none of them had any idea of what he was capable of either. If they had the faintest idea of who and what he really was, they'd be running, screaming. But they didn't. And unlike Creed, he didn't radiate menace in the same apex predator sort of way. Creed resembled the beast he took his name from – large, powerful, surprisingly graceful, but not exactly subtle. Bucky was not prone to dwelling on himself and making such comparisons, but if he had to, he would say that he was more of a leopard, something that you usually didn't realise was there until you were already dead.

He wasn't fazed by Creed vanishing. It was temporary, and likely designed to prolong the chase, perhaps to lure him away from the kids – though if that was the intent, it was a laughable failure, considering that they were likely miles away by now, if not already on the other side of the Atlantic.

In any case, he banished such thoughts as he entered the small cut down off Knockturn Alley, eyes roving all around. He needed to be on his toes here. Then, on pure instinct, he spun, knife popping out and slashing open a throat.

"Well, well, well," a man's voice said in a low, laconic and amused sound growl. "Looks like some things never change."

It took Bucky a moment to register that the body whose throat he'd slashed open was wearing robes, a pale, dark haired boy no older than twenty with accusing eyes. The lack of blood spatter clued him into the fact that the boy had already been dead. The fact that the blood was still warm told him that he hadn't been dead for long, and he cursed inwardly. If he'd pushed Creed harder, this boy might have lived. However, he was dead. Very dead, going by the sudden smell of waste mixed in with gore. He'd been eviscerated.

He wasn't alone, either. There was another figure, lying on the ground. This one was not human, something given away by the unnaturally long limbs and extended lower jaw, bunched with muscle. A ghoul, bleeding the brownish watery blood of their kind. It had not lasted long – there was blood under its clawed fingers, but not much, and its throat had been ripped out with brutal ease.

And the perpetrator of both deaths stood not six feet away from. He was tall, taller than Bucky, taller than Steve, maybe even taller than Thor, with a powerful build and dark hair that surrounded his face with mutton-chops that looked more like a mane. His fingers ended in short, sharp claws that dripped with gore, canines that more closely resembled fangs, and he had the stance of a big cat, an apex predator fully confident in its power. That would have been bad enough. But the eyes… the eyes were what gave it away. This wasn't just some unthinking savage, an animal in human form. Because what gleamed in those eyes was intelligence. Intelligence, and malice.

"I've heard of you," Bucky said. "Sabretooth."

"Oh, you've more than heard of me," Creed said, tone amused and mocking. "We both know that. _Comrade_ Winter."

Ice ran down Bucky's spine and Creed smiled. "Yeah, I know who you are. I've known for nearly thirty years now," he said. "We fought side by side once, remember?" He tapped his nose. "And some things don't lie."

Bucky made a non-committal sound while he mentally ran through possible battle strategies and the best way to put Creed down fast. Putting Creed down wasn't the hard part. He could do that – though it wouldn't exactly be a walk in the park. _Keeping_ him down, on the other hand, was an entirely different story.

"Why?" he asked, nodding at the corpses.

"Them?" Creed asked lazily. "The ghoul thought he could poach. I showed him otherwise."

"And the boy?"

"What can I say?" Creed asked rhetorically, and smiled a toothy smile, revealing bloodied fangs. "I got bored." The smile widened. "And hungry." He glanced down at the boy. "Say… doesn't he look a little bit like that boy you're protecting?" He smiled again. "Nice bunch you had there. The girl in particular looked _very_ tasty."

"If you're trying to provoke me," Bucky said. "You're wasting your time. You know that."

"I just wanted to see if that had changed," Creed said nonchalantly. "I mean, everything else has."

"Cut to the chase, Creed," Bucky said quietly. "What are you _really_ doing here? I'll give you one chance to tell me."

Creed cocked his head and half smiled. "You're giving chances, now? Wow, you really have changed. The Winter Soldier I knew didn't give chances: he just killed."

Bucky let the words roll past him like a winter's breeze.

"You never knew me, Creed, and you were never in my league. Wolverine was, and even he wasn't good enough to beat me, even after I went several rounds with Captain America," he said, and smiled inwardly as Creed's eyes narrowed and he growled like a tiger. "I didn't ask you to move because I wanted to show mercy: I asked you to move because you're a mad dog that's not worth my time. So talk, then scat."

Creed was silent for a long moment, eyes blazing with hatred, then he spoke. "You're right. Weapon X never thought I was good enough to face you, the invincible Winter Soldier." These last words were spat out. "Instead, Jimmy got the nod. But he wasn't good enough. And you've lost your edge. You've gone soft, _Bucky_."

And before Bucky could retort, he surged forward in an avalanche of muscle, bone and savagery.

Instantly on the defensive, Bucky knew not to get sucked in to the belief that Creed was nothing more than untutored savagery in combat. He was an exceptionally skilled fighter, and had over a century and a half of experience under his belt. He also knew how to fight smart – that showed itself in the way he'd confronted Bucky in a tight cut between streets, somewhere he could use his height and weight to full advantage, while inhibiting Bucky's ability to use weapons or technology. While Bucky knew himself to be faster, a relatively even match for strength and arguably the better fighter, Creed's advantage in both bulk and healing abilities made him a real problem.

Make that a very real problem, he thought grimly, as Creed opened up his arm, his real arm.

This could take longer than he'd thought.

OoOoO

Jean-Paul, meanwhile, hadn't been idle. He had spent the hour he had allotted to Carol and Harry to explore the latter's past in Little Whinging finding a very particular person. Draco Malfoy.

Who looked up, somewhat surprised, when Jean-Paul appeared in his room.

"Well, I cannot say that I was expecting a visit," he remarked, putting down his book. "Does Harry have a message for me?"

"No," Jean-Paul said. "He does not."

"No, of course not," Draco agreed. "He is more than capable of telepathically communicating with me if that were the case. This is personal."

"You warned Harry about the Phoenix," Jean-Paul said. "An entity, _mon ami_ , that you should know nothing about."

"Oh, there are writings in the Wizarding World on the Phoenix, if you know where to look," Draco said. "And if you read between the lines."

"Perhaps," Jean-Paul said coolly. "But you also spoke of the fragment of the Phoenix within him. Something that you should _definitely_ know nothing about."

Draco sighed. "The Wizarding World's books on Phoenix manifestations, such as they are, are almost invariably either fourth or fifth hand from ancient sources, or by people who knew nothing about what they were writing about, or both. However, a few commonalities can be identified. One of them is the colossal psychic power someone who wields the Phoenix, even the slightest part, possesses. Whenever that power is used, in even a small way, it sends ripples through the Astral Plane, ripples capable of being detected by most with psychic senses," he said. "Though unless they are strong or trained to know what they are looking, they usually have no idea what they are sensing, or even that they are getting anything other than a mild headache and an intimation of danger. My family has unusually acute psychic senses for a wanded magical family and I have gone to some trouble to hone them, as you would when your house is inhabited by HYDRA's pet monsters."

"And how can you tell the difference between the Phoenix and Harry's own power?" Jean-Paul asked. "It is not inconsiderable."

"It can be difficult to tell the two apart," Draco admitted. "Though the Phoenix makes a rather more dramatic ripple on the Astral Plane than even a particularly spectacular use of Harry's own powers does. And frankly, what with the way he was stabbed through the heart then resurrected by a mysterious force that took the form of a gigantic bird of flame that proceeded to rip apart Hogwarts' heavily warded Entrance Hall and turn HYDRA troopers and Dementors alike to ash and less than ash, it was rather hard to miss." He shrugged. "As for why I warned him, I would imagine that it would be self-evident that such power was dangerous."

Jean-Paul regarded him. "Perhaps," he said. "Perhaps you did indeed merely puzzle it out through reason and research. But how would you know to research the Phoenix in the first place? How would you, a boy, know to read between the lines to see what is truly there? And why would you warn Harry of the Phoenix's danger when that danger is self-evident?" He regarded Draco. "And there is more. Your personality changed, suddenly, very shortly after Harry's heritage was revealed. You speak with the manner of a wise man, when before you were a brat, nothing more than a spiteful child – intelligent, yes, talented, perhaps, but a spiteful child none the less." He leaned forward, expression deadly serious. "No, _mon ami_. There is far more to you than meets the eye."

Draco regarded him. "You think I am a threat," he said. It wasn't a question.

"If I thought you were truly a threat, we would not be having this conversation," Jean-Paul said quietly.

"I don't think that I am the only one in this room keeping secrets," Draco said. "I couldn't say which ones you are keeping, but you are keeping them, from your friends. I saw you. You stand slightly to one side, you observe, and all the while you play at being a light-hearted young man. You speak with the manner of a man too. A wise one, maybe. A dangerous one, most certainly."

"How do you English say… 'it takes one to know one'," Jean-Paul replied evenly.

Draco inclined his head in acknowledgement. "Then," he said. "You can trust, for the time being, that I had no malevolent inclinations towards Harry." He arched an eyebrow. "Don't you think that if I did, I would have acted _before_ he became as powerful as he is now?"

"Perhaps," Jean-Paul said. "But he is still vulnerable, more so than he realises."

"Yes," Draco said. "On that we agree." He sat back. "So, I can assume that Harry and Miss Danvers have returned home, under Sergeant Barnes' watch? I would imagine that they would have noticed if you simply vanished from their party."

Jean-Paul eyed him, then said, "Harry decided to take a side-trip."

Draco leaned forward. "With, or without Sergeant Barnes?" he asked.

"Why do you ask?"

"Call it a bad feeling," Draco said. "Also, my esteemed hosts and escort seemed to receive a message over the radio that made them all rather more nervous and inclined to return here rather more quickly."

Jean-Paul regarded him again. "Without," he said. "He wished to look around his old neighbourhood. I gave him some time. Carol is with him."

"So," Draco said. "Harry is now away from his watchful and deadly protector – and yes, I know exactly who and what Sergeant Barnes is. He spent quite some time living in my house and masks only conceal so much. And now Harry is separated from you too, meaning he is without his primary means of a swift escape"

Jean-Paul stared at him for a long moment. Then, in a flash of golden lightning, he vanished.

"Now why do I get the feeling that this isn't going to end well?" Draco remarked to himself.

OoOoO

It was official, Bucky thought. He'd underestimated Creed. He'd known that the man fought smart – as evidenced by his choice of battlefield, where his size was an advantage, Bucky couldn't get the room to use anything more sophisticated than a knife, and worse, Bucky also had to worry about collateral damage.

Plus, the eviscerated wizard and gutted ghoul meant that the footing was unsteady to say the least. He could win this fight, he was certain. He had Creed's measure.

However, he also knew that it would take far too long. Creed was up to something, he knew it, and it almost certainly involved the kids. He needed to end this, fast. Which meant doing something that he hadn't tried before, something he sincerely hoped he would never have to try.

"Ah well," he muttered to himself. "Here goes nothing."

OoOoO

To an outside observer, for a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then, somehow, Bucky changed, something both indefinable and fundamental. His face smoothed, his gaze turned cold, empty and focused. Creed, seeing this, faltered for a moment. Then, he smiled again. "There you are," he said. "I was –"

What he had been doing remained a mystery however, as the Winter Soldier struck like a thunderbolt.

First, his blade flashed out and carved halfway through Creed's arm, drawing a roar of surprised pain. Before Creed could respond, though, another blow sank deep into the back of his left knee, just as a fist like a jackhammer slammed into the side of it, mangling everything the knife hadn't cut.

Creed swiped at him with a railing he'd ripped clean of its housing, wielding it like a spear, trying to drive him back to get some space. The Soldier, however, simply grabbed it activated one of his new arm's features, an electric charge 25,000 volts, which ran down the arm, through the railing and into Creed, drawing involuntary convulsions and a snarl of pain.

This allowed the Soldier to rip the railing out of his grasp, casting it aside, before delivering a blow that would have caved in an ordinary man's skull. And another. And another. Finally, he reached out and, with a single, savage motion, snapped Creed's neck.

Then, satisfied that Creed was incapacitated, he drew his knife. Wielding the blade with a butcher's skill, he systematically took Creed apart, purposefully targeting areas that would normally take a long time to heal, mangling more complex pieces of his anatomy and slicing through the spine in multiple places, rendering Creed temporarily paraplegic. Finally, he grabbed the railing and rammed it through Creed's guts. Once all that was done, he flipped Creed over, cuffing him.

All in all, it took less than three minutes, and standing back, the Soldier surveyed his work.

OoOoO

 _Sabretooth neutralised, healing factor occupied. A lack of poison limits my options, so his own waste matter will have to do._

 _Estimated healing time, 30 minutes minimum, 45 minutes maximum._

 _Terminate?_

 _No. I need to know what he was doing here._

OoOoO

Jean-Paul's next stop was Little Whinging and, after a forty seconds of frantic searching – an eternity to a frantic speedster of his calibre – he found nothing for miles around.

After that, he stopped for a minute to consider his options. He could check in with Bucky, but odds were that he was occupied. Moreover, Bucky could look after himself. There was someone else that Jean-Paul who might not, who Harry had off-handedly mentioned in two separate prophecies (well, a prophecy and an apparently accurate tarot reading) without knowing the first thing about who he was talking about. Someone else who looked very much like Harry, had near boundless potential in his powers, and who didn't have the first idea about how to protect himself from the sort of people who were clearly on the prowl.

The only problem was that his Asgardian suit limited him to Mach 10, for reasons of safety, and he was abundantly aware that at that speed, he would take at least half an hour to reach Clark, another half an hour to get back. At best. He didn't have that time to waste.

But if he used his powers at full potential without the suit, then he could well die.

After another moment of consideration, he sighed.

"Ah well," he sighed. "Who wants to grow old?"

And then, in less than the blink of an eye, he'd changed out of the suit and vanished in a storm of golden lightning.

OoOoO

Clark was not, it had to be said, expecting a visit from Jean-Paul, not in the middle of the day as he was doing his chores.

It was immediately obvious that something was wrong, from the way that the lightning that accompanied Jean-Paul didn't vanish as he came to a stop the way it usually did, but instead danced around him in an agitated storm, one that matched the expression on his face. He was also carrying the suit Clark had seen under his clothes in a rough bundle, and in general he looked less than his usual impeccably turned out self.

"Jean-Paul?" he asked, surprised. "Are you all right?"

"Are you?" Jean-Paul asked, no, demanded.

"Fine, yeah," Clark said, frowning. "What is –"

"There is no time," Jean-Paul said curtly. "Tell me, have you seen anything, or anyone, odd in Smallville recently?"

"Uh…"

"Answer me!"

"No," Clark said, after a moment. "Jean-Paul, what's wrong?"

"There is no time to explain," Jean-Paul said. "Be on your guard. Be ready to vanish with your parents the moment you see something wrong. Just… be ready."

And with that, he vanished, gone in the blink of even Clark's eye.

"What was all that about?" Clark wondered to himself, distinctly spooked. Then, he noticed that where Jean-Paul had been standing, the corn had spontaneously been turned into popcorn. "Aw great. How am I going to explain this to dad?"

Normal concerns swiftly reasserted themselves.

Well. Normal for Clark, anyway.

OoOoO

In any case, Jean-Paul had retrieved Bucky immediately afterwards, and once the debrief was complete, the two had been taken off for medical examination; Bucky for lacerations, deep bruising and possible hairline fractures, and to help him centre himself and re-emerge from the Winter Soldier persona. Diving back into the latter would normally have earned him an ear-bashing and the sharp end of Tony's paranoia, but everyone was too busy to worry about that.

Jean-Paul, meanwhile, had been stuffed back into his Asgardian containment suit and force-fed nutrient packs to combat potential burn-out, which he ate in worried and faintly mutinous silence.

In the meantime, Steve had made a call to Westchester.

As it turned out, Xavier had already been aware that something was wrong, thanks to Jean, who couldn't sense her baby cousin and was therefore panicking.

When she found out that he had been kidnapped by the Red Room and she hadn't been told, she went through the roof.

Literally.

Once she descended from the lower reaches of the stratosphere onto the doorstep of Avengers mansion, her anger seemed to reach new heights.

As in, Jean was occasionally described as angelic, for her looks and sweet nature. This was a double edged description, however. Because as soon as Steve opened the door, he was confronted by a Jean who resembled an angel more than ever.

That is to say that she was surrounded by an aura of amber-red power, her ruby red hair dancing and lashing about in the telekinetic up-draft like the tail of a particularly angry cat, and she herself was floating several inches off the ground in order to most efficiently scream the following in his face at such volumes that put the horns that brought down the walls of Jericho to shame:

" _YOU MEAN THAT YOU_ _ **KNOW**_ _WHO'S TAKEN HIM AND YOU HAVEN'T DONE_ _ **ANYTHING**_ _ABOUT IT?!"_

Steve, whose hearing was rather better and more sensitive than the average person's, winced. He'd been around quieter bombing raids.

"I'm guessing you picked up the relevant details from the top of my mind, Miss Grey, and decided to cut to the chase," he said.

Jean, expression still furious, nodded.

"Then you should also know why we can't just charge in, no matter how much we might want to," Steve said, tone calm, if a little louder than usual. There was a distinct ringing noise in his ears. He hoped it wouldn't last for long.

Jean, if possible looking even more furious, nodded again.

"Okay," Steve said. "Are you going to do that again? Because while I understand the impulse, Bruce in particular is on edge enough as it is."

Jean glared at him for a long moment, then seemed to deflate somewhat, dropping back down to Earth.

"No," she said, then sighed. "I'm sorry."

Steve put a hand on her shoulder. "I completely understand," he said. "Would you like to come in? We could use your help."

Jean nodded, making her way inside.

Steve shut the door and then, discreetly, stuck his finger in his ear and wiggled. Nope, still ringing.

OoOoO

But as the Avengers were gearing up for war, another battle was already in its earliest stages.

Far from New York, tucked away deep in an unclaimed part of Faerie, within the dimension known as the Nevernever, at the heart of the stronghold of one of the most feared forces in the mortal world, the combatants faced off.

"Harry?" Carol asked hesitantly.

Harry didn't respond, didn't even acknowledge her presence, instead staring unblinkingly at what Carol had to assume was Jean Grey's real life evil twin, who was staring right back at him.

"You don't have to do this," he said quietly.

She tilted her head ever so slightly, but didn't reply. Instead, before she knew what she was doing, Carol found herself making her way over to her bed. It was the most natural thing in the world, which was why everyone else was doing it. Until, suddenly, they stopped mid-step, the impulse cut off like the crack of a whip.

"Don't try that again," Harry said, voice hard now, hard and dangerous. And as he spoke, Carol realised with a chill that Evil Jean had been messing with their heads, without showing any sign of it, not even the signature glow that Harry used.

The tilt of the head seemed to become more interested.

"Last chance," Harry said. "You really don't have to do this. There is another way."

Evil Jean just stared at him. Then, astonishingly, she spoke. "It is my purpose," she said, in what sounded to Carol like a vaguely British accent, rather like the one she'd heard from Milbury, or whoever he really was. Her tone was disturbing calm, even, and almost puzzled, as if she couldn't

"You're not meant for this," Harry said. "No one is."

"I am meant for exactly this," Evil Jean said, frowning. "This is what I was made for."

Not evil twin, then, Carol thought. Evil clone. As she thought that, she noticed a questing presence on the edge of her thoughts, like Harry through their connection, but not. Instead of comfortable and natural, it felt somehow alien. It also felt curious.

Before it could get a good look, though, it vanished, and Evil Jean focused fully on Harry.

"I told you not to try that again," he said evenly. As he said, Carol noticed that she was developing a migraine. Wonderful. As if she didn't have enough problems.

"You aren't a match for me," Evil Jean said. It wasn't a boast, or at least, it didn't sound like one. Instead, it sounded more like a statement of fact.

Carol went to stand by Harry's side, telling herself sternly that all her instincts not to go anywhere near Evil Jean were pointless, since if the other girl wanted to kill her, it probably wouldn't matter if she was a hundred miles away. "Harry," she said, voice low. "She might be right."

"She sucker punched me last time, while I was in shock," Harry said. "Besides, I have a plan." He flicked a finger at the floor behind him. As Carol glanced down, she saw letters of fire arrange themselves on the floor, in short, simple sentences.

PROTECTED YOUR MIND. READ SO SHE CAN'T OVERHEAR, it said. TOO STRONG. CAN'T BEAT HER. TOO GOOD. HAVE SECRET WEAPONS. CAN MAKE IT LONG. STILL LOSING BATTLE.

As Carol was about to say, "Then what's the point?", more words appeared.

BUY YOU TIME. RUN. FIGHT WILL BE NOISY.

"So?" Carol began, then saw a smile crawl up half of Harry's face and blinked as she caught on. "That… is actually a pretty good plan," she muttered. "What do I have to do in the mean time?"

RUN. DON'T DIE.

On cue, a large part of the wall collapsed.

"You sure you'll be fine, once the fight's under way?" Carol asked. "I mean, it's weirdly nice of her to let us talk… oh."

Because Evil Jean's eyes were glowing an eerie blue, at a contrast to Harry's burning gold, while the air around them warped and rippled, the dust around them slowly rising through the air. At the same time, not only had her migraine intensified, but blood was dribbling from her nose. And to cap it all off, a quick glance around the room told her that she was by far the best off, her fellow prisoners, being on their knees, blood running from noses, ears, even eyes.

The fight had already begun. And it was already claiming casualties.

OoOoO

Harry registered Carol leaving, either carrying or dragging her fellow prisoners out through the hole in the wall while cursing up a storm, but only with a very small part of his awareness, the psychic equivalent of peripheral vision. Every other part of him was focused on his opponent.

His opponent was called Madelyn 'Maddie' Pryor according to one of his early telepathic tests of her defences, which were some of the strongest he'd ever come across. Perhaps not as sophisticated as the Professor's, his uncle's, Milbury's, or even Draco's (which, in retrospect, should probably have told him that there was something odd about his former rival's personality change) but they were clever enough. On a par with Betsy's perhaps. And more to the point, they were obscenely strong. Much like his opponent, who he suspected had gleaned far more from her tests of his defences than he had from his tests of hers. The only way he was going to get through that armour was if he found a chink in it, or managed to get her to lower her guard.

For the time being, though, he wasn't exactly interested in getting through her defences. He had material which he was pretty sure would open her up for a sucker punch, but that wasn't his goal. He even had a nuclear option in the Phoenix within him, but since he'd only used that once, by accident, and who knew what the consequences of using it would be… best not to rely on that.

Besides, either of those could, potentially, end the fight – and, in the latter case, cause whatever magic rich dimension they were in to collapse in on itself or burn up like dry tinder. Neither was an appealing prospect. And that wasn't his goal. His goal was to prolong the fight, to make it as long lasting and psychically 'noisy' as possible. His theory was simple: once, he'd managed to make a psychic cry for help carry across dimensions to Asgard. Unfortunately, he had absolutely no idea how he'd done that, and even less on how to replicate it.

However, all those months ago when Alexander Pierce had come to assess him, doubtless with a HYDRA related ulterior motive, he'd said something quite useful. When a psychic used their power on a major scale, it caused ripples in the Astral Plane that were detectable to the right psychics. When a psychic of _his_ power used their power on major scale, those ripples were larger, more waves than ripples. When he and another Omega Class psychic were pointed at each other, going hell for leather at each other? That would cause tidal waves.

So. To recap, all he had to do was to survive and to make it as noisy as possible, against an opponent who was a great deal more powerful and more skilled than he was.

No problem. Should be fun.

 _All right,_ he said. _I think we're done with the warm-up. Let's kick this up a gear, shall we? Bring it on._

Maddie stared at him for moment. Then, after a moment, a reply came.

 _Very well_. _Consider it brought._

OoOoO

Harry was right when he thought that Maddie had gleaned more from him than he had from her. Not, it had to be said, much more, however.

Indeed, Maddie reluctantly had to concede that her opponent's defences were rather strong, certainly much stronger than she'd expected considering the way she'd been able to sucker punch him before. Now, though, he was on his guard, and she could tell that for the first time in her life, she was facing someone who approached being her equal. It was… fascinating. Exhilarating, even. She could and would overpower him, of course, and she was by far the more skilled psychic. But Doctor Essex had drilled into her from an early edge that power was not everything. He had also ensured that she was very well briefed on this particular opponent. He was dangerous.

First of all, he was more than just a psychic. He had magic, and while his training was far from completed, he had had some very competent teachers. The full extent of what they had taught him was thus far unknown. Furthermore, he'd shown a breadth and mastery of pyrokinesis that a wise woman would respect.

Second, Doctor Essex and the Red Room both concurred in their assessment of him that he was exceptionally adaptable and had a knack for doing the unexpected. This extended beyond mere strategy into his use of his powers. While he had already demonstrated that while he was under-trained, especially in the telepathic arts, he was a particularly talented telekinetic, and had used those abilities in ways that she had not even considered.

Third, he had one advantage of her: ample experience of fighting opponents more powerful than he was. Her own training had been designed to ensure the most efficient and effective take-downs of any opponent, often before she knew they were there. She was a hunter. He was very much used to being the hunted, and considering all the enemies he had survived, very, very good at it.

In summation, he was not one to underestimate. However, he had his weaknesses. For instance, he was fighting here to buy time for the escape of someone he cared about, which was… understandable, she supposed. She would do the same thing for Remy. And she had a duty to Doctor Essex, of course. But also for people he didn't even know, who were nothing to him, who, if anything, would only slow him down? He could have scattered them across the complex, then escaped with his partner. If his knowledge of magic was sufficient, he'd likely even have been able to escape under his own power. Instead, however, he intended to stay and fight, to push her as far as he could – that much she had gleaned.

Once, she would simply have accepted this weakness and turned it to her advantage. But here, now, facing someone who was, in many ways, very much like her… she wondered at it. She wondered why. There was something about her current opponent, a sort of resonance, almost, a familiarity, something that made her wonder about things she hadn't before. The golden feather she'd taken from him, once warm and now hot, compounded her confusion.

And that was not the only thing she wondered about. On top of his mind, she'd seen a girl, a young woman of her age, one with the same colour hair, the same colour eyes, the same skin tone, the same features and face shape, even the same build. Oh, there were differences, but they were stylistic. In base format, they were… identical. Was this the mysterious 'Jean' whose name her opponent had said just before she disabled him? And if so, how did they look so much alike? She was created by Doctor Essex for a purpose. What purpose did this girl serve? More to the point, why did they look so much alike?

All these questions bubbled through her mind, before her opponent broke the silence of their mutual testing.

 _All right,_ he said. _I think we're done with the warm-up. Let's kick this up a gear, shall we? Bring it on._

Maddie stared at him, unsure of how to respond to this challenge. The confusion only lasted for a moment, however. She had a purpose. She had a duty. She would fulfil it.

 _Very well_ , she said. _Consider it brought._

OoOoO

Carol, already several hundred feet away and hoping to be more, was helping her fellow prisoners stumble along. Mercifully, most of them were on their feet, and Jono, the boy with the chamber of psionic energy in his chest, who had had psychic fire dribbling from his orifices instead of blood (and hadn't that been disturbing), was actually faring best.

 _Benefits of a psionic constitution, luv_ , he said in her head with grim cheer.

"Wait, you talk?" Carol asked, nearly dropping a groggy Nehzno.

 _Sure,_ Jono said, mental voice sounding very London. _But when you're around telepaths like Sinister, his gorgeous-in-leather-trousers dog of war, or even your boyfriend with the skunk stripe, it's safest not to broadcast anything you don't want overheard._

 _Makes sense,_ Carol replied. _And he's not my boyfriend. Why aren't you bothered now? Also, who's Sinister?_

She got the sense of a distinct snort. _Sinister's the creepy doctor bloke, the one who's really running things here._

 _Oh, Milbury. Yeah, we've met. The name fits,_ Carol said, then grimaced. _I'm a bit stronger than human and he knocked me out with one punch._

 _Woudn't surprise me in the least, luv. My bet is that he's a vampire,_ Jono said readily. _You're used to psychic chatter, then._

 _A bit, yeah,_ Carol said. _What can you do? Other than this, I mean?_

 _Well, the Russian boffins and Sinister were talking about 'psionic reconstitution' and me being a 'full spectrum psi', whatever the bloody hell that means,_ Jono said. _Right now? If you want something blown up, I'm your man._

Carol's lips curved into a smile. _Jono, I like you already. Though you never said why you're comfortable chatting like this._

Jono wasn't able to smile, but his eyes crinkled slightly. _Lovable as hell, that's me,_ he said. _Anyway, I'm comfortable chatting because… well you might not be a psychic, but trust me - with those two going hammer and tongs at each other, even Sinister isn't going to pick up something like little old you and me having a natter._

 _Here's hoping,_ Carol muttered.

 _Who the hell is he, then, your friend?_

 _Harry Thorson._

 _Who?_

 _Right, you've been locked up here since before that all popped up last year. Well, last year in real time,_ Carol said, then gave a concise explanation of Harry's background.

 _And you think that death in black trousers is a clone of his cousin,_ Jono said slowly.

 _Well, but for hair, tattoos and, you know, personality, they're basically identical, and this Sinister guy is way interested in genetics,_ Carol said.

 _Blimey,_ Jono said, silent for a moment. _I actually feel a bit sorry for her now. What these bastards have been trying to do to us, what they have done to some of us, Sinister's been doin' to her since the day she was born. Or made._

 _Yeah,_ Carol said quietly. _It sucks. But we can't help her. Trust me, with someone that strong, you can't help them unless they want to be. And we don't have the time to try even if we want to._

 _Yeah… speaking of help, who's going to help us? Your mate's been good about getting us out of our fine accomodations and keeping the Red Room's biggest gun focused on him, but they're going to find us sooner rather than later._

Carol was about to reply, then immediately went on her guard as a figure emerged from the shadows, sauntering into their path.

"Out for a nice evenin' stroll, _cherie_?" Gambit asked.

Carol raised a hand to stop Jono, who'd visibly tensed. "It's all right," she said. "He's a friend… I think."

 _You sure about that?_

 _Not really, but he slipped me a key card earlier, so I figure that he wanted us out one way or another. Also, he's a serious badass. With just you and me really standing, I'm not sure if we could take him._

Gambit smirked, doubtless guessing the line of the conversation. Then, gunfire rattled in the distance, and he sobered as everyone tensed. "'ere," he said. "Lemme help."

Before anyone could say anything, he put his hands to Nehzno's temples and closed his eyes briefly. Nehzno, who'd been groggy before, yelped and startled upright, apparently entirely aware.

"What did you do?" Carol asked, puzzled.

"I charge things wit' energy," Gambit said. "Teeny-tiny jolt t' th' brain gets y' people movin' again. Not somethin' ah'd recommend regularly, but it works every now and then."

 _Nehzno?_ Jono asked worriedly. _You all right, mate?_

"I am fine," Nehzno said. "I think. Where are we?"

Carol glanced at him, then Gambit. "Wake everyone else up, then I can give a quick Cliff Notes," she said. Gambit arched an eyebrow, but did so, getting an electric shock off Noriko and teaching Carol some interesting new French swear words in the process. Once that was done, Carol quickly outlined the situation.

"So, we just sit and wait here and hope that your friends come," Noriko said. "Great plan."

"Well, actually, I was hoping that Gambit would be able to point us to the exit," Carol said.

Gambit opened his mouth, but as he did, a ripple passed through the world around them. It wasn't an earthquake, it wasn't even confined to the earth.

"What was that?" Carol asked.

"Somethin' bad, _cherie_ ," Gambit said grimly. "Something real, real bad."

 _Oh bloody hell. The walking cliché's right._

"What?" Noriko asked.

 _Nori, luv, I think that findin' an escape's going to be the last of our worries._

"Why?"

 _Well, for starters, the snow's started falling._

"So? It does that all the time here," Noriko said, nervous and trying to hide it.

"Yes," Lorna said slowly. "But… not… upwards."

Inexorably, as if drawn by a magnet, all of their eyes were drawn back towards the building they had left, the dormitory, where two Omega class teenagers, beings so powerful that they could only tenuously be called human, both of whom had shaped, in their own way, into living weapons were locked in a duel. And it was having side-effects.

The dormitory was dissolving, dissolving and being reduced into its smallest molecules, first into dust, then into less than dust, molecules and atoms, going down into the very building blocks of matter. And so was the snow around it and the earth beneath it. Even the air could not escape, as all began to condense around an incandescent ball of warring gold and blue power.

But that was not the concerning part. It would be on the mortal plane, where there were rules, rules that had to be followed, if only in their bending. But here, in the Nevernever, thought influenced reality. The only rules were those that the powerful made. Instead, the concerning part was not the dissolution of the matter in question. Nor even was the concerning part the question of what might take its place as these two titanic powers clashed, their thoughts becoming reality.

No, the concerning part was, going by the sense of building power, that the clash was about to explode, surging out far beyond the tight control of its wielders, who had contained it, constrained it, and directed it – almost – entirely at each other, with unimaginable consequences.

And then it did.

A ripple became a tidal wave, tearing across dimensions, dopplering through time.

And the Astral Plane _convulsed_.

OoOoO

Everyone felt it. On one level or another, everyone on Earth or its interconnected realms felt it, though Earth was struck by far the hardest, as the consequences of the battle resounded throughout creation, amplified by the ever mutable reality of the Nevernever.

To those without any psychic gift beyond humanity's common 'sixth sense' for danger, the strange feeling of foreboding that cannot be explained, and the elusive phenomenon of déjà vu, it struck as painful headaches.

To those, magical or otherwise, human or otherwise, with untrained psychic senses and weak gifts, the pain was such that they could barely stand.

To those with stronger, trained gifts, even their defences left them only able to gasp and hold onto the floor.

And to the strongest of all, with the most sensitive talents, those who could feel the slightest flutter on the Astral Plane, unless they had their defences at their very height, only unconsciousness awaited as their brains shut down in self-defence. But this was a false mercy, as that darkness was haunted by visions both nonsensical and nightmarish.

Seers screamed mish-mash prophecies as dozens of futures revealed themselves at once.

Ghosts and spiritual entities, already strengthened and emboldened by the thinness of reality's fabric, surged forth, driven to insanity.

Demons were either enraged or exulted in the chaos.

And even the most apathetic of gods took notice.

OoOoO

"What the hell is going on?" Steve demanded, as his head pounded and Jean convulsed on the floor, eyes glowing amber-red.

His first answer was a deep, basso roar from deep within the Mansion, followed by the expensive sounds of exploding wood, plaster and metal reinforcement. The Hulk was loose, likely in a blind rage.

Steve grimaced, adding the problem to the list, before pulling out his expensive phone and sticking it in Jean's mouth as an impromptu method of preventing her from biting her tongue off and, hopefully considering its size, from swallowing it. Then, calculating that the nearest person who knew the most about human physiology was either Loki or, if he was crippled the way Jean was, Tony, he set off at a run, cradling her carefully.

Then, all of a sudden, it stopped. The headache vanished – or at least was replaced by the dull throb of a receding headache – and Jean stopped twitching and convulsing in his arms. Even the Hulk, wherever he was, seemed to have quietened and, presumably, calmed down.

"JARVIS?" he queried.

"The Mansion was under severe psychic attack, Captain Rogers," JARVIS replied. "While there are defences in place for such an eventuality, the severity of the attack meant that I had to recalibrate them. Sorry for the delay."

"It's okay," Steve said, as Jean groaned and said something muffled, before removing the phone.

"What…" she began again.

"You're okay," Steve said, hoping that was the case as he helped her stand on her own two somewhat wobbly feet. "We suckered with a psychic attack. JARVIS has set up some counter-measures."

"Oh, right," Jean said, then grimaced. "That was… ow."

"Yeah, that sounds about right," Steve said. "JARVIS, is the attack still going on?"

"Yes, sir, though I fear that it is not limited to the Mansion," JARVIS said. "I am receiving reports of identical symptoms to those displayed by yourself and others within the Mansion worldwide. Based on my database of those with psychic abilities, the effects appear to vary in severity based on the amount of psychic power wielded."

Jean gasped. "The Professor!" she said. "I've got to –"

"If you go out there, you'll be flattened again," Steve said.

"I've got my shields up, Captain," she said. Her eyes, he noticed, were still glowing. "I won't be caught off guard."

"It's still an unnecessary risk," Steve said. "You shouldn't… Jean?"

Jean's expression had gone distant, and the amber-red glow expanded into an aura around her, before collapsing and condensing tight around her body. Suddenly, she gasped, eyes widening. "Harry," she whispered in a strange, resonant voice, then turned and reached out, grabbing what was apparently thin air and ripping it open like a curtain, opening a window onto a world of wonder and horror.

It had once been a concrete and metal facility, perched on high, cold and forbidding mountains like a dragon's fangs, all carpeted in snow and ice. Now, it was a surreal battlefield, with the snow rising up in strange, helix like formations towards clouds made of earth from which bolts of lava and earth sometimes descended, from a mountain made of clouds which periodically erupted with rivers of slow, almost liquid lightning, while the air around surged back and forth like seas, swirling around the cloud-mountain.

And among all this, the unmistakeable sound of gunfire, interspersed with what almost sounded like repulsor blasts, and a lot of panicked and obscene Russian. And an incandescent ball of energy hung at the very heart of it. Steve was not a betting man, in the usual course of things, but he'd have put money on Harry being at the heart of it.

Into this maelstrom, Jean dived without hesitation. Somehow, Steve thought she'd be fine. Primarily, his worry was reserved for Carol and Harry.

And his headache was back. Wonderful.

"JARVIS, call everyone, tell to drop what they're doing and suit up," he said. "We've got our opening."

 **And that, I think, is a suitable moment on which to finish. To explain for the puzzled, Maddie/Rachel isn't a clone, but a lot of people assume she is for obvious reasons. It doesn't help that she thinks she is one – or rather, she thinks she was artificially created. She doesn't know about Jean, which is why she's very interested in Harry. As for why Strange can't track Sinister, let's just say that there are a couple of reasons for that.**

 **In any case, a few questions answered, many more, I think, raised. Til next time. :)**


	10. Chapter 10: Forever Red - Part IV

**So, I wrote this juggernaut of a chapter in between revising, because it was bugging me, and over half of it was written today. Accordingly, you may have to wait a month or two for the next one. However, I rather think that this one will tide you over until then. For one thing, it is largely action, though not mindless, smashing action, but action with a point to it. There will be lots of arse-kicking, rest assured, and some interesting character beats. So read on, dear reader, read on.**

Omega class beings were rare, even among the various pantheons of Earth, being a degree of power only granted to the greatest of Greater Gods and to Skyfathers, and one they weren't always able to exercise on Earth.

Historically speaking, they were far rarer among humanity; natural born, that is, not artificially enhanced. The Sorcerer or Sorceress Supreme was one, though a portion of their power came with their position. Merlin had been a natural born Omega, though it was questionable whether he'd been entirely human.

Various pretenders to that status had arisen down the millennia, but most that managed to cross the boundary into full Omega status relied on outside empowerment – the Juggernaut, for instance, the Avatar of Cyttorak, the Champion of Avalon, known more recently as 'Captain Britain', or the Green Lantern, were three more conventional examples. Gellert Grindelwald had managed to become a less than conventional example, accruing demonic power to add to his already vast magical abilities. Either that, or they were a collection of beings pooling their power – the Uni-Minds of the Eternals, for instance.

Divine Omega Class beings had Rules dictating their actions on Earth, especially when it came to confronting one another, if only because all the pantheons of Earth preferred Earth as it was, a nexus of dimensions and magical powers inhabited by interesting creatures, to as it might be if those rules did not apply, a colossal amount of free-floating gravel orbiting the Sun, and would therefore step in (or on) to prevent such a thing happening. Indeed, it was partly for this purpose that they had retreated from Earth in the first place.

Human Omega Class beings did not have such rules or restraints. Furthermore, never before in history had two Omega class psychics, if ones still growing into the fullness of their power, unleashed their raw might on one another. And more to the point, never before in history had they clashed in the Nevernever, a dimension where thought defined reality. And when those thoughts were those of psychics with raw power to spare, only months after the disruptive power of the Elder God Chthon had torn through reality like a razor through wet paper, one of whom had been touched, even contaminated, by that power, and also wielded magic, the very art of telling the universe to shut up and do as it is told… it is safe to say that you have a recipe for something that has got very much of hand.

With this lack of precedent, and his own somewhat vague grasp of exactly how powerful he was, Harry could therefore be forgiven for not realising the consequences of his cunning scheme. Indeed, if he had acted in the mortal world, or at least in a more 'real' and less turbulent dimension, then the consequences would likely have been limited to mass migraines – at the least, reality wouldn't have been warping around him.

But it was, and reality warped as the Psi-War raged.

So when the Avengers stepped into the Red Room's base, they stepped into a place that was not a Heaven, nor a Hell, but instead a world of fantasy.

The mountain beneath their feet was formed of dark, solid cloud, shot through with silver and crackling white-hot lightning that burst forth here and there, flowing down the mountain in sinuous rivers, through forests of trees carved from water, sleet, snow, and ice. The clouds above, thick and swirling as far as the eye could see, were composed dark, rocky earth, glowing with sullen heat, heat that occasionally manifested as bolts of lava and flame, while the a veritable blizzard of snow soared up in a strange helix formation towards those unearthly clouds, adding a thick pall of steam to the upper reaches of the warped world.

The complex itself fared little better. The buildings, once made of concrete, were largely torn apart, leaving behind silvery ghosts made from sand and water that was solid like ice, yet somehow mutable, reflecting and refracting the lightning-light. Nor were they solely confined to the ground, spiralling up at unnatural angles in complete defiance of all laws of logic and geometry, so as to enter one building through the front would be to exit straight upwards through the roof of another, and to exit one would be to be in multiple different buildings at once.

The complex had also acquired any number of ghosts and forsaken spirits, psychic impressions of nightmares so strong that in the Nevernever, they left physical trace, like a prisoner's tally of their days. Normally, all their influence extended to was a cold sensation, a feeling of unease, anything greater being banished or destroyed by Sinister or Maddie. Now, flooded with excess psychic energy, even the faintest shadow of a dream was given physical form. Sometimes, events simply seemed to replay themselves, the participants limned in ghostly silver light. Other times, those who stepped into certain places were trapped in a memory, whether it be of a horrendous experiment, or simply walking the space of ten feet, that repeated itself over and over again.

And not all consequences were so passive. The Red Room was where monsters were born, so they came forth now, scuttling horrors, twisted parodies of humanity, emerging from the darkness. Here, one with spider-like legs and an articulated neck, there, a serpentine creature with fanged tri-partite jaws that spread wide enough to swallow a child whole that swum through the lapping, sea-like air, and things too twisted to describe. All they had in common was that they were creatures born of pain, of fear, of sorrow and above all, of helpless, hopeless rage, and they existed solely to slake a desire for vengeance by people long since dead, unleashed their savagery on all they could see.

Red Room personnel fought back, to give them their due credit, for while these things were monsters, they were monsters themselves. But the monsters poured forth like blood from an artery, each a unique and foul variation on humanity, a snapshot of tragedy, and new hazards emerged, such as patches of time which ran at different speeds; in some, those trapped within simply seemed to be moving through treacle as the air congealed around them. In others, they seemed not to move at all. In others still, they appeared on the other side in an instant, looking older and haggard. And in yet others, all that emerged on the other side was dust.

Moreover, if you looked carefully by lightning-light through the reflections in the water, you could see other alternatives, where the same players played out the same events in different ways, where the world warped in other, eye watering fashions, and where past and future were as one.

And even then, the tapestry of madness was not complete, for the stars began to fall from the sky, punching through the clouds of earth like sparks through tissue, striking in the valleys below to form lakes of cold fire.

And above it all, the unwitting weavers of that tapestry, Maddie and Harry, outshone all else as they danced a deadly dance on high, blazing gold flames clashing with eerie blue, with the vast bulk of their conflict invisible even in this world of thought and idea.

The Psi-War raged.

Reality warped.

And worlds wept.

OoOoO

Far below the cataclysmic duel, Carol clung to the floor beneath her and reflected that this might not have been one of Harry's better plans. Though, on reflection, based on what she'd seen and what Uthred and Diana had said about their first escapade with Harry, as well as Hermione's contributions on the same subject, this one had the virtue of not being completely insane. Just, you know, possibly very poorly judged.

This was, she knew, perhaps an uncharitable view to take when he'd had to whip up a plan in no seconds nothing when Evil Jean had turned up, while also holding off her psychic probes when she was clearly stronger and better than he was. And while she wasn't really an expert on psychic battles, from what she could see of the battle above, Harry's signature golden energy was getting smaller and weaker, while his opponent's eerie blue aura was growing stronger and larger.

However, considering that her brain felt like it was simultaneously frozen and on fire, while also melting and dribbling down her nose and out her ears (as it happened, that was blood, not brains, but Carol felt that it was only a matter of time), and she had a whole bunch of civilians to look after (and all of them were down for the count, but for Jono, who was looking helpless), as well as an ally of dubious trustworthiness to keep an eye on, and the goal of getting the Avengers to home in on the battle didn't seem any closer to success, she felt justified in being a bit uncharitable.

Then, all her uncharitable thoughts vanished in an instant, as a vast flash lit up the landscape, and then, through the huge crackle and roar of the battle above, came the most beautiful sound she'd ever heard – a vast, rolling and very familiar rumble of thunder. And as it resonated in her very bones, she began to laugh like a maniac.

Harry's plan had worked. The Avengers were here.

Not two minutes later, a beautiful woman sculpted in an orange, no, amber-red, energy landed beside them and miraculously, the pain vanished. It was then that Carol realised that the woman wasn't alone, as two figures with her grabbed Carol and pulled her into a brief rib-cracking group hug. It took her a moment to recognise them.

"Uncle Jack? Grandma?! What are you doing here?" she asked, confused.

"Seeing the sights," O'Neill said, carbine now up and sweeping the sight lines. He was, Carol noticed, wearing a strange kind of metallic headband, as was Alison. Both were in standard black combats.

"Psychic inhibitors," her grandmother explained, at Carol's puzzled expression. "Of Tony's design, to prevent your young man's little battle from turning all our brains to porridge." She glanced upwards. "Sometimes, I think that that boy has absolutely no idea how powerful he is. Which is worrying, since I think that the young lady he's up against knows exactly how strong she is, and how strong he is too."

"No, the whole psychic fallout thing was on purpose," Carol said. "He wanted to make a big beacon that no one could miss."

"Well, he managed that," O'Neill said. "I mean, he's given the entire world a lobotomy in the process, but he got our attention."

"Jack," Alison said, giving him a reproving look as she drew a pistol with glowing orange power lines running through it and almost absent mindedly shot a Red Room Agent in an ersatz Iron Man suit who'd managed to stay on their feet right in the power source, crippling the armour and almost dropping the Agent to the floor under its weight. "It was migraines at worst, for most of us." She glanced at the person she'd just dropped and frowned. "Tony's not going to be happy," she remarked. "Though it was always going to happen eventually." She smiled at Carol. "Now, darling, would you introduce me to your new friends?"

Said new friends, prisoners and Gambit alike, were either staring at Alison and Jack, at the glowing woman – who Carol felt looked naggingly familiar – up at the newly arrived Thor and Tony, or across the battlefield at the other Avengers, who were going through the already half-crippled Red Room Agents like a hot knife through an overused cliché.

"Oh, right," Carol said. "Kurt, Jono, Noriko, Nezhno, Lorna, and the guy in the trenchcoat is Remy, though he goes by Gambit. Guys, this is my uncle Jack and my grandma."

 _Grandma?_ Jono asked sceptically. Alison hadn't reapplied her ageing make-up.

"Long story," Carol said, then turned to Alison and O'Neill, the former amused, the latter currently mid eye-roll. "Anyhow, I know Gambit's not a prisoner, but trust me, he's on our side." She turned back to Gambit. "You're on our side, right?" Then, she frowned. "Why are you helping us, anyway? Not that I'm complaining, you understand."

"Is now really the time?" Noriko complained.

"It is a good question," Lorna pointed out. "And an important one."

"Maybe I helped because I wanted to," Gambit said. "Maybe because y' real persuasive when y' want to be. Or maybe it because I'm a New Orleans boy and a few years back, my home was threatened by a hurricane, name of Katrina. It was all set t' practically wipe the city off the map. Then y' friend's poppa, up there, stepped in and the hurricane wasn' a problem no more. And the way I see it, one good turn deserves another." He smiled a smile so devastating that Carol privately thought it should be banned by the Geneva Convention. Or put in a museum. Either or. "Or maybe, it because I believe that people should be free."

"Thanks," Carol said blinking, then frowned. "That isn't the whole answer, though, is it?" Then, she shook her head. "Whatever. We don't have time for it now. He's on our side."

"Don't worry, dear," Alison said. "We already knew about Mister LeBeau."

"What? No, wait, don't care at the moment," Carol said. "Who's Miss Night-Light and, again, not that I'm complaining, how are our brains not melting? Also, how do we get out of here?"

"Tony's armours will be arriving any moment now," Alison said calmly, as she went over to Lorna. "Lorna, it is Lorna, isn't it? I take it that this bracelet is inhabiting your powers?" At Lorna's nod, she smiled reassuringly and said, "Hold still." Then, briskly, she lined it up with her pistol and shot the bracelet off. "Be ready," she said, as she moved onto the others. "We may be attacked at any moment."

"You were saying, grandma?" Carol said.

"Tony's scanned the terrain, we've found you, and now they'll be coming to cover us back through the portal," Alison said, as she blasted off Nezhno's bracelet. As she removed each bracelet, Carol noticed that she had a calm, reassuring word for each. "They would be here, but most of them are securing the portal – it does lead, after all, right into the heart of the Avengers' headquarters and home. Your young friend, Jean-Paul, would also be here, but he was deputised to evacuate the non-combatants." She smiled at their expressions. "Honestly, I'd hardly have stood around chattering if we could have got you through immediately."

"What portal?" Carol asked.

"The one we got here through, maybe?" O'Neill suggested, smirking at his niece. His sarcasm, however, was undercut by relief as he kept darting glances at her, to reassure himself that she was there and all in one piece.

Carol made a rude gesture at him. "And how did you get that?"

" _Me,"_ the glowing woman said, and smiled. _"Hello, Carol."_

"And you are… oh my god, Jean, is that you?"

Jean nodded. _"I'd have spoken earlier, but…"_ She grimaced. _"Harry and whoever's he's fighting are throwing off a lot of psychic static. Blocking it takes concentration."_

"I vas wondering vhy I could feel my head again," Kurt said vaguely, then smiled at Jean and swept a surprisingly courtly bow. _"Danke schön_ , _fraulein."_

Jean laughed softly, voice strangely resonant. _"It's my pleasure,"_ she said, before casting a worried look at the sky, where the psychic duel continued unabated.

The other prisoners, meanwhile, all looked rather gobsmacked. Gambit mostly looked amused, though underneath the amusement was an undercurrent of tension, as whatever plans he'd been cooking up came to fruition, and it all came down to a last roll of the dice.

"You weren't kidding about the Avengers finding us," Noriko said eventually.

"Like I said," Carol said, shrugging. "It's what they do."

"And… your family."

"It's what we do," O'Neill said, flashing Noriko a brief grin that, while not as charming and a bit more wolfish than Gambit's, was still reasonably impressive. Noriko actually went a little pink and Carol wrinkled her nose. She knew, from the remarks of the girls on the soccer team, that her uncle was a silver fox, but it was still kind of disturbing to see girls her age crushing on him even a little bit.

"Indeed," Alison said. "Oh, and how remiss of us, we haven't introduced ourselves: I'm Alison Carter, this is my son, General Jack O'Neill."

"Nice to meet you," Lorna said, with the others mumbling words to similar effet.

"The pleasure," Alison said. "Jack, 'ware right." O'Neill accordingly turned and fired several chattering bursts of gunfire into something large, deathly pale and semi-humanoid with large teeth and a bad attitude. The bullets tore into the unearthly flesh, ripping away large chunks of both shoulders and face, before a concentrated burst to the head destroyed it, leaving the creature, whatever it was, to slump to the ground. "Nasty bugger," Alison remarked mildly. She hadn't raised her voice. She hadn't even changed her tone. Then, she turned back to the prisoners and smiled a kind, grandmotherly smile. "As I was saying: the pleasure is all ours."

OoOoO

The Agents of the Red Room, Thor had to grudgingly concede, were made of tougher stuff than their HYDRA counterparts which he had faced in London. Like everyone else who was not either protected by Loki's spells, Tony's technology or Jean, many of them were crippled by the telepathic fallout of the immense battle in the skies above – though since those skies had now transformed into what fell more like a giant ocean of lava, calling them skies might not be the most accurate description in the world.

In addition, they were being targeted by a horde of twisted, corpse pale monstrosities, ghosts of those who had died in this vile cesspit, ones that tore anything and anyone the could reach limb from limb, while even some of the buildings were coming to life. However, those Red Room Agents who had managed to either fight off the telepathic fallout or find some method of blocking it were fighting in a disciplined fashion, forming a concerted resistance behind a set of rather advanced looking defensive energy shields.

And in one respect, the chaotic upheaval was actually helping them: Loki had had to teleport a thoroughly Hulked out Bruce to some desolate desert, far from people, which meant that the Avengers were denied their usual method of breaking down stubborn defences (Thor himself could take that role, but he and Tony were generally deployed in the air). Further to that, because the clouds were what all present were standing on, Thor couldn't unleash the full extent of his power for risk of hurting those few innocents present as collateral damage.

Still. All this really meant was that he would have to be a little more precise.

He could manage that.

He examined the Red Room's dispositions with the eye of an experienced soldier, whirled Mjolnir once around his head, and hurled it downwards. The enchanted hammer shot forth in a barely visible blur, circumventing the energy barriers and seeking out its targets with all the inexorable accuracy of laser guided missile.

Some tried to block it. Others tried to dodge it. Most never even knew it was there, as it passed through their skulls faster than any thought had ever done.

Within three seconds, twenty five Red Room Agents were dead. Within ten, so were thirty of the ghosts that Harry's battle had stirred up, though dozens, if not hundreds, more remained.

Normally, as an Avenger, Thor tried not to do any more damage to his opponents than was absolutely required, being aware that mortals were very fragile and that they could get understandably nervous about the power of gods or god-like beings, as well as setting much store by their courts of law.

However, today, he was not merely facing some criminal or criminals, preventing them from committing some crime or apprehending them for the same. Today, he was facing the creatures that had kidnapped his son and his son's dearest friend, the descendant of one of his own dear friends and commander of the Avengers, Steve. In his mind, they had declared war on him and his, and thus they would pay the price.

Mjolnir, cleaned of bodily fluids by the winds of its flight, returned to his hand.

Once it did, Tony, Steve and Bucky attacked on the ground. Tony easily demonstrated the superiority of his technology as compared to those who would copy it and his experience as a pilot of his suits, while Steve inspired panic wherever he went, moving with the speed, smoothness and surety of a great warrior. As for Bucky, he had changed the appearance of his normally well disguised prosthetic arm to that of his previous arm and donned his old mask and goggles, resurrecting the nightmare of the Winter Soldier. Going by the horrified reactions of the surviving Red Room Agents – those who could still stand – it was most effective. Anyone that they did not kill or disable was picked off by Clint, his arrows, for the most part, remaining entirely accurate despite the incredibly adverse conditions. Thor himself had been deputised to watch for and pick off any enemy that looked like they were about to get the advantage of those on the ground.

Natasha, meanwhile, had arrived on the battlefield by undisclosed means – Thor suspected that her mole, this 'Gambit' person, had helped – and was searching the shadows for relevant information, prisoners, or the architects of this foul scheme.

It was tribute to Steve's brilliance as a commander, Thor mused briefly, that he had put such a plan together in moments. And while he might not enjoy his part in it, wanting to go and help his son and/or hunt down this Sinister creature and make it scream, he accepted that of them all, Loki would be best suited to ending that fight without hurting Harry.

Besides, part of the reason he was being told to hang back was the fact that if this Rachel Grey had her sister's power (which seemed fairly apparent) and the kind of skill, ruthlessness and malevolence imparted by her monstrous guardians that he suspected, he might be required to continue Harry's battle – Loki would be occupied smoothing out the damage done to this part of reality and aiding Harry, while Jean was occupied already.

Additionally, he had a lingering fear that no matter what Trelawney's prophecy said and Fury had deduced from Harry's letter, there might be only one option if the fight against Jean's stolen sister must be continued, and that was not a choice that anyone should be forced to make, much less a young woman hardly out of childhood.

As it was, he could only be ready, while he hoped against hope that his son was safe, and that he would not be left with that fateful choice.

OoOoO

The Avengers were not Earth's only defenders to take note of what was happening, either, as was evidenced by a red shape soaring up through one of the lakes of star-fire, treating heat of the likes which the mortal world had never witnessed with the same disregard that most would a light drizzle.

Wanda had taken the field. She had spent the best part of a day finding and destroying the tentacle demons with her apprentice/boyfriend, when she would rather have spent it taking her godson to do his school shopping. However, she accepted it as part of the job. In any case, said apprentice/boyfriend's jokes about Japanese pornography had been amusing at first, but had rapidly become less amusing when it turned out that the cause of the demons' presence was a small coven of practitioners who happened to be _otaku_ and to have got hold of the wrong grimoire, which they cast a spell from at the wrong place and the wrong time. A little too much knowledge and a lot too much imagination (the latter of which most of them used to undress her with their eyes while she was in the midst of interrogating them) plus a little bad luck had led to demons galore, screaming civilians and lots and lots of largely impervious to magic gunk, which she could _feel_ drying in her hair.

All of that, combined with the pain in the arse that was sealing the hole through which the creatures had come through, along with feeling tired, sweaty, grimy, and generally disgusting, had left her in a foul mood to begin with. Now, this had come up, a colossal psychic disturbance that gave her an evil migraine. So, leaving the also exhausted, grimy, and near-exhausted apprentice/boyfriend, who was now bleeding from the nose, in the care of the local SHIELD office, she'd come to investigate, her foul mood now mixed with worry, because one of the few people she knew of who had the power to cause such a disturbance and was likely to get in enough trouble to do it was her godson.

Then, thanks to a little psychic communique from Loki, she found out what happened.

Like the man said: Hell hath no fury like a godmother who's already pissed off and who has just found out that her godson has been kidnapped by the person who has made his life a misery.

And that person soon found out the extent of that fury.

For while Wanda could not cut loose with the full extent of her rage, for fear of hurting her godson, his best friend, his stolen-at-birth cousin (who might have to be hurt, but if it had to be done, it would be done on purpose, not by accident), or any of the other poor children who were prisoners of the Red Room, or indeed the Avengers themselves, the arrangement of the Avengers tactics actually forced her to focus her rage. This wasn't too much of a problem for her – like her father, she was quite good at it. It also helped that she had a very deserving target, one whom Loki had suggested for both personal and tactical reasons.

Wanda knew that the man who'd concealed Harry's treatment by the Dursleys for his ends, wiped the minds of those who would take him away, was a considerable telepath. Therefore, logic dictated that he would either be reacting to the relentless storm of a raw power, which would stand out like a tree on an otherwise bare plane (or, considering his previous facility in concealing himself, like a gap in a jigsaw puzzle), or he would be somewhere hardened against psychic interference, which would also stand out.

As it was, she found him at work on a computer while his lab literally melted around him. It was obvious that it was him: the cloud-earth under her feet screamed of the evil that this… _thing_ had perpetrated. The list of crimes committed here alone would take days to enumerate. But right now, she was only concerned with those he'd committed against her godson, and as she thought of those, the deadly rage that made brave men and women tremble at her father's name surged within her.

Her fists clenched, knuckles whitening as they cracked like gunshots.

The creature looked up. It seemed almost insultingly ordinary in looks, having the look and manner of a well-preserved English local doctor in their early fifties, with fine clothing and neat hair. That little detail almost made her eyes blur red with fury: how _dare_ this creature indulge in the small luxuries of fine clothes and grooming when it had ensured that her godson was kept in a cramped, spider-webbed cupboard, wearing little more than rags. How _dare_ it affect an appearance of harmless benevolence when it had been the architect of much of her godson's misery, and far more besides. And how _dare_ it have the _gall_ to look _surprised_ when it saw her and the anger on her face.

"Ms Maximoff," it said mildly. "I was informed that you were occupied."

Wanda did not reply, instead hurling a hex blast at the computer, which spontaneously melted, much like the lab around it.

This actually drew some emotion from the creature, which was at first surprised and wary, then irritated, glaring at her. "You have just destroyed some rather valuable and utterly unique data on the interaction of two Omega Class psychics abilities," he said. "In doing so, you have committed a crime against science, woman!"

"Somehow, I imagine I will sleep soundly," Wanda said coldly, gathering power, her mutant inheritance rather than her magic. Magic was a force of life, of beauty and wonder, and there were some things that it should be soiled by contact with. "All the more so after I fulfil a promise I made to myself, my sleeping godson, and his father."

The creature was not stupid and struck before she finished her sentence, telekinetically attacking the vulnerable parts of her body; the veins to her brain, the blood vessels in the brain itself, and the valves around her heart, primarily. But Wanda, for all her fury, was not stupid either, and had already prepared herself against such an attack – one did not enter a fight with a psychic without adequately warding oneself beforehand, not if one had a choice. Not twice, anyway.

So, before the creature could respond with a more indirect attack to cover its flight, she struck, a blast that hurled it into the air, where it stuck as if caught in a spider's web. As it did, it stared at her, expression surprisingly calm. Resigned, patient and… thoughtful.

"Interesting," it remarked. Its human disguise had been sloughed away now, leaving a pale, spidery creature with slightly inhuman proportions, dark hair, and red eyes matched in shade only by the strange gem in its forehead. "Despite the lack of socialisation by your father, in your actions, you greatly resemble him."

"I am _not_ like my father," Wanda snarled, another surge of fury running through her like a bolt of lightning. "I am _nothing_ like my father, do you hear me?! I…" She trailed off. In another life, in another time, in another moment, she might have decided then to capture the creature before her, bring it in for interrogation and perhaps worm out its secrets – or just find some new and imaginative way to make it suffer for all eternity. In yet another, she might simply have killed it instantly and left it at that.

But then, she remembered her godson's tears when she had first met, his desperation for affection, the misery of his childhood now compounded by this. She remembered his pain. She remembered her promise. And she smiled a dangerous smile, one befitting the eldest child of mutantkind's dark messiah.

"Actually, no. You're right. I _am_ like my father. I _am_ his daughter. And do you know why? Because I'm going to fulfil that promise I made, a promise to render you down to screaming, traumatised atoms if you ever went near my godson again. And while I'm not going to have the time to make it last, I am going to _enjoy it_. So scream, you bastard, _scream!_ "

As she spoke, she crooked her fingers and made several jagged, vicious gestures, scarlet power crackling around her hands, and then around the creature too.

There are no words to describe what happened next.

After all, how do you describe the feeling of every single, cell turns on itself simultaneously, while your marrow turns first to red hot lead, then to molten acid? How do you describe the sensation of every single atom in your body attempting to change into another kind of atom, as those which remain in something approximating their natural form are twisted and torn by the radiation unleashed by the purposefully uncontrolled transmutation?

And that was only the start of the horrors. Its nervous system unfurled and twisted around the razor sharp edges of bones that shattered, sending bubbling lead and acid onto those fragile nerves that nevertheless did not burn away entirely, remaining intact enough to feel pain. Its skin slowly tore away from its flesh like a plaster. Horror laid upon horror as Wanda's probability warping powers allowed her to unleash a lifetime's worth of vengeance on behalf of her wronged godson.

The creature known to most as Sinister did manage to scream, briefly. However, within fifteen seconds, his tongue had dissolved. Shortly after, so did the rest of him, leaving a stinking, scorched, protoplasmic mess, in which globules of various minerals and metals floated.

Wanda stared at the puddle, feeling both that she had avenged her godson (and everyone else this thing had tormented, too) and strangely dissatisfied. Nevertheless, she thought as she sent the puddle seeping into the cloud-rock in a thousand different directions, he had suffered and it was done. The Red Room had lost the primary architect of this latest scheme, and likely with him, control of their most powerful weapon.

And there was another niggling sensation in the back of her head. Just how much of her father's darkness was in her? And how much was all her own?

OoOoO

Another with a personal acquaintance with darkness, another who also wondered how much of that darkness belonged to him and how much had been implanted by others, haunted the dark, nightmarish mountain. In a maelstrom of horrors, he was perhaps the greatest horror of them all.

And he wore a mask. Not merely a literal mask, but a figurative mask. It is a common thing, among those who feel they have something to hide, or feel that they need something behind which to hide. Or sometimes, they feel they need a mask so that they can show the world their true face, to be who they really are.

Normally, this man wore the mask of Bucky Barnes. Other times, other, very rare times, he removed that mask and all others, revealing the man who simply went by James. Only Natalia ever saw that one. But here and now, he wore another mask, both figurative and literal, one that had haunted the world for over half century. In black combats, a concealing mask and goggles, and above all, a metal arm with a red star on the shoulder visible to the world, he was making one thing very clear: the Winter Soldier lived again.

He wasn't sure whether this was the mask that was his true face. In all honesty, right now, he didn't care. It was the mask that was needed.

He sized up his opponents, those few who hadn't scattered in terror at the sight of him, or charged into battle, young fools desperate to make a name for themselves, and whose epitaphs were written in blood that drained away through the clouds.

OoOoO

 _Targets: Five._

 _Threat level: Three Beta Class – smart, well-trained, experienced. Two Alpha – low Alpha, armoured in weaker copies of the Iron Man armour, armed with a selection of guns, blades and repulsors. Weak at the joints_

 _Estimated Time Required: 90 seconds._

OoOoO

Precisely 90 seconds later, the Winter Soldier looked down at the dead. He wasn't going to shed tears over them, but he did feel a degree of pity towards them. They probably thought that they were genuinely serving the Motherland – Russia – doing what was best for her. In a way, they might even have been right. From a purely logical perspective, in the short term, harnessing such power as Harry and other, weaker superhumans (or greater, judging by Jean Grey's long lost sister) could greatly bolster Russia's position in the post New York and London world.

In the medium term, however, it would lead to the devastation of Russia at the hands of Harry's loved ones, and perhaps even at the hands of those like Magneto, revealing it as a foolish and desperate gambit. Better would have been to take tissue samples and study and clone from there.

In any case: they had involved children. They had stolen children. Even, he suspected, killed them. And that was unforgivable.

The Winter Soldier methodically reloaded his weapons as he thought this, checked them once more, and looked around. He had enemies to kill.

OoOoO

Psychic battles are, broadly, battles of wills. Of course, it's rather more complicated than that – the maxim that knowledge is power applies more in psionics than in any discipline other than magic, and the knowledge of how most effectively to apply power often decides any psychic contest more sophisticated than a mere contest of power.

It also changes as you sub-divide: purely telekinetic battles are predominantly battles of will. But telepathic battles, when held between approximate equals – or at least, between two combatants when one is not simply capable of steamrolling the other – are also battles of will. But the weapons used make them something much more mercurial. They are battles of ideas.

This little fact was one of the few reasons that Harry hadn't been steam-rollered by Maddie, something he was abundantly aware. That and the facts that she'd never really faced a near-equal before (not that it seemed to faze her), her combat telekinesis was rather rusty (though it was getting sharper with every passing moment), and that Harry's tactics were what could be called less than conventional.

While it was true that Harry's more recent strategies had often devolved into 'kill it, kill it with fire', that was partly because he could afford to use such a strategy in many of his more recent fights. Now, however, he couldn't. Simply unloading all his power at Maddie wouldn't work. He'd forced the telekinetic aspect of their fight into what was essentially a direct contest of power, using every bit of ingenuity he had to spare to prolong it. But it was still ultimately defensive.

In the telepathic fight, however, his tactics were a bit different. He never attacked in earnest, instead refusing to play by all conventional rules: where Maddie's imaginings cast it as a fight between two armoured knights, he dodged or parried every blow whilst quoting _The Princess Bride_. Where it became a chess match, he rolled a set of dice. And when she finally got fed up and constructed an imagining of a death trap that would shame any cheesy spy franchise worth the name, he simply wriggled away via a construct of a sonic screwdriver, if by the skin of his telepathic teeth.

Every single time, in every single way he could, he evaded a stand-up fight, never letting her get her grip on his defences, while never responding with attacks of his own. Or not real attacks. Instead, his responses were more like the psychic equivalent of a light jab in the ribs: startling, something to make you twitch and jump, but hardly a real threat. And that was what they were designed to do – to keep her confused, to keep her on her toes, circling, never quite able to focus and pin him down.

Of course, she was by far the more skilled telepath, and by far the stronger too. Which is why, as time went by, Harry found himself with less room to manoeuvre, his jabs having less startling effect, the confusion lessening as she adapted to his Fabian tactics, understanding the shape of his mind and thus, his thoughts.

Before, he'd danced around her, ducking and weaving to strike again. Now, though, that was changing. Now, he was on the run.

OoOoO

But as Maddie forced the battle into a more direct contest of power and skill, that only upped the ante of the side-effects.

Those psi-sensitives asleep, or in deep comas, struggled and cried out as nightmares of varying intensities tormented them. Even those without any more psi-sensitivity than any other person, nothing more than the faint intuition of something being wrong that every person sometimes gets, suffered at least a little. And throughout this, the psychic turbulence allowed dark creatures to emerge from the Dreaming in ever greater numbers to haunt the minds of mortals.

And the consequences grew more severe. Some of the weakest and most elderly psychics, few in number, were driven to the very edge, clinging onto life with their fingertips. Others of fragile mind had that superficial sanity shattered, their minds fragmenting under the strain.

If the battle had taken place on the mortal plane, the side-effects would have been less severe. But they were in the Nevernever, the close cousin of the Astral Plane, where thought and reality were intimately intertwined, a dimension wrapped around the entire world. Here, the effects were amplified. Here, the consequences were growing.

OoOoO

And creatures from the Dreaming were not the only things to take notice, to celebrate this chaos on which they could thrive.

Other beings, often far older, and most certainly far greater, took notice. Where many of the creatures of the Dreaming that took advantage were the lesser beings of that realm, the barracuda that swarmed and struck when opportunity came along, these were of another realm the Astral Plane. And they were no mere barracuda. These were the Great White Sharks, the Sea-Dragons, the Leviathans, the ancient apex predators of the Astral Plane.

One, a huge creature of darkness and shadows, with only long, needle-like fangs and blank, malevolent white eyes standing out, savoured the taste of terror and saw opportunity for his revenge.

Another, with the appearance of a little old lady, but the mien of something far more terrible than that, watched and smiled.

A third, clad all in dark armour, from the depths of which a pair of eyes gleamed, let out a soft laugh, pleased by the onslaught.

A fourth, smaller, slimmer, almost human but for the wicked, fey gleam in its eyes, stirred restlessly, testing the bonds.

And beyond them, something from another realm, something that made them all look like specks, stirred. And as it stirred, it laughed in a voice of fire.

OoOoO

Lukin stared at the devastation on the screens before him in absolute horror, as the Avengers, and the traitors to the Red Room, tore through his Agents like they weren't even there. He wished he had the already completed weapons at his disposal, but deep down, he knew that they would not make any difference. These were the Avengers. You could put them down, but you could not keep them down. Sooner or later, they would come back at you and unleash their vengeance ten-fold. HYDRA had found that out, only a few months ago. Now, the exact same scenario was playing out here, even down to reality being twisted and warped – though admittedly, this was a realm where reality was flexible to begin with.

A sickening feeling settled in his stomach. He had failed. All of his preparations, all of his works, all of his hopes and dreams, had come down to one roll of the dice. One roll, and he had lost.

"General Lukin."

He looked up, distracted, and was surprised to see Doctor Essex standing not ten feet away from him. Once again, the man – or whatever he was – had proved able to appear out of nowhere. And there was something a little odd about him, something hard to pin down, but visible in the little things; in the shine and apparent freshness of his unearthly pale skin, the slightly damp looking hair, the lack of facial hair, and the change of clothing. Since Lukin did not think that Essex had stopped in the middle of a battle to freshen up, he had to wonder what was going on.

But it was a brief speculation only. With the wrath of the Avengers unleashed, Essex's dog-of-war occupied with trying and failing to subdue Thor's son, and worst of all, the Winter Soldier returned to wreak a horrible revenge, he had no time for speculation.

"Doctor Essex," he said. "Do you have anything to help?"

Essex nodded. "The Spirit World is malleable," he said. "My machines can use that malleability to move my labs through it. They are powering up as we speak. I estimate that they will be able to bring half the base with us."

Lukin felt an unimaginable surge of relief, though he was careful not to show it. Not that there was really any point in hiding it. Essex could sense it, after all, and likely didn't care. "How long?" he asked.

"Ten minutes," Essex said.

"We do not have that much time," Lukin said.

"Your men and women had better make some, then," Essex said plainly. "I have done my part – those creatures, ghosts of a sort, astral imprints that have constructed bodies for themselves out of the vast psychic turbulence. Quite fascinating, really…"

"Yes?" Lukin asked, impatiently.

"I have directed them to attack the Avengers and their cohorts," Essex said. "Especially the children. And I have directed Mister Dursley to do so as well. He should provide a tolerable distraction, physically and psychologically."

It took Lukin a few moments to place the name of Dursley, but then, he did and raised an eyebrow in surprise. "You would cast that thing away?" he asked. "I was under the impression that he was of use to you."

"Limited use," Essex said dismissively. "I have extracted all the relevant information from his genetic code and while his abilities are potentially highly flexible, he shows no signs of the intellect required to explore and harness them in such a fashion. If I need another of him, I will make one."

"And the boy? Your girl?" Lukin asked. The boy, he could understand sacrificing. After all, Essex had taken samples of all the fluids and tissues that could possibly be relevant while the boy was unconscious, and since he could clone people… well, the loss of the chance to monitor the unique growth of such a boy would, Lukin knew, be a great blow to a scientist, but a manageable one. Doctor Essex, after all, knew as the Red Room did when to divest himself of an asset. But the girl, his weapon…

"The boy is a regrettable loss," Essex said calmly. "Though not an unexpected one. As you note, I can replicate him, if not his unique development. As for Madelyn, she will find her way back to me eventually."

"You have faith in her?" Lukin asked, surprised.

"I have faith in her programming," Essex corrected him. "She will do what she was made to do. Nothing more, nothing less."

Lukin nodded. So it was with the Black Widows. Though, as a small voice whispered in the back of his head, the programming of one of those Black Widows had failed…

He shook his head, dismissing the thought, then barked several orders in Russian down the comms. The fighting intensified.

Now all there was, he thought, was to hope that it was enough.

OoOoO

Natasha watched the battle from one of the few high points in the complex that had not been destroyed as part of Harry and Rachel Grey's psychic duel, or the rest of the battle. She suspected that it was part of the original Faerie fortress, explaining its resilience, and malleability.

As she watched, she noticed that the battle had suddenly surged in intensity. This was no last stand, that much she was sure of. They were buying time. As she was about to warn her teammates, something struck her in the temple, hard. Only a lifetime of experience, made her roll with the blow on instinct, robbing it of some its force, and only a lifetime of being used to such blows and, perhaps, the effects of the Infinity Formula kept her conscious, and thus alive.

Rolling fast and getting, somewhat unsteadily, to her feet, she swept the roof for her attacker. She wasn't hard to spot – it was a largely clear roof and in any case, her attacker wasn't hiding. She was tall, for a woman, taller than Natasha herself, and more muscular, dressed in practical combat clothing that mirrored Natasha's own. She had blonde hair, blue eyes, and couldn't be older than 30. If anything, Natasha suspected that she was closer to 20. A child, in other words, compared to her, though a dangerous one – she was skilled enough to sneak up on Natasha herself, larger, and probably stronger. Moreover, Natasha could see the spark of madness in her eyes, eyes already dilated by what were probably amphetamines of some kind, and the badge on her belt.

Somehow, she wasn't surprised. This had been coming.

"So," she said in Russian. "You're the Red Room's newest star graduate."

The girl's face twisted in a sneer. "As you once were," she said. "Look at you now: the great Natalia Romanova, an old woman, an old traitor, an old whore, selling herself to a group of Americans in circus costumes."

"Two of them aren't even human, much less American," Natasha said mildly, ignoring the insults. She'd been called far worse. In any case, a lack of response would goad more insults, giving her more time to recover. "Who are you?" She knew perfectly well who her opponent was, but again, it would buy her time.

That drew a proud tilt of the chin. "I am Yelena Belova, a loyal daughter of Russia," she said. "I am the Black Widow now, old woman. I am the future."

"You were also born Ukrainian, going by that accent," Natasha said, tone still mild. "I'm surprised. In my day, the Red Room's speech coaches were far more rigorous about weeding such things out." In truth, there was no discernible accent, but she knew Belova's type. She knew how she would react.

As it was, she was not disappointed, as Belova flushed with anger. "I do not have an accent," she snarled. "I am your better, Romanova. I was trained to be everything you are and more, to be the one who stands over your traitorous corpse and once and for all reclaim the title that you have dragged through the mud, in the service of Russia's enemies. I will be the one to lead Russia out of its corruption and infection by the West, to make it great again."

Natasha tilted her head, inwardly assessing the damage Belova's kick had done. She was as healed as she was likely to be, short of a few hours and an ice pack. It would do.

"You're a child," she said, contemptuous words softened by genuine pity. "You call me old, and I am. But you say that you are the future, when you are living in the past, Agent Belova. You are fighting battles that are already long lost, for a cause long since discarded."

"Discarded by fools and traitors," Belova spat. "Cowards who allowed the Americans and their allies to carve up our empire, to give our rightful inheritance into the hands of the corrupt West, to make us weak!" She jerked her chin. "Now, come, you traitorous whore-bitch. There has been enough talk. It is time for you to fight like a woman and perhaps die with some honour."

Natasha arched an eyebrow, noting that Belova had been doing most of the talking. "Fine," she said, setting herself. "If you think you're good enough to be the Black Widow… show me."

Belova, forgetting that only a moment ago she'd been calling Natasha to come fight her, attacked in a flurry of lightning fast blows. Natasha had to concede, as she retreated under the onslaught, that Belova was incredibly good. She was tall, strong and fast and made yet stronger and faster by whatever cocktail of drugs the Red Room was feeding her in lieu of the Infinity Formula, and extraordinarily skilled. Moreover, her repertoire contained moves that Natasha found out very quickly were designed specifically to break her defences. To break them and to kill her.

Only a little piece of luck, a slight stumble over a fragment of stone, and Tony Stark's superlative inbuilt body armour prevented Belova's now drawn blade from opening her abdomen up the way the younger woman had opened up her defence. As it was, it skittered off her ribs and went high, opening a cut in Natasha's neck. A thin one, not near a vein or an artery, but nevertheless – first blood was Belova's. And they both knew it.

Belova smiled. "It is obvious how this will end," she said, with absolute confidence. "You are as good as they say, Natasha. Almost as good, that is. Because I am better." She beckoned. "Come. You have earned a merciful death."

Natasha arched an eyebrow again. "At the risk of sounding clichéd," she said. "It's not about how it begins, but how it ends. You'll realise that if you ever get to my age."

Belova's smile turned into a snarl. "I will see your age and many years after, knowing that you are rotting in the ground," she hissed, and struck again.

But this time, however, she quickly found every single one of her blows countered, her knife missing every blow, and when she would not relinquish it, Natasha's own knife flickered out, dipping, slicing, removing both knife and Belova's right thumb.

While this did not immediately slow her down, as high as she was on adrenaline and amphetamines, her blows grew wilder, blocked, diverted or evaded with the same ruthless precision.

And then, for the first time, Natasha attacked. The heel of her palm struck Belova's jaw, snapping her teeth shut on her tongue, almost biting through it, filling the younger woman's mouth with blood. As the second Widow stumbled, surprised, Natasha went on the offensive, using moves that Belova didn't recognise.

"You have no concept of what the Soviet Union was really about," she said, punctuating her words with punches, kicks, elbow strikes, knee strikes, and throws. She didn't use her knife. She didn't need to, for her words were chosen to cut sharper than any blade. "You would have been a child when it ended, and you saw the last years, the years of _perestroika,_ of _glasnost_. You did not see the famines and purges of the 30's, the horror of the Great Patriotic War, and the many dark days between then and the end of the Soviet Union. I saw them. I fought in the War, against the Nazis. I fought against Germans, Japanese, Italians, Americans, Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Chinese, South Vietnamese, South Koreans, Finns, Swedes, Norwegians, Greeks, Turks, even Russians and Ukrainians, and so many more. I fought against creatures of our world and this one, and ones that you could not even begin to imagine. I fought them all for the Motherland. I lived through the darkest of days, I did the most terrible things, things that even you, you mad, vicious little girl, could not even comprehend, all for the Motherland. But I came to realise that the Motherland only saw me as a weapon, as a tool. We are Black Widows, Agent Belova. We were not made to be like Captain America, to be paraded, honoured and admired, to be heroes. We were made to be used. And did you think that we were the only ones?" She snorted. "Of course we were not. There have been others, before you, before even me, because we were always meant to be replaced."

"You might be expendable," Belova spat. "They might have been. But they were weak. _You_ are weak. _I_ am not."

"You think that you're different," Natasha said. "Of course you do. You want to. They make you want to, the same way they made me. They took your desire for approval, for admiration, for something even approximating love, and they twisted it. You would do anything for them, just to get a pat on the head and a 'well done, Yelena'. And you would accept that because they taught you that your only purpose was to serve the Motherland, and by the Motherland, they mean them. They told you that you were different from the others, that you could be the best, that they held out special hopes for you. They told me the same thing, and every other girl they thought possessed enough talent. They told us that so we would strive to be the best, to live up to their expectations, to avoid disappointing them. They did it to create loyal little weapons, beautiful, deadly, and completely obedient. And that's all you are, Agent Belova. You are a weapon they programmed."

Belova made to reply, but Natasha launched a snake fast strike at her throat.

"Following orders isn't some kind of superpower," she said, driving a knee into Belova's solar plexus, a heel into the side of her knee and an elbow into the base of her skull. As the younger woman collapsed like a marionette, Natasha looked down at her. Then, after a moment, she knelt down beside her, binding her wound. The thumb was long gone. "Doing as you're told, not thinking outside the box, following your programming… that's why you lost," she said, as she tied off the binding, before standing up to leave, ignoring protesting, bruised muscles and cracked bones. They could wait. "Because the version of me you were programmed to defeat? She's like the Soviet Union. She doesn't exist any more."

OoOoO

Jean was also grappling with existential questions. For one thing, she was baffled by the prospect of someone who wasn't her having the raw psychic power to overwhelm Harry in mental combat. Professor Xavier, of course, had the skill to do something like that, and the power with Cerebro. Betsy had the skill and perhaps the power, with Cerebro, though it would be a reasonably close contest. Equally, she supposed that someone like Harry's grandfather would also be capable of it, being a god of gods. And then there was Harry's mother, who could probably do such a thing with an idle thought.

But none of them would. And more to the point, she'd sensed their minds before, and while Harry's opponent felt strangely familiar, like a scent she'd smelled many years ago, it was not one of them. So who was it? Who could be so powerful, every bit as powerful as she was, as far as she could tell? She was hardly conceited, but she'd been left with the impression by the likes of Doctor Strange, Professor Xavier, and Harry's Asgardian relatives, that she was the strongest natural born psychic in history – a rather dizzying prospect.

Yet, she thought, as she watched golden flame dance around an eerie blue lightning-like fire, there was now someone who was every bit her match who was psychically beating up her cousin. And they were beating him. The golden flames were diminishing in strength, while the eerie blue was growing, and even if that visual cue were not enough, Jean could sense the intricacies of the ferocious battle, which, in truth, was less a battle and more the psychic equivalent of Harry tap-dancing on a rock-slide and trying desperately not to be dragged down and crushed within it.

She had been expressly told not to intervene until she had been called to do so. This was partly because she was still recovering somewhat from being blindsided the vast psychic tidal wave unleashed by this battle, partly because Harry's opponent was clearly extremely skilled, and partly because separating two such powerful psychics without harming at least one of them was a difficult feat indeed.

Also, she was needed to psychically protect those who could not protect themselves; Carol, the other prisoners, and the mysterious, charming and very handsome Gambit. However, since she had seen Loki and Tony Stark both provide methods for the Avengers and those with them to shield themselves from the psychic turbulence, she suspected that she'd been dispatched to do so to keep her out of trouble. Two Omega Class psychics locked in combat was causing quite enough trouble to begin with.

But even so, despite her reluctant acceptance of this charge, she felt something within her, something pulling her up towards the two combatants. It was a resonance, like the one she shared with Harry, but now the mysterious other was here, it was so much stronger.

That resonance nearly proved a fatal distraction, as one of the ghost-like creatures that rampaged through this place of horrors, more like an unearthly cross between panther and serpent, made all of shadow rather than flesh, attempted to pounce on her from above.

Carol, however, was equal to it, moving in a blur, leading with her newly regained shield. While the body blow did not seem to faze it, the shield did, striking blue sparks off its ghostly flesh and eliciting the furious, very human scream of a child in distress. That made them all hesitate for a moment, wondering if this thing was more than it seemed, before Carol's astonishingly young looking grandmother poured five rapid shots into the creature's head. Looking around at them, expression grim, she said, "You can't afford to hold back. No matter what those things look or sound like, you can't blink for a moment."

"What are they?" Nezhno asked, tone troubled.

"De ghosts of de slain," Gambit said grimly. "People taken 'ere. Tortured. Transformed. Killed."

"And you _worked_ for these people?" Noriko demanded.

Gambit gave her a look that was suddenly very cold. "Y' assume ah had a choice," he said bitterly. "An'… when it y' own life on de line, when dey don' ask y' t' take part in de messy parts… it easy to rationalise. Easy jus' t' think o' gettin' out on y' own, jus' leavin' an' runnin' as far an' as fast as y' can."

"So what changed?" Carol asked.

Gambit didn't say anything for a long time, though for a brief moment, Jean got a flickering image through his well-designed psychic defences. It was of a young woman, with hair and eyes just like hers, though the hair was shorter and she had strange tatoos on her cheeks, almost like scars, that lent her an intimidating air. She was smiling, though, which softened her face, especially since it looked like smiling was something she was not accustomed to doing.

" _Who is she?"_ she asked, before she could stop herself.

Gambit looked startled, then angry, then sighed. "Let's jus' say tha' she's someone ah care for," he said. "An' after I got t' know her, ah realised tha' every man 'as 'is moment t' choose t' stan' up an' be counted. Most of all, though, it's like ah said, _cherie_ : if dere is one thin' in dis life tha' ah believe, it is dat people should be free. Especially if dey've never had th' chance."

Before Jean could question him any further, Loki appeared beside her, to the startlement of all present. "Good evening," he said politely. "I am Prince Loki, as you may know. As you will be glad to hear, your exit from this foul place is imminent." He turned to Jean. "Miss Grey, I and Ms Maximoff have need of your assistance in containing and breaking up this battle, to set all to rights." He made a few complex gestures, and a web of light settled on those not protected by Tony's psychic inhibitors. "They will no longer need your protection."

" _I can help Harry now?"_ Jean asked, folding her arms.

"Yes," Loki said, taking arm in a gentlemanly fashion and stepping into space. "Though tactics will need to be discussed."

And with that, they vanished.

 _Well,_ Jono said, after a moment. _That was unexpected._

OoOoO

Unfortunately, that was not the only unexpected thing that they would come across.

Dudley had, by means unknown to himself, had his rage and sense of humiliation stoked to a furnace's heat. For years now he had been invincible, respected, admired. Any who had crossed him had been crushed. Anything, or anyone, he had wanted had either been given to him or taken by him. As far as he was concerned, this was the natural order of things.

And then, his miserable little freak of a cousin, Harry, had appeared out of nowhere – and while, if Dudley was honest with himself, he looked larger and stronger than he had before, and he had magic, that was no matter. Dudley himself was a great deal larger and stronger than he had been, impervious to harm, stronger than anyone else. A more discerning mind might question why his cousin had appeared all of a sudden, had been given to him to break.

But Dudley merely presumed that it was a reward for his actions, or that providence had simply given him the chance for revenge, for he remembered how the Avengers and Harry's other freak friends had destroyed his life, taken his parents away, and sent him to some filthy home, far from his games and other toys, where he was treated no better than anyone else. After that, of course, Doctor Milbury had arrived, and spoken to him of the great strength within him, awakening it, and over the next few years, he had been given anything he wanted, in exchange for occasionally beating up whoever was sent to him. At first, it had been games, food, and other things like that. Then, as he grew older, his appetites had matured. Food, still, games, sometimes, but alcohol too, drugs, sometimes, and often, girls. The latter weren't usually especially happy to see him, but Dudley didn't really care about that. In his book, it made it more fun. Some had been, though. Power, after all, was an aphrodisiac to some, even if it had a lot to overcome.

Though he did not know it, he was very fortunate that Harry had not been able to come across this thought when they had fought, for if he had, it is almost certain that Harry would have killed him on the spot.

Of course, Dudley would not have heeded any such warnings. He didn't fear his freak cousin, no matter who his father really was, sneering at the coward's attempts to prevent the fight before it began, presuming that he was the stronger. Fool.

But then again… perhaps not such a fool. Some of Dudley's burns were still healing, and even if they weren't, he vividly remembered first Harry's attacking his eyes, before scuttling off to hide in the darkness, then the bright light and the unimaginable agony as he was roasted alive, pain made all the worse by the fact that since Milbury had found him, he hadn't experienced pain. Oh, one or two of the girls had tried to scratch him, but that had mostly tickled. This was something different, something, in truth, like he'd never felt before.

But his cousin had underestimated him, the stupid freak, tried to help him, as if they could be friends. He'd shown him. He'd beaten him. He'd broken him, crushing bones like twigs. He'd have smashed his skull in another few moments.

Then, something strange had happened. Harry had caught his punch. _No one_ caught his punch. And he had laughed. Normally, that would have made Dudley angry, but there was something strange about this laugh, something that made him feel something he'd only ever felt around Milbury and that strangely familiar freak girl of his, the one who was off-limits and had nearly melted his small brain when he'd tried. Then Milbury had shown another side of himself too, one that had cowed Dudley into submission, though he'd never admit it.

But even that hadn't frightened him as much as Harry. The little freak, not so little any more, had put himself back together, and then repaid the favour, beating Dudley, breaking him, burning him, before the final blow launched him up beyond the mountain's peak, leading to a painful landing. He had waited, body aching, full of pain both blunt and jagged, and burning too, as little fires licked away at his skin from above and below. But the pains slowly began to recede, and it became clear that Harry had not bothered with him. Like Dudley had sometimes done himself, he had dismissed him, considering him beneath notice. From a distance, Dudley saw the battle begin in earnest, as the freak and Milbury's girl freak fought in the weird skies.

Good riddance to them, as far as he was concerned, he thought, and was planning to find a way out. Milbury and the Red Room had been cool, but Dudley could see that they were in trouble. And it certainly wasn't worth him getting caught up in whatever was happening to them.

But as he thought this, something stoked up the banked fires of his rage, at the abject humiliation he had suffered at Harry's hands. No one hurt him like that. No one dismissed him. No one made a fool out of the Beast.

So he had begun to run downhill at speed, ignoring the strangeness of the world around him. One or two of those strange, pale creatures attacked him, but he tore them limb from limb, seeing only the faces of Harry and the other freaks he knew were present, including a beautiful blonde freak who he'd never seen, but somehow knew was Harry's friend, as he did. He wanted to break them, like he had done before, to show them what he really was. And maybe have a little fun in the process. The girl freaks were quite pretty, after all.

Of course, it was Essex at work that made him know Carol's face, that pointed him in the right direction, but Dudley didn't know that. All he cared about, as he charged down the mountain, sometimes galloping on his knuckles like a gorilla, was revenge.

And when he arrived, seeing them sheltering by an empty building that had gone less weird than the others, with an old man and another beautiful freak, both with guns (like that would help them), and being joined by a bunch of metal suits, he was at first a little puzzled. Then, he saw the strange tear in reality, a door to another place, away from here. Most of him was drawn to it, at first, but Essex's influence was strong, stoking the rage. He could leave, but he would take his revenge first.

OoOoO

Alison looked up sharply, and Carol followed her gaze, worry intensified by the fact that Gambit was looking on edge too. "Down!" Alison snapped, in a tone that demanded obedience and received it from the muscles of those commanded, without recourse to their owner's brains.

Everyone dropped to the floor, just as something huge sailed over their heads with a furious, inhuman roar.

At first, Carol thought it was one of those weird ghost creatures, but she was wrong. This thing was splotched, pale skin mixed with angry red, bruise yellow-purple-black and burnt black. It was human, or at least, it looked human, but it was larger in every direction. Taller than Thor, wider than Volstagg, with hands like small frying pans, it looked more like one of the monsters she'd fought in London, or like that troll that Harry had described, than anything human. It was bald as an egg, the smell of burnt hair mixing with a rank smell, like a combination of condensed locker room smell and caged animal. Thankfully, it was fat enough that that and what little remained of its clothing preserved its modesty and Carol's lunch. And its piggy eyes, full of fury and hatred, were staring right at her, as it visibly seethed with rage.

"What the hell is that?" she asked.

"Dat," Gambit said, with grimness that barely covered his fear. "Would be de Beast."

"Otherwise known," Alison said, with a similar grimness. "Unless I am very much mistaken, as Dudley Dursley."

Indeed, the Beast seemed to show recognition of the names, first smirking, pleased, at being called the Beast, then giving Alison a suspicious look on being called by a human name, as if wondering how she did it. The look, of course, carried another undertone, one that seemed to be undressing Alison with its eyes, a similar one to the one it had directed at her, and Carol felt a shiver of both rage and utter disgust. Then, she realised where she'd heard that name before.

"This?" she said incredulously. " _This_ is Harry's cousin?"

That name sparked recognition too in the Beast's eyes, recognition and a renewed hatred.

"Vell, I can see who got zer looks in zer family," Kurt piped up, with a nervous laugh.

Carol wasn't exactly in a rush to disagree, and even if she had wanted to, she didn't have time, for the thing that had once been Harry's cousin, that had been transformed into a monster by the dark doctor who had haunted Harry's life, let out another furious bellow and _charged_.

The fight was swift and brutal, as the Beast moved with a speed that something that size shouldn't have been able to muster. Gambit unleashed a storm of glowing playing cards from who knew where, which exploded like grenades, demonstrating why Belova and the Red Room hardcases had been wary around him. Their pinkish-purple fire consumed the Beast in a cloud, but it was one that it emerged from, merely infuriated further. Her uncle Jack's bullets simply spalled off its fat flesh, ricocheting off to who knew where. Alison's gun, firing those strange orange energy bolts in a humming roar, seemed to hurt it, knocking it off balance, and drawing an angry bellow.

However, none of the wounds it did seemed to be even close to incapacitating, and the Beast's momentum carried it into Nezhno.

As it did, astonishingly, the slim boy seemed to stop it cold, growing in size and strength like the Hulk did, tattoos humming with power, until they were almost of a size. For a few moments, the two titans struggled, but Nezhno's blows were blunted by the vast amount of fat that the Beast possessed, and as far as Carol could tell in their brief acquaintance, Nezhno was a gentle soul. The Beast, by contrast, was vicious, enraged, and whatever else could be said about its fighting skill or lack of it, it knew how to cause pain.

As Nezhno staggered back, shrinking hand covering a bloodied eye, less than a minute after the fight had begun, still fighting on but clearly losing, Carol realised they needed a plan. The various prisoners of the Red Room were individually powerful, but not skilled enough or experienced enough to use their powers in concert. If they had done so, Dudley would have been crushed, even with all his power. But they did not, and so he was not. Instead, he was the one doing the crushing.

Thankfully, though, Carol had an idea. "Jono, Remy, grandma, buy me time," she yelled.

"Y' got a plan, _cherie_?" Gambit asked.

Carol nodded.

 _A good one?_ Jono asked hopefully.

"Eh."

"We'll make do," Alison said, nodding sharply. "Do what you need to."

Carol nodded back. "Lorna, Noriko," she said. "You control electricity, right?"

"Magnetism, technically," Lorna mumbled, clearly terrified.

"The two are related," Carol said impatiently. "I'm not great at science, but I know that much."

"What are you planning?" Noriko asked.

"Can you control the lightning in the ground?" Carol asked.

"Do I look like Thor?"

"No, you don't have the killer abs. Yes or no?"

Noriko looked doubtful. "Maybe," she said. "What do you want to do with it?"

Carol showed her shield. "This was given to me by Odin," she said. "It's made of the same stuff as Thor's hammer. I'm pretty sure it can do the same things." She grinned. "I want you two to charge it up."

The girls exchanged a look, then flinched as Nezhno let out a yell of pain.

"Now or never, girls," Carol said.

"We'll try," Lorna said eventually.

"That's all I can ask for," Carol said, setting herself, as both girls laid their hands on her shield.

The two girls closed their eyes and, for a moment, nothing seemed to happen. Then, electricity, electric-blue in Noriko's case and lime-green in Lorna's, began to crackle around their hands, and lightning in the cloud-earth below began to gather around their feet, building, growing brighter and brighter, with white-hot fury, before suddenly leaping up through their bodies and pouring into Carol's shield with a buzzing zap, which drank it all up. And as it did, Carol laughed a mad laugh, because it was working.

After two minutes, minutes that seemed to go on for eternity, it ended, and Lorna and Noriko fell to their knees, smoking and smelling disquietingly of bacon, but alive. Carol, meanwhile, could feel the power humming in her shield, and wasn't entirely sure of how to get it out again, but figured that she'd have to hope.

"Kurt," she began, then stopped as she turned. Nezhno had returned to his previous size, lying on the ground, obviously groaning in pain, clutching an eye. Gambit's bo staff had been snapped and one end driven through his shoulder, just above his heart – something that Carol felt was more a case of poor aim than merciful intent – pinning him, insensible, to the ground like an insect. Her grandmother's gun had been snatched out of her hands and crushed, the woman herself tending to Jack, who was horribly crumpled and still, limbs pointing in entirely the wrong directions, ordering the arriving Iron Man suits – a few of which had already been scrapped by the Beast, torn apart, though they seemed like the smaller models, with the larger ones in reserve – to ferry the wounded away. She turned to Carol and called to her, expression frantic. Carol ignored her.

And Jono was worst of all, because as she watched, the Beast, huge ham like hands around his waist wrung him like a chicken, spine and neck visibly snapping. Carol was just in time to hear, with her mind, not her ears (for those had been deafened by the lightning, rendering her surroundings eerily silent), an agonised scream. With that, he hurled Jono aside, like a rag doll. Then, he turned to Carol. He hardly seemed hurt; more burnt, certainly, perhaps more bruised in places, and truly naked now, the last of his clothes having been destroyed, but not seriously harmed. And as he turned to her, he leered, apparently savouring her fear and despair, which collected in the pit of her stomach like ice, saying something doubtless disgusting that she couldn't make out.

What that leer did, though, was make her angry, a deep, throbbing anger, and suddenly, she knew exactly how she was going to unleash the lightning within her shield. Being trapped in this Red Room complex, it was like turning back time to earlier in the Summer. But she'd faced a giant monster that had once been a person, that had broken a friend of hers before too, on an icy mountain, armed only with a shield, less than six months before – though it seemed like an eternity ago. She'd learnt a lot since then.

"Kurt," she said, barely audible to herself. With a faint smell of sulphur, Kurt was beside her. "Drop me on his head."

Kurt gave her a shocked look, and she repeated her words, before adding, "drop me on his head, then get the girls clear. Do it."

Kurt looked at her askance, but nodded, and grabbed her. There was a moment of twisting, of strangeness, then as requested, she landed on the head of the person formerly known as Dudley Dursley. Locking her legs around his throat, knowing that she had to move fast, before he got over his surprise, she didn't even bother with a quip. And, as she had done on that mountainside all those months ago to a giant werewolf, she did to this monster: she raised her shield and brought it down hard, slamming it like an axe into his piggy eyes, releasing the lightning within with a thought. There was a moment of agony and ecstasy, of a white hot fire that consumed everything before her eyes, and then it felt like she was flying and then… nothingness.

OoOoO

In the chaos of the battle, even as it was being ameliorated by the efforts of Loki, Wanda, and Jean, no one who was not at ground zero noticed Carol's attack, or even the preceding fight.

Almost no one.

Thor was the God of Thunder and Lightning. Storms were a part of him, and he knew their feel anywhere, able to tell a natural storm from an unnatural one in an instant. And he felt the lightning discharge from Carol's shield as soon as it happened, his eyes drawn to it. He saw Carol fly, limbs loose, through the air, catapulted by the sheer power of the lightning strike and the thrashing of her opponent.

Diving fast, he caught her as gently as he could, before giving her into the care of her grandmother, who was sending those remaining prisoners, woefully few in number, through the tear in reality in the care of JARVIS through Tony's armours – several of which had been reduced to scrap, presumably by the huge, monstrous creature that Carol had fought, that was now bellowing and spasming in agony.

"She struck bravely," he said.

"Yes, she did," Alison said grimly.

"She will be well," Thor assured her. "She is strong and I felt the strength of the lightning that coursed through her. She will heal from this, I swear it."

"I'm sure," Alison said briskly. "Now, if you would kindly squash your little bastard of a nephew before he gets up, I would be much obliged."

Thor did a double take. "What?"

"Dudley Dursley," Alison said. "Your nephew by marriage. Presumably a mutant or some experiment of Essex's… which is about to attack, again."

Thor looked up at the creature that was slowly regaining its feet and bearings, then glared at him in recognition and hatred. Now he looked, he could see his son's bully in the creature. Vernon and Petunia's foul spawn had become even fouler in the intervening year, or more, considering that time moved in the Nevernever, going from spoiled child to… _this_. If there had been any goodness in him before, it was long gone by now.

Thor glanced at Carol, and at the others who had been harmed by this monster. "I will see it done," he said grimly. "Go."

She did, and Thor strode forward. "You do not want to do this, boy," he said quietly.

The vast, naked monster snorted. "I remember you," it said, in a thick, deep voice, full of rage and malice. "You and the other freaks were there when my house was taken away, my things, my parents. You destroyed me!"

"Hardly," Thor said coldly. "Your parents received a punishment far less than what they richly deserved, and it was to be hoped that your time in government care would improve you. Clearly not."

"Oh, I'm 'improved'," Dudley sneered. "I'm bigger, I'm stronger, stronger even than you, freak!" With that last roar, he hurled Carol's shield at Thor, so fast that it was barely perceptible, fast enough to remove the heads of any human in its path, to tear through high gauge steel.

Thor caught it without even batting an eye.

"I doubt that very much," he said. "Come, whelp. Test yourself against me, if you dare."

Dudley bellowed and charged. Thor, silent, waited. And when the double axe-handle blow, one sufficient to crumple the armour of a tank, came down, he blocked it with his left forearm, the impact sufficient to shatter the glass of any windows nearby, if there had been any, and disperse some of the trees of rain and snow about them.

"Pitiful," Thor said contemptuously, as Dudley strained ineffectually, trying to drive his arms down. He might as well have tried to shift a mountain. Inwardly, though, he was a little surprised at the whelp's strength, which compared favourably with that of Volstagg. Monster though he might be, Vernon and Petunia's spawn had grown into a young… man of remarkable strength. Then, he dropped Mjolnir. He would not soil it with such a petty task. "You think you know power. Let me show you what _real_ power is," he said, and drew back a fist.

The impact echoed around the mountains like a thunderclap, and Dudley was driven deep into the mountain of clouds and ice and lightning.

He would survive, Thor was sure enough of that. He had estimated Dudley's strength to be equivalent to Volstagg's, and had therefore struck with commensurate strength – enough to hurt, disable, and teach the whelp a lesson, but restrained enough that he would live to learn it.

It had also, he thought as he took to the air again, been faintly satisfying.

That satisfaction, however, was ultimately short-lived.

OoOoO

Jean had joined Loki and Ms Maximoff in the skies far above the battle, head reeling from what Loki had told her. Harry's opponent had once been an innocent, someone who ahd been shaped into a weapon by the same monster that had made her cousin's life a misery.

She would have torn off immediately to find him, while swearing through furious tears to tear him molecule from molecule, if it had not been for Loki informing her that Wanda had found him and, apparently, dissolved him. It didn't leave her very satisfied, but it did leave her able to focus better, shaken though she was.

"Now, Jean," Loki said. "I want you try and contain the psychic duel between Harry and his opponent." Now that she'd steadied somewhat, she got the distinct sense that he wasn't telling her something, but now was not the time to ask about that.

Jean must have looked at him askance, because he smiled, as did Wanda, though more tightly in the latter case.

"We'll be smoothing out reality," she said. "Returning it to what it should be. You won't have to stop it all, just leave us some breathing space to work in. Once that's done, we'll help break it up."

Jean took a deep breath, and nodded. "Okay," she said. "Let's do this."

So they did, Jean's amber-red power forming a bubble around the two clashing energies of gold and blue, the resonance growing ever stronger within her. It was a strain, harder than anything she'd had to do since before she'd discovered the full extent of her powers earlier in the Summer, and soon sweat was rolling off her brow as she struggled to contain the fallout of the battle from two other Omega Class psychics, one her equal, one the closest thing to an equal to either her or Rachel that the world had ever produced aside from each other.

The only reason that she even could manage that much was because the two were tired and focused entirely on each other, and perhaps, though she could hardly be sure, she was a smidgen stronger than Harry's opponent. Or at least, she was more accustomed to fully extending her powers, which was a surprise, since Professor Xavier had purposefully taught her of her powers slowly, so she would be able to grow into them, to control them. She somehow doubted that whoever this person's teacher was had been half as kind. Then again, perhaps he had wanted to keep her hidden… and a psychic of their calibre, as Harry had intentionally demonstrated, was very hard to keep hidden if they were going at full tilt.

Either way, she could feel the world around her realigning, reshaping itself under the golden-green and scarlet red stewardship of Loki and Ms Maximoff, returning to something approximating natural: the snow fell downwards, the clouds returned to the skies and and the earth to the mountains below. The creatures she sensed far below, each a fragment of horror and tragedy that made her wanted to tear this base apart for reasons that had nothing to do with what had been done to Harry and his friend, seemed to be fading away, with no more psychic turbulence to empower them.

Then, all of a sudden, that feel away, because within her bubble she saw the powers coalesce into people, apparently carved of energy like she had been, one a young man of golden-white, the other, a young woman of eerie blue. Then, the young man, Harry, lashed out, hand reaching for something that gleamed around the other's throat. And as he did, the resonance suddenly spiked beyond anything she'd ever imagined, drawing her in.

OoOoO

Maddie was only dimly aware of the raging battle, and the consequences of her own psi-war, let alone that she might have another name and a past that she never knew of.

In large part, this was because she was entirely occupied with her opponent. Harry Thorson was, to use a phrase Remy had once coined, 'a slippery little bastard'. Wherever and whenever he could, he slipped away from a direct contest of power and skill, knowing as she did that she was by some way the stronger and more skilled.

However, in pure strength, he was the closest to her match that she had ever faced, bringing a whole new level of challenge to this battle. She wasn't simply able to reach in and switch him off, or use one of her many techniques to slip past his defences – while she had been able to do that once, he was too strong and too wary for that to work a second time. She had tried illusions, creating multiple versions of herself, attempting to bamboozle him, but he had easily detected most of them, and she unleashed some of her most sophisticated illusions, including a labyrinth, he had responded by opening his third eye, the magical trick sometimes known merely as 'the Sight', hitting her with a telepathic piledriver which made up for its lack of subtlety with its raw power, and attached a mocking telepathic message.

 _I'm the nephew of the god who wrote the book on illusions. Did you really think I was going to fall for that?_

This, she had to concede, was likely true, and so had tried direct psychic attacks to his very being. But those didn't work either, for only tendrils could slip through his defences, and he was strong enough to easily swat those aside, where he didn't simply evade them entirely. She had tried attacking from multiple angles, fusing lightning from the cloud-mountain below with psionic energy. That had caused him some bother, as he loudly complained about how, since he was the son of the god of Thunder and Lightning, if anyone was throwing lightning around, it should be him.

 _Or at least,_ he grumbled, as he grounded out the last forked bolt. _You'd think I'd find it easier to deal with._ He'd then seemed to grin at her, a grin every bit as cheeky as any of Remy's. _Oh, and thanks for the new trick, by the way._

The meaning of this puzzling remark was then explained when he drew flame down from the volcano-skies in vast quantities, infusing it with psychic power of his own, and hurling it at her in the shape of a giant bird of prey.

Maddie had only just thrown up a shield in time, so startled was she by her opponent's off-the-cuff adaptability. He had not merely endured one of her better attacks, but adapted the technique for his own purposes and turned it back on her. Really, she rather found herself admiring him.

Of course, such moments of direct confrontation were few and far between, as Harry Thorson danced away from each attack, parried each thrust, and evaded every attempt to pin him down, like a cat on a hot tin roof. She'd never seen such a thing before, but Remy had described it for her, and she had to admit, based on what she imagined it would be like, Harry's slippery, agile, and infuriating dodging seemed to fit.

Tactically, she knew that it was the best way to prolong the fight, for it was one that they both knew he could never win. His telekinesis was remarkably adept, true, arguably better than hers, though it was weaker and like him, she had learned from this fight, and his telepathy was woefully raw compared to hers, though not without its sharp edges and unexpected tactics. For instance, after the light psychic jabs had failed to draw further startled reaction, and she'd begun to get a real idea of the shape of his thoughts, beginning to pin him down, whenever she looked like locking him down, he'd thrown a flicker of a memory at her.

Each and every one of those baffling memories featured someone who looked like her, sounded like her, even smiled like her, presumably the mysterious 'Jean'. Well, to an extent. Maddie knew that her own smiles were rare, cautious, shy things, whereas the person who appeared in the fragmented memories Harry Thorson kept throwing at her apparently had no shortage of smiles, warm, confident and kind smiles. Of the other things that she, whoever she was, seemed to have no shortage of, were kindness and what Maddie faintly recognised as love, though of a kind that she didn't think she'd seen before. And then there was something else that struck a far more familiar chord: power. Power, not necessarily stronger than hers, but at least a match, something she had not thought possible. She had not even thought that someone like Harry, at least able to compete with her for power, existed until these last couple of days. And now, there was someone who was her match? Whose power was fiercer, less disciplined, less constrained? And was, above all, even though it was only a second hand memory of power, somehow… familiar?

Each time, it made her hesitate, made her wonder, made her curious as to who this person was, how they looked so alike when she _knew_ that Doctor Essex had made her for a purpose. What purpose did this person have, this person who was like her but not, identical but different in every single way? Who. Was. She.

This question, and her duel with Harry, occupied her so much that she didn't even notice the bubble of psychic power, power created by the one like her but not, surrounded them, and the strange resonant feeling that had been plaguing her ever since she first encountered Harry – no, before, though it hadn't been half as strong.

She didn't notice until they were entirely contained and the two of them, her and Harry, stopped. He was all but at her mercy, the battle nearly complete, and they both knew it. Then, she realised that he was smiling.

 _You've lost,_ she said. _Why are you happy?_

 _Because I haven't lost, Maddie,_ he said, exhausted glee hanging off his every psychic syllable. _I've won, oh, I've won. No, we've both won._

 _What do you mean?_

 _I mean that my plan worked. I knew I could never beat you, but I was never trying,_ came the excited, wickedly gleeful reply, the sort of tone she'd expect from Remy when he'd just done something particularly clever. _Didn't you ever wonder why I never attacked in earnest?_

Maddie had to admit that she had. She'd presumed it was just caution, trying to buy time for his friends.

 _You're half right,_ Harry replied. _I was buying them time, but I was also forcing a fight that would cause enough psychic noise for my uncle or my godmother or someone else to pick up on it, to follow it back here, to find us._ A delighted laugh echoed between them. _And they did. The Avengers are here, and they're not alone. My friend and the new friends she's made, the prisoners of the Red Room and Sinister, Essex, Milbury, whatever you want to call him, they're home free. And you're free too._

 _Free?_ Maddie asked, puzzled.

There was long – and by long, she meant that it was measured in seconds, rather than milliseconds, for this was psychic communication.

 _I suppose I should have guessed,_ Harry said eventually. _You never really realised._ His gaze focused on her upper chest – and not her breasts, that young men usually stared at. It was the part where, between her breasts, the feather she'd taken from him laid. _And you have something of mine,_ he said. And before she knew it, he struck out, grabbing the feather before she could stop him.

And the resonant feeling reached a fever pitch, there was a great twisting sensation, and then…

It was strange. It was like they were in a mind-scape, but not in any one person's mind. She looked around. The room was made of stone, probably a tower going by the round shape, like some kind of castle. It was richly adorned in tapestries of red and gold, with similarly coloured squashy sofas and armchairs, glass windows looking out onto a snowy evening, and a roaring fire in the grate.

"Well," someone remarked in a mild tone. "This was unexpected."

She whirled. Behind her, standing next to one of the armchairs, was Harry Thorson, no longer glowing gold or humming with power, but looking mostly ordinary, in a non-descript t-shirt and jeans. However, strangely, his clothes kept shifting between the ordinary outfit and some kind of burgundy red leathers, inscribed with a stylised golden bird, and when they appeared, so too did a golden circlet around his head.

Furthermore, though, around his neck was the golden feather that had called to her. A large part of her wanted it back, for reasons that she couldn't even begin to explain.

He smiled at her, and stuck out a hand. "Hey," he said. "I'm not sure if, between you telepathically laying me out and the psychic battle just now, we were ever introduced. Harry, Harry Thorson."

Uncertainly, suspiciously, Maddie stared at his hand.

"I don't bite, you know," Harry said dryly. "I know people who do, but I don't… and that's far dodgier than I meant it to. Sorry."

Maddie stared at him, baffled. Then, at his entreating expression, slowly took the hand, ready to use one of the blows Remy had taught her if he was about to try something. But he didn't. "Madelyn Pryor," she said, then hesitated. "Remy calls me Maddie," she added, though again, she wasn't sure why.

"Nice to meet you, Maddie," Harry said, shaking her hand. "Shall we?"

Maddie eyed him suspiciously, watching as he took a seat, gesturing at her to do the same. Her suspicious gaze transferred to the indicated armchair.

"The chairs don't bite either," Harry said dryly. "Not unless the Twins have got at them."

Not having the faintest idea what he meant, Maddie slowly, grudgingly, sat down. She knew very well that appearances could deceive, but what puzzled her was that this place, whatever and wherever it was, didn't seem designed to deceive her. She'd never seen it before in her life.

"It's my school common room," Harry said, reading her expression, if not her mind. "I suppose because the feather was responding to me, it created this." He picked it up and eyed it, closing on eye and regarding it suspiciously. "Not entirely sure how, though. According to grandpa Odin, it's just a phoenix feather, but it's obviously something more than that…" He dropped it and clapped his hands, making Maddie jump. "Still, now we're here, wherever here is…" He trailed off and looked hopefully at Maddie. "Actually, considering that you're a far better psychic than I am, or probably will ever be, do you have any idea where we are?"

"The Astral Plane, perhaps?" Maddie suggested, more than a little puzzled. "Perhaps this feather, whatever it is, responded to our power by creating a temporary sanctum of sorts from it, and chose your memories because you acted on it?"

Harry nodded thoughtfully. "You know, I think I actually understood that," he said. "It would make sense." His thoughtful expression turned to her. "So. What's your story, Maddie?"

"Why do you want to know?" Maddie asked suspiciously.

"Can't I just be curious?"

Maddie eyed him.

"Okay, fine," Harry said. "Though, for the record, I'm a very curious person."

"Clearly."

Harry grinned, entire face lighting up. "Sarcasm!" he said, delighted. "Wonderful! You _do_ have a personality!" At Maddie's affronted expression, he chuckled. "Sorry," he said. "I couldn't resist." His expression abruptly turned thoughtful and he studied her, chin resting on the palm of his hand. "You do have a personality, and a mind of your own, I think – you took this feather because you wanted to, not because you were told to. Somehow I doubt Milbury or whatever he's really called cares too much about shiny things, and one of the Red Room thugs would have swiped it otherwise – thanks, by the way. It's nice that someone picked it up who would appreciate it, though I am glad to have it back."

Maddie sat back, startled by the wave of chatter. Of all the people she'd known, only Remy had chatted anywhere near this much, and even he was generally more reserved. And even he never displayed the ability to switch from playful to thoughtful to serious in mid-word.

"So," Harry said, serious and thoughtful again. "You're not just Essex's puppet. You're stronger than he is. Why do you do what he says?"

Maddie frowned. "Doctor Essex created me for a purpose," she said.

"And what would that be?" Harry asked quietly.

Maddie regarded him for a long moment, then shrugged minutely and said, "I find people for him."

"Is that it?" Harry asked, surprised.

"I protect him, too," Maddie added, after a moment. "I also serve as a case study on the development of psychic powers. What were you created for? And who by?"

"I wasn't created," Harry said, then paused. "Well, I was conceived, but that's something I really don't want to get into."

"And you have no purpose?" Maddie asked, surprised. It wasn't entirely uncommon, among prisoners, but even so. Even Remy had seemed to have a purpose, finding things, and sometimes people, but usually things, and acquiring them for Doctor Essex.

Harry opened his mouth, then paused. "Well," he said. "I think I had one. Doctor Strange didn't exactly create me, but… he shaped me, I suppose. Helped me be ready."

"To do what?"

"Remember when the skies went red over the Summer and the world went wibbly?"

"Wibbly?"

"Weird."

"Yes," Maddie said. "I do."

"I was meant to stop Chthon, the thing behind that," Harry said. "In a way, I was the only one who could. So I did. Apart from that…" He snorted. "Well, there's a prophecy or two going around. I'm meant to destroy this dark lord, a wizard and a psychic, called Voldemort. He's not as powerful as I am, or you are, but he's clever and dangerous. And then there's the other prophecy." He smiled at her, a wry smile. "Funny thing. You're in it."

Maddie's eyes widened, confused. Prophecies were not knew to her – Doctor Essex had taught her of such things. But she hadn't imagined that she would feature in one, unless it was about Doctor Essex, and even then, it would be a brief mention.

"In what way?"

"Something about me finding the lost and gathering them to me," Harry said. "Three people. One was someone that a friend of mine seemed to recognise. Another was something about a frozen memory. That one I've got no clue about. But the third… a hound in chains, that waits to break free."

"You think that's me?" Maddie asked. "Impossible." But her tone was uneasy. She knew that she was often called Doctor Essex's hound, even occasionally by Doctor Essex himself. Like a hound, her primary purpose was to find people for him, to track them down. It was something she was especially good at, through telepathy and psychometry. But in chains?

"They might not be obvious chains," Harry said, reading her face again, or just guessing at her thoughts. "But think about it: have you ever thought about leaving him? About going off and discovering the world, of making your own life, free of him?"

Maddie froze. Those words, almost exactly the same words, had once been said to her by Remy. He had wondered the same thing. He had talked of the same thing, in light, gentle tones, of perhaps taking a holiday – something that had had to be explained to her – away from Doctor Essex and everyone else, just the two of them. He had even coaxed her into choosing different clothes from the standard clothes Doctor Essex assigned her, pointing out that if she wanted to blend in out in the world when she was finding people, she had to dress like someone out in the world.

When she had seen tattoos, the very concept had left her fascinated, so Remy had taken her to someone he knew, someone magical who could apply or remove tattoos at will – apparently the ordinary version involved needles and was really rather painful. He'd paid for it, as he had the clothes, which Maddie knew was a generous gesture, out of character for a thief, especially when she could simply have made them believe that she had paid them and that she erased all memory of her anyway.

Doctor Essex had been… puzzled, but not especially bothered, apparently accepting Remy's explanation that if she was to travel out in the world, she would need to blend in. That said, she hadn't seen Remy for a while afterwards, either, and he had been more circumspect about holidays and going away from Doctor Essex – which was good, since after a little talk with Doctor Essex, the details of which she couldn't remember, the very idea seemed ridiculous. She was not a person from out in the world. She was someone made with a purpose.

"Just because you're made to be one thing doesn't mean you can't become something else," Harry said, and she realised that, strangely, she'd said almost all of that out loud. How puzzling. Then again, this was the Astral Plane – probably – thought and reality were close cousins here. "I mean… take my friend Tony. He's Iron Man. He started out as a weapons designer. He made and sold things that killed people and he'd never really known anything else. I mean, that was what he did for a living, what his dad and everyone around him had taught him to be and to do. No one could even imagine him doing anything else. He occasionally did other things, but weapons were the main thing he did. Then, one day, after he was kidnapped and hurt with his own weapons, after he saw what they did, he escaped with the first Iron Man armour, and started destroying his weapons and stopped selling them. Everyone told him he was crazy, that he should go back to weapons. But he didn't listen. Now, he makes clean energy and machines that help people, that make the world better. He's still Iron Man, which does have weapons, but he uses them to protect people. And frankly, though I didn't know him before, I think he's way happier now."

"I'm not unhappy," Maddie said, frowning. "I fulfil my purpose."

"But are you happy?" Harry asked gently.

Maddie frowned. She supposed she was… around Remy. And she did get a certain satisfaction of fulfilling her purpose, for Doctor Essex.

Harry just stared at her, eyes sad. Eyes so like hers. Then, he looked thoughtful again. "Let me tell you a secret," he said. "You've probably noticed that our eyes are exactly the same."

Maddie nodded slowly. She had. She'd been wondering about it.

"Our powers are a lot alike too," Harry said. "Same power-set, though I'm not as strong. And I have magic. And I'm half Asgardian. Okay, so, mostly same power-set. And we sort of… resonate around each other. Our powers recognise each other. We're both drawn to this feather, too. Did you ever wonder why that was?"

Maddie frowned again. "I was a little curious," she reluctantly admitted. She wasn't meant to be curious, but she was.

"Well, I'm not sure either," Harry said. "But there's something odd. Because, change the clothes, lengthen the hair, remove the tattoos… and you look exactly like my cousin Jean."

"The girl you were showing me?" Maddie asked. "The one who…"

"Has powers like ours, is as strong as you are, and is generally a warm, sweet and lovely person?" Harry asked. "Who is free?"

Maddie hesitated, then nodded.

"Free?" another voice asked, one just like hers. Maddie twisted in her chair, as Harry looked up and smiled.

"Hello, Jean," he said.

OoOoO

Jean was, to say the least, confused. One moment, she'd been in a battle in the middle of some alternate dimension, trying to contain the fallout of Harry's battle with someone that the doctor behind Harry's misery had moulded since birth to be a weapon… and now she was in some strange castle room. Some strange, cosy castle room.

She caught the tail end of a conversation. "Free?" she asked, puzzled.

"Hello, Jean," Harry said, looking up from one of the armchairs by the inviting fire. He sounded cheerful. "Jean, I'd like you to meet Madelyn Pryor, otherwise known as Maddie."

Jean looked where Harry indicated and saw someone else twisted in their chair. And she couldn't hold back a gasp. Because it was like looking in a mirror. There were stylistic differences, of course, in clothes (the other girl was wearing what looked like a functional bodysuit, though it kept flickering to a t-shirt and a pair of grey jeans) and in hair, makeup and the strange, yet rather striking tattoos on her cheekbones, but in their basics… the hair was the same colour, the near unique emerald eyes the same shade, the height the same, the build the same, the everything, exactly the same.

"Who are you?" both girls asked, at the exact same moment.

"That," Harry said, standing up. "Is exactly what I'm trying to figure out. You're both as strong as each other, you've got identical power-sets, identical everything really, but for fashion sense… you even sound the same. Mostly. The accent is a little different. Maddie sounds more like me." He coughed, a little embarrassed. "And. Um. I think I have a reasonably good idea what's happened."

"What?" Jean asked.

"Well," Harry said. "I'm no scientist, but…" He paused, then turned to Maddie. "You would know, actually, Maddie," he said. "Can your Doctor Essex clone people? Create copies of them?"

Jean decided not to mention that Doctor Essex was decidedly past tense, since he'd been melted.

Maddie hesitated, then chewed her lip. It made her look much more human. "I think so," she said slowly. "Though I do not know for certain."

Jean suddenly got Harry's implication. "You mean…"

"I think so," Harry said quietly. "Like I said, I'm no scientist, but it fits."

Maddie looked puzzled. "What?"

Jean simply shook her head, in concert with her knees, which seemed on the point of failing her. Harry, bless him, was up and at her side in a moment, helping her into a chair.

"We think that you might be a clone of Jean," Harry said quietly. "A copy. You said that Doctor Essex created you… well, this is who he must have created you from."

Maddie looked troubled, then frowned. "Impossible," she said.

"Why?" Harry asked, eyebrow raised.

Maddie ignored him. "How old are you?" she bluntly asked Jean.

"Seventeen years old," Jean said, puzzled.

Maddie frowned. "So am I," she said.

"Time passes faster here," Harry pointed out.

Maddie waved this away. "I am not often here," she said. "I am usually with Doctor Essex, elsewhere, in the world, or where time moves similarly."

There was a puzzled silence. "Well," Harry said. "This is confusing." He shook his head. "Either way, that doesn't matter. Whoever you are, wherever you came from, in my book, you're one of us. You're family. Please, let us help you. You don't have to do what Doctor Essex says, even if you were made to do it. I know you think for yourself, I know that a part of you wants a life of your own, we can help you get it. It doesn't matter what you were made for. What matters, all that matters, is that you are alive, you can choose. All that matters is what you choose to do."

Then, before they could say anything more, the common room construct fractured around them, sending them whirling back to reality.

OoOoO

Harry barely caught himself in mid-air, and as he did, realised that he was no longer under psychic assault. Indeed, everything seemed to have calmed down. In his hand was the warm, almost hot, phoenix feather. Opposite him was Maddie, no longer glowing, and looking deeply troubled. Jean was equidistant from the two them. And a little away from her were Loki and Wanda, the former of whom was watching Maddie very carefully, while the latter, looking tired, battered and dirty, but no less wonderful a sight for all that, immediately wrapped Harry in an incredibly tight hug. Harry relaxed into it, hugging back as he felt tears on his godmother's cheek.

"I'm fine," he said, answering the unasked question. "I'm fine. It's all fine."

But it wasn't.

Because below, there was a sudden sense of building power around the Red Room base, and Harry instinctively knew what was going to happen, and saw Maddie's conflicted expression.

"Stay," he said. "Please. I'm begging you, please."

Maddie chewed her lip again, but then, the power spiked and her mind was made up. Twisting in mid-air, ignoring Jean's pleas and Loki's attempt to entrap her by magic, she shot down towards the base like an arrow.

"Oh no you don't," Harry muttered, and not for the first time, prepared to do something incredibly noble and very, very stupid.

"Harry?" Wanda asked, then her eyes widened as he gave her an apologetic smile and kiss on the cheek.

"Sorry. Got to go fulfil a prophecy. And save a girl. Bit of both."

"Harry, no, don't – "

"But before she could stop him, Harry wriggled like an eel, slipping free and shooting off after Maddie.

Loki tried to catch him, too, and Jean, but not for nothing was Harry known as the youngest seeker in a century, and he easily evaded his uncle's attempts, watching as a dome grew up around a large part of the base, pouring the last of his power into catching up. Maddie flew in just in time, and, right on her tail, Harry followed her, tackling to the ground.

Something flew in afterwards, the wind-stream grazing his legs, but he barely noticed it, as he and Maddie crashed into the ground, only instinctive telekinetic defences saving them from a messy and embarrassing end.

As it was, though, Harry was completely drained and, in the midst of the courtyard of the remains of the Red Room base as it arrived in a mysterious new location, on an island of some kind, he managed to half-smile up at the astonished Maddie.

"I'm not giving up on you yet," he said. As darkness descended, he thought at her, _Just remember: whatever they made you to do, you don't have to do it. You want something else? You can choose it. And you won't have to do it alone, either._

And then, he embraced oblivion.

OoOoO

Loki, Jean and Wanda were not the only ones to see Harry dive through after Maddie, back into the Red Room, following them to wherever they were going next. Just as they were about to disappear, Thor, quick thinking, hurled Mjolnir after him. It followed the two into the shrinking gap, and vanished along with the rest of the base.

"Whatever you have done, my son," he said quietly. "And whyever you have done it…" His lips quirked in a sad smile. "Though I think I have a good idea why. Wherever you go, a part of me is with you. And so, I will find you."

 **And so Harry's Chronic Hero Syndrome/Born-To-Be-A-Knight-Of-The-Round-Table Syndrome lands him in another fine pickle. As soon as he gets out of trouble, he feels the need to dive right back into it, and perhaps unsurprisingly, for the sake of a pretty girl (though the 'pretty girl' part is barely a footnote on the list of his reasons why). Also, he thinks that she's a clone, because that's the logical conclusion to jump to.**

 **Oh, and Sinister's Unexplained Recovery… that'll have an explanation, though I've already implied it. Let's just say that there's a reason that he's ludicrously hard to kill, and it's not 'healing factor'.**

 **Brief historical note:** **I do not mean to imply, in Natasha's speech to Belova, that the Soviet Union was simply 'the evil empire' and the West was composed of plucky heroes working to free the people within it. In truth, there was good and evil, heroes and villains, on both sides – though equally, there was also a reason that most of the defectors across the Berlin Wall were going West, rather than East. Natasha, for her part, doesn't have any great faith in the US and the West at large as some kind of liberal utopia; she's far too old and far too cynical for that, and she's right. However, she is primarily focused on dismantling Belova's illusions rather than doing an in-depth socio-political compare and contrast.**

 **Now, a review would be much appreciated, thank you kindly.**


	11. Chapter 11: Forever Red - Part V

**Well, welcome back, ladies and gents. First thing's first:** _ **If you're confused by this being chapter 11, that is because chapter 10 was posted during this site's periodic issues with alerts, and the update alert wasn't sent out. In that case, go back and read chapter 10 immediately.**_

 **Now, I'm all done with my exams, and but for admin stuff of moving out of my rented house, receiving my results and graduating, my undergraduate career is over. I will officially be a graduate. Holy crap, I am so not ready for this.**

 **However, it means I have a bit more time for fic writing – not as much as you all might prefer, since I'll be getting a Summer job if I can, but hey.**

 **Anyway, that brings us to this latest chapter. I won't lie, it's pretty dark. Not all dark, mind you, but there are lots of feels, lots of tears, a fair bit of ominous stuff and horror overt and implied going on, but there are bits of light and humour in the dark too, and a bit of character exploration. It's also largely a fall-out chapter, since everyone's reeling from the battle in the last chapter and Harry's latest piece of stupid nobility.**

 **Whatsmyaccount:** **My pleasure. How did I do it? Lots of procrastination, for the most part. And thank you. How do I write so many different characters without mixing in my own biases? Good question. Excellent question. To be honest, I'm not sure if I do, and even if I do manage to avoid mixing in my own biases, I'm not sure how. I suppose it's about getting into the right mental space, thinking yourself into the character. As for the distracted nature, I used to be/am still like that. Now, I mostly just get distracted within this vast universe. Do I plan 100k in advance? Well, usually, I plan a lot further, but yes, though almost everything beyond the basic framework is up for change. And again, thank you.**

 **Guest:** **I do reply to anonymous reviews, but I much prefer PMing replies. It's quicker, much more extensive (a discussion can begin, for one thing), and frankly, much easier. Getting an account is very easy – all you need is an email address and five minutes. As for the Necro Sword and King Thor, no, we won't see those for a good long while yet.**

 **Guest:** **Most of the Avengers are quite pragmatic. Harry has the capacity to be extremely pragmatic… just not when someone needs saving.**

The mood back at Avengers Mansion was grim, to say the least. While it had seemed as if they had been about to pull off a clean-sweep, rescuing Harry and Carol and half a dozen other prisoners, as well as Natasha's mole, Harry had demonstrated his customary talent for throwing a spanner in the works by chasing after Jean's doppelganger.

Speaking of said doppelganger, there was a good deal of confusion surrounding her, with Carol, Jean, the Red Room prisoners and Gambit all (entirely logically) believing that she was a clone – or at least, in the latter case, assuming that after they saw Jean. However, the truth was far worse.

Madelyn 'Maddie' Pryor had, in fact, been born Rachel Grey. She was Jean's twin sister, and had been stolen the night she was born, replaced with a dead infant by the creature known variously as Essex, Milbury, and Sinister, before a life of brainwashing had transformed her into Sinister's ultimate weapon, his hunting hound and dog-of-war. Jean had narrowly escaped the same fate thanks only to the intervention of Doctor Strange, who had nevertheless failed to save Rachel and prevent her becoming Maddie.

Jean had already been reeling from Harry's first capture, the psychic backlash of Harry and her twin's duel, meeting said twin, then Harry's second capture, diving right back into the Red Room's custody. The failure of her immediate attempts to follow him as she had before had dealt another blow. Now, she was in numb shock, tears streaming down her face as she stared into the middle distance, not responding to any attempt to comfort her.

Carol had come to relatively quickly, and on being informed of what had happened, immediately demanded that they go back and find Harry. When she was told that they were effectively back to square one thanks to the Red Room's escape, she had descended into furious, frustrated tears, loudly castigating Harry's stupidity. The fact that her much loved uncle was still unconscious and critically injured, broken bones having been the least of his problems following his not quite being fast enough to dodge a swipe from the Beast, had not helped. She was also being comforted by her grandmother, who was treating the situation with a kind of grim familiarity.

Gambit was being watched carefully by Clint and Natasha, though he didn't seem to have any thoughts of escape. Indeed, as soon as he had awoken from sedative aided unconsciousness, his first response – after immediate fear that he might be back in the Red Room's hands and foul swearing in response to his rather nasty injury – was to inquire of Maddie's whereabouts. When he'd been told she hadn't come through, he'd slumped in a kind of despair.

The ex-Red Room prisoners didn't much of a stake in what happened to Harry or Maddie – one they hardly knew, and while they were deeply grateful for his part in their escape, and concerned about what had happened to him, he was not exactly their top priority. The other, no matter how tragic her circumstances had been, had aligned herself with the bad guys. She was even suspected to have played a part in bringing them in.

As a result, they were mostly relieved on their own behalf, semi-delirious and disbelieving of the fact that they were free, as well as worried about their own: Noriko and Lorna were barely conscious and somewhat scorched, Nezhno was nursing a nasty eye injury and some considerable damage to his torso from the Beast's fists, while Jono, spine and neck snapped by the same, his internal fires extinguished, quickly put on life-support, seemed to be in a liminal state where it was unclear whether he was alive or dead. Kurt was the only one who'd emerged relatively unscathed, meaning that he was the only one really in a state to worry about others, which he did. For the most part, they wanted to contact their families, and with JARVIS' aid, did so, as well as being offered accommodation at Avengers Mansion or the Xavier Institute for the time being.

The Avengers and Wanda, meanwhile, were in a state of stunned disbelief. They'd had Harry literally in their grasp, and then, in the blink of an eye, he'd gone. Logically, it wasn't exactly surprising that he'd chosen to go after Maddie, since logic rarely featured in Harry's thought process when he made such decisions.

Slowly, though, they started to piece together why, and came to two conclusions. First, Harry honestly believed that he could turn Maddie, and was gambling everything on that. Second, he also believed that she was part of the second prophecy, with her most likely being the hound in chains, something the Avengers had previously theorised themselves.

And while Loki and Wanda had, as soon as they got back, set up a tracking spell based on Mjolnir's connection to Thor, and started calling in favours owed all across the Spirit World, they didn't anticipate much immediate success. The Nevernever was in uproar: while the transformative effects of Harry and Maddie's battle had been confined to the local area, a contested portion of Wyldfae territory not strictly under the suzerainty of either Summer or Winter, it had sent disruptive shockwaves throughout the nearer regions of the Nevernenever, which had been on edge to begin with, following the events of the Battle of London and 'Red Sky Day'. And as the Courts were wont to do, they were inclined to blame each other.

Furthermore, any spell tracing the thaumaturgic connection between Thor and Mjolnir, while it successfully circumvented whatever measures Sinister had in place to deflect magical tracking, had to contend with the fact that, by all early indications, the Red Room base had been warped into the deeper reaches of the Nevernever, beyond the borders of Faerie, into the sort of realms where up was down, time condensed into crystals, and the formless took form.

While it was generally suspected that the Red Room – or at least, Sinister – wouldn't pick somewhere too tenuous, it was also suspected that the instability of the realms surrounding it meant that the spells would have to be tweaked time and time again. And that wasn't even getting into the temporal distortions. Furthermore, that same instability meant that even if some knowledge could be gleaned from the remaining chunk of the Red Room base (which, as it happened, mostly consisted of rubble or strangely transmogrified molecules, having borne the brunt of the side-effects of Harry and Maddie's battle), perhaps a list of locations of other bases within the Nevernever, if indeed they existed.

Nevertheless, they persisted. Thor returned to Asgard to speak with Heimdall and his parents. Loki went to pump some of his contacts, both mystical and mundane, for information on the Red Room, while Natasha cross-examined Ivan and her own contacts on the same, and Coulson prepared to speak to Gambit. Wanda went to do the same on the mystical side of things, after retrieving her apprentice, even mentioning turning to John Constantine for help. Clint kept an eye on Bucky at the latter's request while he centred himself again, emerging from the Soldier persona, which he'd dived into twice in less than twelve hours. Tony set his robots to repairing the Mansion and with JARVIS, frantically combed the internet for traces of the Red Room and whatever they might be up to, or wherever they might be. Bruce, devastated though he was, applied himself to medical care of the injured.

And Steve, who saw this as a personal failure on his part, made preparations to demand answers from the Russian President. Up close and personal.

Jean, meanwhile, roused herself to call Professor Xavier, who had managed to insulate himself from the worst of the backlash, having prepared defences against that sort of thing after being caught off-guard by Gravemoss' dark magic the previous year. Within minutes, he had started up Cerebro, and was sweeping the world for any information that could help.

In other words, the mood was, among those not lost in despair, determined. But it was most certainly not optimistic.

OoOoO

Elsewhere, the mood was more… confused.

Maddie, meanwhile, had watched Harry lapse into unconsciousness, confused beyond words. Why had he followed her? Why had he rendered himself vulnerable to people he _knew_ meant him harm? Did he think she would protect him? But why would he need protection in the first place? He'd been free of the Red Room, away from Doctor Essex, both of whom were fleeing, and under the protection of people even more powerful than she was, from whom the Red Room and Doctor Essex were fleeing in the first place. No, protection wasn't his driving motivation.

She thought back to what he'd said and frowned, trying to piece it together. As she did, she vaguely registered a lot of excited voices speaking in Russian, and half a dozen armoured Red Room Agents closed in on Harry with ill-intent. Before Maddie knew what she was doing, she'd struck out, sending all six of them flying, four into crumbling buildings, and at least two into the strange seas of the island around them, with waters flaring like rainbow opals. The chatter got more excited as she stood up and placed herself so that she was standing over him. "You will leave him," she said in Russian. "He will be assessed by Doctor Essex."

Some of them looked dubious, but a mixture of Doctor Essex's name and her expression made them think twice. In due course, Doctor Essex emerged, with the commander of the Red Room, General Lukin. Both of them stared in some surprise at the unconscious Harry, a noteworthy event – General Lukin was generally adept at hiding his feelings and Doctor Essex rarely showed any sign of surprise, or any emotion at all.

Then, Lukin chuckled. "I commend your programming, Doctor Essex," he said. "As you said, your hound returned, and she has brought the greatest of prizes with her."

Doctor Essex dropped down onto his haunches to inspect Harry, Maddie obediently moving out of the way to allow him to do so. "Yes," he said eventually. "She has." He didn't look away, but a couple of Red Room Agents snapped to and vanished into one of the less decrepit buildings, returning with a stretcher.

"I will do it," Maddie said, as they went to load Harry onto it. When Doctor Essex turned to her, eyebrow raised, she was momentarily lost for words. After a moment, however, she came up with a reason. "The superstructure of this base is damaged and rubble strewn throughout," she said. "Creatures stirred up may still infest it. Additionally, he is exhausted and recently injured. A simple shock to his body or a sharp impact could lead to further, perhaps severe, injury. My telekinesis would ensure physical stability, as well as a defence against any surprise attack. Furthermore, I now have a detailed understanding of his psychic defences. I can ensure that he remains unconscious in transit."

Doctor Essex regarded her for a long moment, then nodded. "A logical decision," he conceded. "Proceed."

Maddie nodded, carefully telekinetically lifting Harry onto the now hovering stretcher, being sure to support every part of him. And as she did, she wondered why she had spoken out. Normally, her duties would have run their course by this point, and she would either have been ordered to rest, to be physically assessed, or to take on some other task for Doctor Essex. What happened to a captive was not her concern. Yet this time, she had made it her concern. In this case, she did not want the Red Room laying their hands on him. And she didn't know why.

The trip with Doctor Essex and General Lukin to the special infirmary, one of Doctor Essex's labs, was relatively swift. Once they were there, Maddie placed Harry one of the examining tables, while Doctor Essex activated it and, on being satisfied that it was working, scanned Harry.

"Is he functional?" Lukin asked.

"There is no sign of brain damage," Doctor Essex said. "The physical damage is reasonably extensive, with broken bones being reset by telekinetic means, and the subject's inherent regenerative abilities mean that healing has already begun. No correction seems to be required. Exhaustion is also present, but that is a problem that will fade with time. Sufficiently hydrated and supplied with nutrients, he will heal on his own."

"Excellent," Lukin said.

"What do you plan for him?" Maddie asked suddenly.

Both men stared at her, Lukin startled, Essex considering.

"Nothing that need concern you," Lukin said curtly, after a long moment. "Your master is aware. You do not need to be."

Inwardly, a large part of Maddie conceded the truth of this. Her function was to act on Doctor Essex's commands. This was going beyond her remit, far beyond. However, a small but increasingly large and loud part of her was full of questions. It took her a moment to find a suitable reason for them, but it came quickly enough. "He is a psychic, and a superhuman in general, more powerful than any at your disposal save for myself. He is also a magical practitioner of considerable power and enough skill to be a threat. Additionally, he has sufficient hand to hand combat skill to defeat multiple highly trained opponents and tactical ingenuity to first manufacture an escape from the Beast's arena, before creating cover under which he successfully discerned the location of the other superhuman subjects and free them, before engaging me in psychic combat and despite his clearly deficient training in telepathic combat, draw out the fight for some time. Just now, he claimed that the entire purpose of the fight was to create sufficient psychic turbulence to allow the Avengers and their allies to discover this base's previous location, a claim supported by the fact that he very rarely directly attacked me, and only ever did so in the form of testing strikes, brief counter-attacks, and distractions. Given even the slightest chance, he can and will escape again. I am your only chance of preventing him from doing so. Logically speaking, it would be wise to inform me of your intentions regarding him."

Lukin's expression now warred between outrage, surprise, and grudging consideration of her fabricated but logically sound reasoning. Doctor Essex, meanwhile, was studying her carefully.

"He will be brought into the Red Room's service," Lukin said eventually.

"By what means?" Maddie asked, mind afire with questions. "Given my insight into his motives, and his demonstrated character, I doubt that he would serve willingly." Then it hit her. "You intend to break his will."

She didn't know why, but that seemed obscurely offensive to her. This was odd, even – especially – to her. After all, she had had no problem dominating the wills of others when required to. But that was only a temporary state of affairs, and only done for pragmatic reasons. Even so, once, it would not have bothered her. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it would not have occurred to her to be bothered by it. But now… her exposure to Remy, and this mysterious boy, who had echoed Remy's words on freedom, who had been so earnest in trying to convince her that something about her situation was wrong, that her purpose was not all there was in her life, meant that she was bothered.

He was misguided, of course (of course?), but even so: he had said that she was 'one of us', referring to himself and someone else who he regarded as important to him, a girl who looked just like her, had extended an offer of kinship and friendship based on hardly any acquaintance at all, and… he had been kind to her. It was not something she was used to, certainly not so randomly – even Remy had taken some time to get to know her before offering such open kindness. She wasn't entirely familiar with concepts of morality, of good and bad – they were not things that Doctor Essex dwelt on, as he considered them unnecessary to her purpose, and unnecessary in general – but as far as she could tell, Harry was a good person. His mind was also unique, one she felt was worth preserving.

"Surely there are other methods," she began.

"Enough."

It wasn't said in a particularly loud voice, but a lifetime of habitual obedience caused Maddie's mouth to snap shut at Doctor Essex's command.

"This is not your purpose," Doctor Essex said. "This is not what you were made for. You will cease."

That, however, only fired off more questions. For instance, who was that other girl who looked so like her, who had power just like hers, who Harry had originally thought that she was a clone of? With their appearances and powers, it was a reasonable conclusion, if an incorrect one. However, their similarities suggested that they shared genetic material, and further, that she shared genetic material with Harry, who had eyes of an identical shade to hers and the others, Jean's. If this was not part of her purpose, if this was not part of what she was made for, why was she capable of it in the first place? And why wasn't it part of her purpose? Why was she not allowed to think?

"Essex," Lukin said slowly, doubtless reading her body language, which Maddie had to admit was likely defensive.

Doctor Essex merely raised an eyebrow at him. "Do you really think that I would allow so powerful a subordinate to roam free?" he asked. His tone was calm, mild and seemed to be one of genuine inquiry. It was also unclear as to whether his words were directed at Maddie, Lukin, or both. Then, he ended doubt by focusing on Maddie. "You are my Hound and you _will_ come to heel. Cease this line of thought."

Maddie frowned.

Doctor Essex sighed, impatient. "I see that work will have to be done," he said, then cleared his throat and began to recite. "'Between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act… falls the Shadow.'"

With the last word, Maddie stiffened, then relaxed. Her eyes were now glazed and empty.

"She can hear you," Essex said clinically, responding to a question from the now relaxing Lukin, in words that Maddie was only distantly aware of. "And respond on reflex to stimuli such as her name. But she cannot act. She is on my leash once more." He cleared his throat. "Sleep."

And Maddie knew nothing more.

OoOoO

Carol, meanwhile, had not grown any less frustrated and angry, though her tears had mostly dried up, with even the arrival of her mother, who gathered her into a desperately tight hug, only eliciting a few more sobs. Mother and daughter stayed that way for a long time turned out to be rather more on the ball than Carol had previously given her credit for.

Specifically, when Carol was about to broach the subject of why she'd been kidnapped, her response was, "I know."

"You know?" Carol asked, startled.

"About why you were taken. About your powers."

"What powers?" Carol asked, on reflex.

"The ones that crushed a door knob, broke your chair and split your school bag," her mother said dryly. "I wasn't expecting you to start glowing green and fly, but I figure that when you're raising a super soldier, puberty's going to throw a curveball or two."

"Oh," Carol said, and coughed. "Those powers. Look, mom -"

"I know where they come from, too," Mrs Danvers said. "Except for the green ones."

"Those were me using the Green Lantern Ring. It's like Thor's hammer but, you know, a ring. It was a temporary deal. And how did you figure that was me?" Carol asked. "Since when did you know about the super soldier thing?"

"You're my daughter," Mrs Danvers said simply. "I'd know you anywhere." As Carol stared at her, stunned, she continued. "As for the super soldier powers, I've known for a long time. Mom liked to tell stories to me and Jack when we were growing up, same way she did to you, and I could read between the lines. Even if I couldn't have done, I once saw her change our car's tyre without a jack. After that, it wasn't too hard to figure out. The fact she doesn't age just confirmed it."

"You _knew?_ " Carol demanded. "And you never _said?_ "

"What good would it have done?" Mrs Danvers replied. "The serum gave mom powers, but it didn't do much in me and Jack. We were faster, stronger and tougher than most, but that was about it. I thought that the serum degraded by generation and that it wouldn't do much, if anything, to you." She sighed. "Then Captain America, my long lost grandfather, reappeared after seven decades frozen in an iceberg and whatever happened to you last Easter in the Rockies proved me wrong. But even then… I hoped I could keep you away from it all, hide you in plain sight. Now, I see that I never had a chance."

"Why?" Carol asked, frowning.

"Mom told us stories about what she did, about her battles with the Red Room – and yes, I know who they are. Mom was never exactly explicit, but I could read between the lines. And Jack and I, we saw them differently," her mother explained. "Jack saw a whole new world of adventure and excitement, the chance to be a hero. It was like a real life Narnia to him. Me, though, I looked past the monster slaying to what they actually did to deserve slaying in the first place. And like Jack, I saw a whole different world. But the one I saw was one of pain, misery and powers so far above humanity that we might as well be ants, that would crush you if you crossed them, or organisations like HYDRA and the Red Room, machines of pure evil that were never truly defeated and ground up everything in their path. After all, hadn't my grandparents, Captain America and Peggy Carter, been killed in the line of duty? Cap was at that point presumed dead, as was Peggy Carter, even though no one ever found out what happened to her. Mom knows, I'm sure of that much, but she always refused to talk about it. Not only that, but I saw how often mom came home limping or carrying an injury. Jack didn't always, or if he did, he didn't think about it for long but I did. And dad…"

She closed her eyes. "He was a decent, kind and very normal man, who I'm not even sure knew exactly what mom did for a living when they got married. He did later on – I walked in on him patching her up when I was eight. He apparently died of a very normal disease when I was sixteen, cancer. But to this day, I'm not entirely convinced that the cancer was natural. I have no proof, other than how fast it took hold, how it resisted all attempts at treatment, how it wasted him away into nothing in the blink of an eye… and I wonder."

Carol silently supplied a box of tissues, which her mother took with a nod, wiping at her damp cheeks.

"Anyway, I saw the supernatural world and wanted no part of it. I knew about SHIELD back when almost no one did, and I knew that I wanted nothing to do with it, even the missions not involving the supernatural." She sighed. "Mom, of course, always assumed that Jack and I would follow in her footsteps, in Peggy Carter's, and become an Agent of SHIELD. For a long time, it was just taken for granted that I would join SHIELD, which let women see combat, especially if their surname or mother's maiden name was Carter, and Jack would either join SHIELD or the military. Medicine wasn't really discussed, but it was one of the few acceptable alternatives. When it came out that I wasn't even going to do that, the rows were awful. Mom was always driven – once she set out on something, she wouldn't stop until the end of the world. She once quoted something her mother had told her: _Compromise where you can. Where you can't, don't. Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right. Even if the whole world is telling you to move, it is your duty to plant yourself like a tree, look them in the eye, and say, 'No, you move'._ She lived by that philosophy. Dad had used to be a tempering influence on her, but he was gone. And worse, this was something she'd never compromise over. You see…"

She trailed off, obviously looking for the words. "Mom always felt that we had a Duty, a duty to stand up and protect those who couldn't protect themselves, to fight evil wherever it could be found, to be the wall that protected ordinary people from the monsters in the darkness. It probably comes of being raised the way she was, growing up on stories of her father, and feeling that she had to live up to her mother's legend after she vanished. That would be fine if it wasn't for the fact that she practically insisted that it had to be through SHIELD or the military. Medicine was fighting to protect people through defeating disease, so that was okay, but it had to be fighting _something_. But fighting simply wasn't what I wanted to do. I didn't want to fight evil, I wanted to make good. I couldn't see what mom found wrong with that and after what happened to Jack during Desert Storm, I felt I was right. Not only that, but I felt that mom had lied to him about the world, had led him like a lamb to slaughter. That wasn't entirely fair on her or Jack, who was never stupid, even though he was even more hot-headed and stubborn back then than he is now, if you can believe it. But that's the way I felt."

She shook her head. "I was always a disappointment to her, though she never said it and never would." Her mouth twisted. "Though she's never made any secret of the fact that she hates your father. She tolerates him for my sake, and for the sake of you and your brothers, but nothing more. As for Jack, well, he'd probably have shot your father long ago if he thought he could make it look like an accident." She waved this away. "Mom loves me, I know, loves me to pieces. But she doesn't understand me and never has. She expected me to carry on the Carter legacy, the Rogers legacy, and use my gifts like she and her parents had, and to be an example to women everywhere. In other words, to do my duty and be a symbol. But I didn't want to be a symbol, or even an adventurer. As boring, selfish and cowardly as it might sound, I just wanted a life of my own. I just wanted to be an ordinary person. And she couldn't understand that, not deep down. She'd been raised by a living legend in the very midst of the super spy world with her parentage an impossibly important secret, raised from the start to be a hero, to be an Agent of SHIELD. She never knew anything else. Then, you came along."

She smiled sadly at Carol, reaching over to brush her hair out of her eyes. "Oh Carol," she said. "You were the daughter that mom always wanted. Right from the start, you were always the leader, always ready to fight anyone and stand up for what you thought was right. My scrappy little warrior maiden; you were everything that my mother had hoped I would be."

"So you resented me," Carol said bitterly. "Yeah, I can see that."

" _No."_

Carol had run across a great many things in her young life and had faced them down without blinking, but the vehemence of that one word nearly knocked her out of her chair.

"No," her mother repeatedly, voice soft but fierce. "I have never resented you. I have loved you from the moment you were born, so much that I thought my heart would burst. You were, are and have always been my brave, beautiful and brilliant little girl and I will _always_ love you. I would tear the world apart for you." She shook her head. "I didn't resent you, Carol. I was afraid for you. I was afraid that you would be drawn into SHIELD's, mom's world, a world of monsters and death, the way you have been. You idolised mom, and your cousin Sharon, herself a top notch SHIELD Agent, and why wouldn't you? They were brave, adventurous and inspirational women, and mom of course had all sorts of amazing stories to tell. They were everything you wanted to be. You and your father found that you had a similar mutual lack of understanding that mom and I do, so you decided that you hated him and latched onto Jack as a father figure instead."

She gave Carol a wry smile. "It probably didn't hurt that he let you do just about anything your father said you couldn't out of spite. I love my brother, but he can be very childish sometimes. And he had stories too, half of which I am convinced he made up." The smile faded. "I was afraid that you would be drawn into that world, so I tried to limit contact with mom and Jack – which wasn't entirely difficult, since mom was still working at SHIELD, mentoring a young up and comer called Nick Fury, when you were little and Jack was travelling all over with the Air Force – and sometimes I didn't step in when I should have done, when your father tried to make you into the proper young lady he wanted his daughter to be. I half hoped that he would succeed or, at least, that you would choose to follow my path, or any path but the one that's brought our family so much pain. I'm sorry about that, for all the good that does, I really and truly am. All I can say is that I was afraid, afraid of what you might walk into."

"'You were afraid of what I might walk into', but you're _sorry?_ " Carol said. "You think that that makes it all better?"

"Probably not," her mother said bluntly. "But I'd have locked you away in a nunnery if I thought it would protect you." When Carol opened her mouth, her mother raised a hand. "Did Jack ever tell you what happened to him in Iraq, during Desert Storm?"

Carol closed her mouth, frowned, then shook her head. "He never really wanted to talk about it," she said.

Her mother sighed. "I can't blame him," she said. "He was on a mission behind enemy lines. What he was doing I don't know, but like you were, he was captured. He was one of the few of his team to survive. After that, he was tortured, for weeks. Mom led the rescue op, her last in the field, and got him out… but it left a mark on him. Physically, he healed up fine, though it took months, years. But mentally, he was never quite the same."

Carol, through her horror, noticed that her mother was crying and half thrust out the box of tissues before, on an impulse, hugging her.

"I saw what mom went through, after she got Jack out of there, the look on her face… it was like part of her had died," her mother said eventually. "I can well believe it. And once you were showing signs of turning out like your cousin and uncle, like mom, I started having nightmares about you being the one in that hospital bed, all blood and bandages and… and broken. I'd rather _anything_ than that. I did everything I could to discourage you - everything I could stomach, anyway. It didn't work of course. That much was obvious, even before you met your friend, Harry." She shook her head ruefully. "I closed off every route I could to SHIELD's world, mom's world, and then a whole new way into it waltzed into your life: a brave, handsome and dashing young man who was right in the heart of that world, loved and respected you for all of who and what you were."

"Loved?" Carol asked, startled.

Her mother chuckled sadly. "Honey, he's devoted to you," she said. " And not like those other boys who've chased you in the past, either. I've seen how he looks at you, and how you look at him."

"I'm not in love with him," Carol snapped.

"I never said you were," her mother said calmly, and at her daughter's puzzled expression, elaborated. "I said you loved him. Not that you were in love with him. There are many kinds of love, after all. You love him, very much I think." She smiled sadly and, pulling out a tissue, gently wiped away some of her daughter's dried tears. "You'd hardly be getting so worked up over him if you didn't." Carol wrinkled her nose, but didn't say anything. "As a friend, maybe," her mother added. "But it's still love, even if you don't want to take him to bed."

Carol went scarlet, letting out a non-verbal squawk.

"Or maybe you do," her mother said, with a cheerful wickedness that made it very clear that she was the older sister of Jack O'Neill. "His father is quite a looker, after all, and he does seem to be growing into a rather handsome young man."

"Mom!" Carol squeaked, then glowered as her mother chuckled.

"I have to get my amusements somehow," Mrs Danvers said. "And your face…" She trailed off, and smiled.

Slowly, reluctantly, Carol's glower dissolve into a tentative smile, which faded. "How can I smile right now?" she asked. "Harry's still with those Red Room psychos."

"If there's one thing I've learned, it's that smiles matter more when things are bad than when things are good," her mother said. "As for him, from what I've been told, he went with them willingly this time. Which suggests to me that he has a plan – that boy does not strike me as a fool. A bit reckless, maybe, but not a fool. From what I hear, he's a born survivor. And you'd know better than I how powerful he is."

"If you'd ever heard one of his plans, you'd know how totally not reassuring that is," Carol grumbled.

"Maybe," Mrs Danvers said. "But I do know that the Avengers and just about every other mover and shaker in this world and several others are looking for him, and one of them is famously known as the Star-Spangled Man With A Plan. Considering how quickly they found the lot of you earlier, I think that they'll find your young man sooner rather than later."

"Yeah," Carol mumbled. "But what'll happen to him before they do?" She looked up at her mother. "I mean, what happened to uncle Jack –"

"Will almost certainly not happen to him," Mrs Danvers said firmly. "And I should not have told you that story. Regardless, they went to a great deal of trouble to get hold of him, and you. He's valuable to them, so they won't damage him any more than they have to."

"Yeah," Carol said. "But mom, they've got a psychic even stronger than he is, and the big bad can screw with his mind anyway. What if what they do to him instead will be worse?"

Her mother, who'd been trying to steer her away from this line of thought, took her by the shoulders. "Carol," she said. "Look at me." Reluctantly, her daughter did so. "Don't think like that. Trust me, it will destroy you, and it won't do him the slightest bit of good."

Carol bit her lip. "Then what do you suggest I do?" she asked. "I mean, you've been in this situation before."

"Find some way to distract yourself," her mother said. "Don't forget about the person who's missing, but don't let your fears and pain eat you up, because they will if you give them the chance. And be ready to support them when they come out the other side."

Carol nodded. "And what about after?" she asked eventually. "You going to tell me to stay away from Harry?"

"That would be cruel to both of you. And even if I did, would you listen?" her mother replied bluntly. "No, of course you wouldn't. The two of you are like peas in a pod. And even if I did manage to separate the two of you, I've come to a realisation, one that I'd hoped to avoid. Adventure, finding bad guys to fight, people to help and, frankly, trouble in general, is in your blood. Even if you don't go looking for trouble, it finds you, and it was always going to. You're a hero, Carol. It's who you are. All trying to stop you, to make you be something else, would do is make you hate me. And I couldn't stand that." She smiled sadly, and pulled Carol into a hug. "Besides. I have raised a brave and righteous young woman, whose first concern after going through hell and getting struck by lightning is for others. The least I can do is be proud of her."

Carol sniffed, tears returned. "Y'know," she said. "Technically that wasn't a lightning bolt."

"Well, I, for one, am inclined to overlook the minor details," her mother said. "And for now, I'm just glad that you're safe here with me."

And a large part of Carol had to admit that she felt much the same way.

OoOoO

Carol, however, was left with the feeling that she should have done _something._ However, before she went to speak to anyone about that, something else struck her. Specifically, about Lorna. Whose powers were very similar to those of Magneto a.k.a. Wanda's Incredibly Scary Yet Polite Dad. And if there was one thing she'd picked up over the last year of her exposure to Harry, was that coincidence was kind of non-existent when superpowers were involved.

So, when Wanda was on a break from her tweaking her tracking spell, something on which she was consulting with Loki and her boyfriend/apprentice, Harry Dresden, who apparently happened to be something of an expert on the matter – according to her grandma, SHIELD rated him as one of the top magical trackers on the planet – she went to have a chat.

"Hey," she said, not entirely sure how one should address one's best friend's godmother/stand-in mother who'd just had to deal with said best friend/godson being kidnapped, then, when they'd got them back, literally slipping through their fingers. It didn't help that she didn't exactly know Wanda all that well. Their prior contacts boiled down to one time over Easter when they were agreeing that Clint's arms were indeed amazing, a brief meeting during the Battle of London, and a whole bunch of times when Harry, post his latest traumatic experience or just because he felt like it, was cuddled up to her. "Uh…"

Wanda looked up and gave her a weary, slightly strained smile. "Hi, Carol," she said. "How are you holding up?" When Carol hesitated, her smile turned wry. "Sorry. That was a little too on the nose. I think I inherited my dad's sense of tact."

Carol thought back to her previous interaction with Magneto, which had mostly consisted of him remarking that she seemed a worthy heir to the previous Green Lantern, and that he knew how the ring worked because he'd come across it a lot, while fighting the previous Green Lantern. Since Carol had what she felt was a fairly good grasp on just how powerful the ring was, and thanks to her chat with/tutorial from Alan Scott's ghost, a good idea of just how good he'd been with it, this little remark – with the implication that he'd gone multiple rounds with Alan Scott several times before and come out honours even – to be even more spectacularly scary than his turning HYDRA's super helicarrier into indestructible tinfoil. "I can see that," she said, drawing a chuckle from Wanda.

"Quite," the older woman said dryly, though there was a shadow in her expression. Carol supposed that having one's beloved godchild kidnapped by the Red Room, then diving back in out of crazy-ass chivalry, would have that effect. "I suppose I got my parenting skills from him too. I mean, I ran from him, and now my godson seems to prefer to dive back into the Red Room to stay with me…"

"Whoa, hey, Harry thinks the world of you," Carol said, startled and indignant.

Wanda sighed. "I know," she said. "And I know why he dived back into the Red Room." She shook her head. "Don't mind me, I'm just a little, a lot, frustrated. Tired too, in truth. Trying to get that spell to track Harry to keep tracking him is like… oh, I don't know, some ludicrously complex and frustrating thing that keeps changing. And…" She closed her eyes and trailed off.

"Yeah," Carol said quietly. "I've been thinking about that too. Mom suggested that I try and think of something else. And I did. Um."

Wanda cracked open an eye and raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Well… you know the other kids who were in with me? The other prisoners?"

"Yes," Wanda said, in a leading tone that wondered where this was going.

"You remember the one with green hair? Lorna?"

Wanda frowned. "Very vaguely," she said.

"Well, she's got powers. Magnetic powers," Carol said awkwardly. "Kind of like your dad's, actually. And your dad, is, well, I'm guessing he's older than he looks, and he's kind of handsome in an older guy sort of way, and I think, just think, that maybe I can see a little bit of him in her. So to speak." She coughed. "So, um, do you think your dad was in Australia about sixteen years ago?"

Wanda's other eye opened wide and she stared at the ceiling. "No," she said flatly. "No, this _cannot_ be happening. This cannot be happening _again_."

"Uh… so it's possible?"

"Since I have a half brother who's about sixteen now, I'd say yes," Wanda said, voice muffled as she put her head in her hands. "Clearly father spent quite some time celebrating his newly regained youth."

"Regained youth? Also, ew."

Wanda sighed. "There was an incident, most of twenty years ago, where my father and some of his old frenemies, Professor Xavier among them, wound up being rejuvenated," she said. "A living island was involved. Don't ask." She sighed again and pinched the bridge of her nose. "Another half-sibling young enough to be my kid. By the hoary hosts of fucking hoggoth, I do not need this right now."

"Well, it's not guaranteed…" Carol said. "I mean, I'm just guessing. Same powers doesn't mean that they're related… does it?"

"Not necessarily," Wanda sighed, standing up. "My half-brother, Pietro, who I sincerely hope you never meet because he is a complete brat, has super speed."

"Like Jean-Paul?"

Wanda snorted. "He wishes. He's not half as fast," she said. "I'd be surprised if he could break the sound barrier yet." She grimaced. "That said, specific mutations do tend to run in families. Look at Harry – he's got psychic abilities, and so do at least three of his cousins."

Carol frowned. "Three? I mean, there's Jean, her possibly evil twin, and…"

"Tyler," Wanda said. "Another foul little brat, from what I hear. Not one of Jean's siblings, as far as I can gather, but a relative." She waved a hand. "He was a fellow student at the Xavier Institute, then either dropped out or was kicked out. Since Charles doesn't give up on people lightly, I'd guess the former." She shrugged at Carol's expression. "I hear things. Apparently he was a psychic too."

"What about that other cousin of Harry's?" Carol asked.

"Which one?"

"The fat one."

Wanda blinked. "Dudley? Dudley Dursley? I wasn't aware that he had any powers. What does he have to do with anything?"

"Well, he does," Carol said. "And he was huge, mean, and working as muscle for the Red Room and/or that Sinister creep."

Wanda stared at her, then threw back her head and actually cackled. It went on for some time. "Sorry," she said, at Carol's affronted and disturbed expression. "It's just that his parents, Lily's sister and her brother-in-law, were always so adamant about how they were completely and utterly _normal_. The irony is delicious." Her expression changed. "Except that it resulted in a monster, of course. You had a run in with him?"

"You could say that," Carol said. "He was the one who…" She trailed off.

"Carol?" Wanda asked, tone suddenly gentle and concerned as she looked over the younger girl with a worried and worryingly practised eye. "Did he do something to you?"

"What? No, unless you count trying to kill me," Carol said, then remembered his expression and shuddered. "Though I don't think he'd have objected to the idea."

Wanda laid a hand on her shoulder. "Well, he can't do anything to you now," she said gently. "He was the one who attacked your group, then?"

Carol nodded. "I zapped him with some lightning Noriko and Lorna channelled into my shield," she said, then, at an arched eyebrow, added, "I figured that since it's made of the same stuff as Mjolnir, it might do some of the same things." She shrugged. "It probably didn't do much."

Wanda smiled a crooked smile. "Miss Danvers, I like your style," she said. "And according to James, it stunned your attacker – he didn't exactly say who it was. After that, the boy made the mistake of challenging him, and found himself buried halfway into the mountain in short order."

"James? Oh, Harry's dad's old name," Carol said.

Wanda nodded. "I still sometimes refer to him as James," she said. "Old habits." She shook her head. "In any case, we have digressed. Where was I? Oh yes. The strength could simply be a product of Sinister's experiments, or some exotic application of telekinesis. Magic can be used to enhance strength, though it's a risky endeavour at the best of times. Of course, we don't know for sure, while we can find out very quickly if this poor girl is, in fact, my newest half-sibling. Which she probably is, since coincidence is not something that exists in my life."

"I think I'm beginning to understand that feeling," Carol remarked, then yelped as Wanda took her firmly by the hand, stepped forward, and then the very next moment, they were in the lobby of the Xavier Institute. "You can teleport?" she managed, in a strangled voice.

"Of course," Wanda said. "Every wanded wizard can – it's like getting a driving license for non-magical people."

"But you're wandless," Carol pointed out.

"There's a certain crossover," Wanda said. "In theory, just about anyone can learn to use both, though putting that into practise…" She smiled wryly. "Let's just say that I'm the best in my generation, I was trained by the Sorcerer Supreme, and it took me years to get the hang of it. And practically speaking, only a few people are inclined towards even some aspect of the wandless art, if they're wanded, or wanded art if they're wandless. You need to know how to teach it, and you need to know how to learn it."

"That sounds… ludicrously complicated," Carol said.

"Really? That was the simplified version," Wanda said. "The full explanation involves Quantum Physics, high end theoretical psychology, complex magical theory, debates over nature versus nurture, and possibly a little bit of genetics. That last part is still up for debate."

"… Good to know," Carol said.

Wanda smiled faintly. "There are ways of simplifying it," she said. "A couple of my friends actually managed to figure out to train yourself to be magically ambidextrous, for want of a better description. The best of both worlds, though they did end up splitting the difference on some of the downsides."

"Cool," Carol said, blinking. "Are they teaching, or something?"

Wanda's mouth tightened. "They were killed," she said curtly. "Fighting Voldemort."

"Oh. Oh, god, I'm sorry," Carol said.

Wanda gave her a brief smile. "It's okay," she said. "You weren't to know, and it was many years ago. Their daughter has apparently mastered the art, at a remarkably young age too. Apparently young Zatanna's quite the prodigy."

Carol eyed her. "Don't take this the wrong way, but are you trying to distract yourself?" she asked.

Wanda grimaced. "Busted," she said. "Yes, yes I am." She sighed. "For me, family is complicated. I spent my early childhood with my mother's family in Romania, which was nice, though mostly meant I was surrounded by lots of distant cousins. Then my powers came in when I was 12, and I ran away, afraid I'd hurt someone." Her expression shadowed. "And I did. My father found me then. It was as if he'd been ready, he'd been forewarned. Either way, he beat everyone to me and…" She snorted. "He was like a guardian angel. An avenging angel. And he was my father. Half the supernatural world was after me and he took them all on. I loved him then. In between being terrified at my powers and being driven half-way insane by them as they twisted reality and my perception of reality like playdough, of the bad guys coming to get me, of the good guys wanting to execute me because I was a danger to the world, of course."

"Of course," Carol said.

Wanda smiled wryly. "Yeah," she said. "I've had a weird life. Anyway, Strange took me, helped me get control of my powers and told the Council that if they wanted me, they'd have to fight him for it. They didn't take up the offer. And I didn't see my father again for many years. When I did, he was a cold, calculating, murderous terrorist, halfway mad at the best of times. The only reason he wasn't far worse, a global terror, was because he didn't want to expose mutantkind before he was ready. And because a lot of power groups in the supernatural world didn't want to have modern day witch-hunts starting up, as they inevitably would if the would was was confronted with someone like my father on the rampage..."

"It was covered up."

"More or less. It helped that his worst days were pre-internet, and his powers tend to have a certain effect on electronic equipment if it's not specifically hardened," Wanda said. "Ah, Henry."

"Hello, Wanda," Hank said, stopping. "I would say that it is nice to see you, and it is, but given the circumstances…"

Wanda grimaced. "Yes," she said. "Henry, have you checked Lorna Dane out yet?"

"Beyond a basic physical to ensure that she is in good health, no," Hank said. "While someone who's had a severe electric shock would normally be top of my priorities list, Thor and Loki between them managed to do a rather good job with her and Miss Ashida and I am afraid that Mister Abidemi, Mister LeBeau, Mister Starsmore, and General O'Neill have been occupying my time." He turned to Carol. "Ah, Miss Danvers. A pleasure. Tell me, do you think that Ali, Alison rather, would consent to an attempt to activate the dormant super soldier serum within your uncle?"

"Wait, what? He's going to be okay, right?" Carol asked eyes wide with panic.

"He will be fine, under any circumstance," Hank said. "With magical assistance, I foresee no long term brain damage. His bones have been set, and the internal bleeding has been stopped. Nerve damage, however…" He sighed. "I hesitate to make an immediate prognosis, but the reason I ask because it could be the difference between his making a full recovery and severe permanent damage to his mobility, and possibly his independence."

Carol's eyes widened even further, and she simply stared at Hank.

"Honestly, Henry," Wanda said, folding her arms and frowning. "Did you really have to dump that on her? She's got more than enough to worry about at the moment."

Hank looked embarrassed. "Sorry," he said.

"I don't know," Carol said suddenly, a little distant. "She might. You'd have to ask her." She paused. "Also, Ali? She barely lets _anyone_ call her that."

"I am one of the lucky few," Hank said. "Being that I have known your grandmother since she was hardly more than your age."

"Huh," Carol said, blinking. "Wow. She never said."

"If there is one thing I have learned about your grandmother over the many years of our acquaintance, Miss Danvers," Hank said. "It is that she has secrets to spare. Now, what brings you two here, and what does it have to do with Miss Dane?"

"Have you asked her about her powers yet?" Wanda asked.

"No, I haven't had the time. Why?"

"She's got my father's powers. Carol thinks that she might be my half-sister," Wanda said flatly.

"I'm not certain, but I think it's a pretty good bet," Carol put in.

"Oh my stars and garters," Hank said faintly.

"Quite," Wanda said.

"Well, she's upstairs," Hank said. "And Wanda?"

"Yes?"

"I know that you have many issues with your father," Hank said. "For which I cannot blame you. I've known Erik for many years, and I know how he can be, something which is bad enough when you're just his friend. I would also imagine that, not for the first time, finding out that you have a half sibling young enough to be your own child is not a pleasant surprise."

"What are you saying, Henry?" Wanda asked.

"Just… please be gentle with her," Hank said. "Her parentage, if it is what you suspect, isn't her fault, and as you well know, she has been through hell."

Wanda's expression softened. "Of course I will," she said. "Of course it isn't. And of course I know."

"That is all I can ask," Hank said. "She's upstairs, in the third room on the right."

Carol had been silent throughout this, and was silent as she followed Wanda upstairs. "So… you and your dad have issues," she said.

Wanda snorted. "You could say that," she said.

"I get that," Carol said. "I mean, my dad's not, you know…"

"A superpowered former terrorist with a possibly not so former messiah complex who was and could yet again be a threat to all life on Earth?" Wanda said.

"Right," Carol said. "But him and me, we don't get on either. We see the world in totally different ways, and want totally different things. He wants me to be something I'm not. I'm guessing that your dad did too."

"He did," Wanda sighed. "Though he came around eventually. Regaining his sanity helped in that regard."

"Yeah," Carol said. "Unfortunately, my dad's not crazy. Just, you know, a gigantic asshole."

Wanda laid a hand on the younger girl's shoulder in sympathy. "Family can be hard," she said. "Very hard. Because unfortunately, for the most part, you have no choice in who they are. And no matter how hard you try, you can't shake them off completely."

"Yeah," Carol said quietly.

"But," Wanda said. "That doesn't mean you have to let them define you. Your life is your own. Remember that."

"I will," Carol said.

"Good," Wanda said, then took a deep breath. "Right. Once more unto the breach." Then, she knocked on the door.

"Come in," a melodious female voice said.

Wanda opened the door, letting out the sound of sobbing and revealing two women. One Carol recognised as Lorna, the bright green hair unmistakeable. Her face was buried in the shoulder of the other, a tall, dark and elegant woman with white hair, was one she vaguely recognised as one of the Institute's senior faculty.

"Wanda," the woman – Ororo Munroe, that was her name, Carol remembered, though a lot of the students either called her Ms Monroe or by her codename, Storm. She sounded a little surprised. "And Miss Danvers."

"Ororo," Wanda said. "I wanted to speak to Miss Dane. But if this is a bad time…"

Ororo glanced down at Lorna. "Lorna tried to get into contact with her mother," she said. "As the others with her did with their parents. None of them claimed to remember them, or to know that they even had children. Lorna's mother even accused her of playing some sick joke. None of the local authorities, teachers, or friends that Lorna tried remembered her either."

"That telepath," Carol said, in dawning horror. "He fucked with their memories so no one would go looking, same way he fucked with Jean's mind, her mom and dad's too, to make them forget about Harry."

Ororo nodded, giving Carol's language a pass under the circumstances. "The Professor believes so," she said.

"Well, I don't think he'll be doing it again," Wanda said.

"Oh yeah?" Carol asked. "You know that how?"

Wanda gave her a look that, suddenly, made her look disturbingly like her father. Carol shivered.

"Okay, never mind."

Wanda's expression softened again. "Lorna," she said. "It is Lorna, isn't it?"

Lorna's sobbing, now diminishing into damp sniffles, looked up. Wanda gave her a kind smile. "Yeah," Lorna said, a little suspiciously, darting glances at Carol and Ororo. "Who're you?"

"My name is Wanda," Wanda said gently. "I know you've been through something horrible. In fact, I've actually got a pretty good idea of what you've gone through – I went through something very similar when I was a little younger than you are now, when my powers came through. My godson, Harry – you've met? Good. He's still with them and we're trying to find him again. So I know it's very hard, but I've got a couple of questions I'd like you to answer. Do you feel up to that?"

Lorna stared at her for a long moment, lime green eyes swimming with tears, but eventually she nodded.

Wanda smiled. "Great," she said. "I know that your mum can't remember you at the moment, and I swear, I will do everything I can to fix that, to make sure that everyone remembers you. But did she ever say anything about your father?"

Lorna frowned, then shook her head. "He," she began, then gulped. "She just said he was some bloke she knew ages ago. He wasn't an Aussie and he didn't stick around. He didn't even know that she was going to have me."

Ororo's gaze darted between Wanda and Carol, before her eyes widened.

"Okay," Wanda said, voice wobbling only slightly. "I know this might seem a little strange, but do you mind if I take a couple of your hairs?"

"Why?" Lorna asked, instantly suspicious.

Wanda hesitated, then closed her eyes. "I'm a mutant, like you," she said. "But I have other powers too. Magic. I think I have an idea about who your father might be. I could be completely wrong, but I can check."

"With a coupla hairs?" Lorna asked sceptically.

Wanda smiled. "Magic can do some pretty amazing stuff," she said, plucking a hair or two from her head. "May I?"

Lorna hesitated, then at Ororo and Carol's encouraging nods, let Wanda take a couple of hairs, which separated easily.

At Lorna's expression of surprise, Wanda smiled again. "I thought using a little magic would be less painful and more polite than yanking," she said dryly, drawing a damp chuckle from the younger woman. "Now, this will only take a few moments," she said, laying the hairs alongside one another, and murmuring something in a soft, liquid language. Almost instantly, the hairs glowed a pale blue, then brown and green hairs leapt over to each other, intertwining.

"Does that mean what I think it means?" Carol asked, after a moment, as Wanda stared, stunned at the hairs. "Wanda?"

The older woman didn't respond.

"Wanda," Ororo said.

Wanda shook her head, snapping out of it. "I…" she began, then took a deep, shuddering breath. "My guess was correct. I know who your father is, Lorna."

"What? How?" Lorna asked, confused.

"I suspected because you have his powers," Wanda said, voice carefully measured. "Now that I know to look, there's some resemblance in the face, too. I know because the way the spell responded. Your father, Lorna, is a man called Erik Lensherr. And he's my father too."

Lorna's eyes widened like saucers. "You're my _sister?"_ she whispered, incredulous.

"Half-sister," Wanda corrected, then softened it with a wobbly smile and damp eyes. "Yes. Yes, Lorna, I am your sister."

Lorna stared at her for a long moment, then began crying in earnest, emotionally overwhelmed. Wanda, with the instincts of a mother, sat down beside her and pulled her into a hug, rocking her gently back and forth, murmuring comforting nonsense in her little sister's ear.

Family can be hard. But that doesn't mean they aren't worth it.

OoOoO

Carol, meanwhile, secure in the knowledge that she had done a Good Deed, something which marginally alleviated her monumentally fucking awful last day or two. Unfortunately, it didn't alleviate the crushing sense of failure and self-loathing she felt at not being able to save Harry, instead merely pushing it to one side. Now, distraction completed, it was back in full force.

Intellectually, she knew perfectly well that she had had no way in hell of stopping Harry from doing what he'd done; he'd been in Wanda's fucking arms, and Wanda was the next best thing to Thor or Loki power wise, if not on par with them. Considering how powerful Harry was, there wasn't any realistic way for most anyone short of Thor, much less her, to physically stop him from doing something he really wanted to do. Of course, she was aware that… well. He didn't exactly do what she said, but he _did_ listen to her, more than he did to almost anyone else. Maybe, just maybe, he wouldn't have gone after Not Quite Evil Jean – real name Rachel, given name Maddie, apparently – if she'd asked him not to, if she'd begged, which was something she never did. But she would have done, she'd have done it a dozen times over to stop him from throwing himself back into the Red Room's clutches again, to be subjected to who knew what tortures.

She was acutely aware of how lucky she'd been to escape almost entirely unscathed from the Red Room, and even more aware that she'd only done so thanks to Harry's insane but effective plan to get the Avengers' attention. After all: look what they, or their very creepy (and apparently very dead, courtesy of Wanda) ally, had done to Maddie. Remembering the almost blank expression on her face, the way she'd been so cold, so calculating, not cruel, as such, just robotic and remorselessly logical, in contrast to Jean, who was all life and warmth and kindness, who'd immediately swept Harry under her big sisterly wing while her doppelganger, her twin sister, had done her level best to smoosh him into the dirt… it made her skin crawl. Just what the hell had they done to her? And what the hell would they do to Harry?

All of this brought her back to the nagging sense that it was her fault, that she could and should have stopped him.

Of course, others disagreed.

"Don't be stupid, darling," her grandmother said briskly. "You couldn't have stopped him, and even if you did manage to, he wouldn't have thanked you for it."

"What, so you think he _wanted_ to be captured and tortured again?" Carol demanded.

"No," Alison said calmly. "What I think is that he considered it an acceptable price to pay to try and save his long lost cousin."

"That's… totally like something Harry would think," Carol said, deflating. "But…"

"You still think you should have saved him," a tired, raspy voice said from the bed next to them. They were in the Xavier Institute's worryingly extensive infirmary. Like everything else in the mansion, one even larger than Avengers' Mansion, it was clear that Professor Xavier had spared no expense. In the bed that Carol and Alison were standing next to was the badly injured, but stable, Jack O'Neill, who had taken about as well to enforced bed rest as crocodiles do to salsa. "Yeah, we've all been there, kid. Fact is, though, you can't save everyone. Not if they don't want to be saved."

"He –"

"The way you tell it, he dived back into the Red Room, knowing that they were about to vanish, to try and save someone else," O'Neill said. "He didn't want to be stopped. Or saved."

"But… you don't leave people behind," Carol said. "I shouldn't have left him behind."

"You were unconscious, darling, it wasn't like you had much of a say in it," Alison said gently.

Carol folded her arms, pretended her eyes weren't watering, and glared at nothing in particular.

"Not that it makes you feel any better," O'Neill remarked. "It's an absolute bastard to deal with, kid."

"Especially when the person you feel that you failed is someone you love," Alison said.

"I'm not," Carol instinctively began to snap, then stopped. Then, after a long moment, she said, in a small voice, "So what if I do love him, as a friend? Is that why it sucks so much?"

"Oh darling," Alison said, voice soft, compassionate and understanding. "Come here."

Carol reluctantly shuffled over and was promptly wrapped in a grandmotherly hug. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, there was a sniff, followed by a shake of the shoulders, then a strangled sob.

"Let it out, darling," Alison said. "Just let it out."

And Carol did. It was not elegant, graceful, or dignified. Pain rarely is. Instead, it was raw, messy, and prolonged, enough that the right shoulder of Alison's shirt was a damp mess and the seemingly inexhaustible supply of tissues that all mothers and grandmothers seem to have hidden on their person, possibly in a portal to subspace, was exhausted.

"I don't understand," Carol eventually said thickly.

"Why he did what he did?" Alison asked.

Carol rolled her eyes. "No," she said. "He's a fucking idiot who just has to save people. That's why he did it." She shook her head. "I don't understand why I keep crying, though."

"You spent most of a day in the hell otherwise known as the Red Room and your boyfriend's there right now," O'Neill said. "I'd say that's pretty good reason to cry."

"He's not my boyfriend," Carol said, glowering at her uncle.

"Tactless though he may be, your uncle Jack does have a point," Alison said gently. "You have every reason to cry. And contrary to what you may have come to believe, tears are not in any way, shape or form a sign of weakness. The only thing that they're a sign of is pain. And there's no shame in that." She smiled. "Besides. A good cry can be quite cathartic."

Carol wrinkled her nose, but didn't disagree.

"Oh yeah, especially with ice cream and a romantic comedy," O'Neill put in. "I just can't get enough of that."

Alison eyed him. "Hank is giving you far too much morphine," she said. "Or perhaps not enough, if you're capable of being that sarcastic." She smirked. "Besides, I remember a certain someone post-break up being utterly absorbed by _the Princess Bride_."

"I was watching it for the fight scenes and the jokes," O'Neill said mulishly.

His mother fondly patted his arm. "Of course you were, darling," she said, as Carol giggled.

As a wise man once said, happiness can be found in the darkest of times, so long as one remembers to turn on the light.

OoOoO

Not all, however, were so capable of finding the metaphorical light switch.

Thor felt helpless. For someone of his power, a greater god with the strength to wrestle the Hulk, the power to bathe entire worlds in lightning, and a peerless weapon that could comfortably shatter such worlds, it was not a feeling he was accustomed to, and not a welcome one either. And yet, this last year or so, it was a feeling that he found himself facing more and more. It was, he found, one of the unforeseen downsides of fatherhood, one often caused, in his case, by his offspring's bravery, nobility of spirit, and complete lack of common sense.

Jane sat with him, mostly in silence, knowing very well that platitudes would be of no help and having already contributed as best she could by discussing with Loki how to tweak her New Bifrost technology for use in finding and rescuing Harry, her _de facto_ stepson, of whom she was very fond. She had then had to leave it to him, because actually doing so required in-depth knowledge of the Nevernever, intimate familiarity with the enchantments on Mjolnir, and high end thaumaturgical skill, none of which she possessed. Since she found this frustrating to put it mildly, she understood Thor's standpoint very well. Both of them had done all that they could, and for now, they were relegated to the sidelines.

What made it harder for Thor, however, was the certain knowledge that, in Harry's place, he would have done the exact same thing. In fact, he had done the exact same thing, trying repeatedly to reach out to Loki when his brother was in the depths of his madness. The situations were not so different, though in the case of Rachel Grey – or as those who knew her called her, Madelyn 'Maddie' Pryor – she was not so much mad as completely and utterly brainwashed from infancy, to the point where even Thor's optimism on the subject of redemption was challenged. After all, unlike Loki, this was not simply returning to sanity, for want of a better way of putting it, retreading a road long taken, but finding a road never previously taken, with only an earnest but uncertain guide leading the way. But such obstacles were not likely to overly faze Harry, who tended to take any obstruction as a personal challenge. Moreover, Thor had to admit that his son was not merely persuasive, if in a more off-the-cuff fashion than Loki's famous silver tongue, but positively magnetic, and tended to be an excellent judge of people. If he thought that there was something there worth saving, then there most likely was. The testimony of the young man known as Gambit only supported that.

Speaking of whom, he was being interrogated by Agent Coulson as part of efforts to discern where the Red Room would surface next, and what they had planned. Thor himself had nothing he could do. Nothing, that was, but sit and brood and what horrors the Red Room had planned for Harry. For unlike Carol, he knew exactly what horrors those were.

OoOoO

"I owed the man," Gambit said eventually. "If y' can call 'im a man. My powers were actin' up. Hell, they damn near killed me. Essex, 'e saved my life. In exchange, I worked for him."

"Doing what?" Coulson asked.

Gambit shrugged. "I'm a t'ief," he said. "I stole t'ings for 'im, scouted out locations, spied on people for 'im…" His expression grew haunted. "An' sometimes, I found people for 'im."

"Recruits?" Coulson asked. "Or test subjects?"

Gambit smiled bitterly. "A little bit o' both," he said. "I tried t' let a few slip, t' turn a blind eye… but 'e was a telepath, y' know? 'e picked up on it."

"And he punished you," Coulson said.

Gambit nodded tightly. "After dat, ah did as ah was tole," he said, accent thickening. "Den, a few months ago, 'e made me guide a bunch o' his big boys, Sabretooth an' th' like, to a group of mutants who were called de Morlocks."

"Someone's read their Wells," Coulson remarked mildly. "What happened?"

"De useful ones, dey were captured," Gambit said. "De ones dat weren't useful…" He trailed off.

Coulson nodded, not pressing the young man. It didn't take a great deal of imagination to work out what kind of orders someone like Essex would give to someone like Sabretooth in that scenario.

"Ah managed t' slip a few out o' there in de chaos," Gambit continued. "Collapsed th' tunnel after dem, t' let dem get away. But…" He trailed off again, expression haunted.

"You don't think it was enough," Coulson said. "You wonder if you could have saved more if you'd acted earlier. And you don't need to go to sleep to have nightmares any more."

Gambit smiled a crooked, mirthless smile. "Y' sure y' ain't a telepath, Agent Coulson?" he asked.

"No," Coulson said. "I've just been in a similar sort of place." He paused for a moment. "I take it that was what made you plan to help Maddie, later Carol, Harry and the other prisoners brought in with them, escape."

Gambit nodded. "Ah couldn' take it no more," he said. "Though ah'll admit dat when ah first got close t' Maddie, it weren't t' help her, but t' get information on Essex, t' get away, or once I found Agent Romanova, t' bring him down. It weren't too hard. 'e didn' care much about what we got up to off-duty, y' know?"

"You were going to play the honeytrap on a girl at least two, if not three, years younger than you, with next to no life experience and absolutely no conception of the sort of game you were playing," Coulson said, tone entirely neutral.

Gambit sighed. "Yeah. Ah was gonna use her, and ah ain't proud o' dat. But at firs', ah t'ought she was just one o' his attack dogs, like Sabretooth. Hell, 'e called her 'is Hound. Den, once ah got t' know her…" He shook his head. "She was no differen' t' me. She was a victim, even more so dan me. She'd never had a life o' her own. She'd never been free." He looked Coulson in the eye. "And if dere is one t'ing in th' whole damn world dat ah believe, Agent Coulson, it's dat people should be free."

"So instead you did what?" Coulson asked.

"Gave her a taste of freedom," Gambit said. "Worked on her. Used every trick an' bit o' charm an' persuasion that I had t' show her that dere was another way, another choice, another life, one where she didn' jus' 'ave t' be Sinister's slave, t' convince her that no matter if 'e made her or not, she was a person and she had de _right_ t' be free." He grimaced. "O' course, this was before ah knew that she 'ad been stolen as a baby, that she weren't some experiment o' Sinister's." He shook his head. "Ah mean, I knew that de man was vile, but t' steal a baby girl from 'er family, then t' tell her all her life dat she ain't nothin' but an experiment, made t' do his bidding, dat she weren't even human, t' make her _accept_ it…"

"Dehumanisation," Coulson said quietly. "It's an effective technique for controlling someone."

A smile flickered across Gambit's face. "But it weren't perfect," he said. "Maddie, she 'ad a mind of her own. She always did. It was jus' a matter of encouragin' her to use it. T' make her own choices." The smile faded. "But I didn' have long enough to convince her all the way. Ah was getting' close, I know that much, but… it weren't enough." He looked up at Coulson. "Tell me plain, Agent Coulson. Y' think that th' kid's got a chance of gettin' through to her?"

Coulson regarded him for a long moment. "I can't claim to know Harry Thorson very well at all," he said. "However, everything I've heard, everything I've read, suggests that he has a gift for getting under people's skin. Going by the accounts given of Miss Pryor's choice and Harry chasing after her, she was clearly conflicted about doing so. I would have to say that on short notice, without time to really work on her, and considering the ground work you've put in place, I think he's got as good a chance as anyone."

Gambit nodded, then his strange eyes narrowed. "An' tell me this, Agent Coulson. If 'e don' manage t' get through t' her, or if y' superiors just ain't sure, what happens then?"

"I don't know," Coulson said eventually.

Gambit grunted. "Honest answer, ah suppose," he said, sitting up and grimacing at his shoulder injury. "But remember this, Agent Coulson – dere's a good girl in Maddie. She jus' needs t' be given a chance t' make de right choice. An' I figure that any organisation that employs a man who once tried to take over de world should understand de virtue of giving out second chances, especially to people who ain't never got a first one to begin with."

"I'll bear that in mind, Mister LeBeau."

OoOoO

Shortly afterwards, with the various methods of tracking still in progress, the Avengers were briefed on what they might face when they encountered the Red Room again.

"The Red Room was born out of a realisation," Ivan said. "A realisation that while the West had super soldiers, while the Nazis, while HYDRA, had unbelievable technology, all Russia had was its winter. While that stopped the likes of Napoleon and Hitler, at some point, perhaps very soon, even the great General Winter would no longer be enough to stop foreign invasions."

"General Winter?" O'Neill asked, in a wheelchair and currently undecided on whether he was going to have his super soldier genes activated.

"The Russian winter," Loki said.

"Ah."

Petrovitch nodded and steepled his fingers. "So Russia turned to the sciences, to create better defences, better weapons. And thus the Red Room was born. Its job; to create operatives suitable for the changing nature of warfare, to protect the Motherland and her interests by any means necessary."

"Any?" Steve asked tensely.

Ivan gave him a long look, and all of a sudden, you could see that for all he was outwardly no older than his late thirties, he was far older than that. "Any, Captain," he said. "Any you can imagine and many I truly hope that you can not." He turned away from Steve. "I will keep this concise. Using biological treatments and conditioning based on the work of Doctor Pavlov, work that Doctor Pchelintsov and Professor Rodchenko took further after superhumans began to appear, superhumans beyond the usual lot of magical practitioners, vampires, demons and half-human progeny of both. First it was the Red Skull, then it was Captain America, Blade, Namor and Jacqueline Falsworth, the second Spitfire. The magical side of things came to unusual prominence, too – the Dark Lord Grindelwald rose to power with the aid of demons, brought the Dark Lord Kemmler into his service and created a vast dark empire across Europe, North Africa and Western Asia, while Dumbledore and Strange respectively emerged and re-emerged to challenge him. And in the years after the war, more came forth: Xavier. Mar-Vell." He nodded at Alison. "Alison Carter. And a young man of immense power by the name of Jor-El."

"Jor-El?" Thor asked sharply. "Did he look like this?" He shifted to his James Potter form.

Ivan studied his face carefully, then nodded. "Very much like," he said. "I suspect that there is a story behind that, but it can wait. My point, however, is that more and more superhumans were piling up in the West, as was more and more unusual technology, usually emerging from the laboratories of Howard Stark. Anton Vanko had access to some of that technology when he defected, but he was unable to replicate much of it when he returned to the Motherland. HYDRA remained, a lurking threat – weakened, but still a threat. This made affairs more urgent, forced the Red Room to adapt faster. The programming alone went from merely programming in commands and responses to implanting memories."

Bruce's eyebrows shot up and he opened his mouth to ask a question, before frowning and restraining himself. Tony, however, wasn't quite so restrained.

"How?" he asked bluntly. "How the hell is that possible?" He waved his hands. "I mean, memories are basically information, and brains are basically biological computers, so theoretically, yes, it could be done. But how was it possible to actually do it in Soviet freaking Russia in the…"

"The implantation aspect of the program began in the 1970's," Ivan said. "And I do not know. I have my suspicions – not all the technology the Red Room possessed was terrestrial, and such things are capable with magic, if not necessarily replicable. What matters, though, is that it can be done. More so, the Red Room have mastered the art."

"You think that they might apply it to my son?" Thor asked, seething rage in every syllable. Lightning cracked and thunder rolled outside.

"Considering that he is a very powerful telepath in his own right and could possibly unravel, if not simply obliterate, any telepathic binding placed on him, I think that they might well judge it to be the easiest method of controlling him," Ivan said bluntly. "Though I don't think they will try it yet. The Red Room goes through bodies like water, yes, but only with ordinary humans, of which there is no shortage. Your son is unique, and his brain is likely to be as well. I doubt that they will try rewriting it by force while other options remain. However…"

"However?" Thor asked dangerously.

"The man in charge of the Red Room at the moment is General Aleksandr Lukin," Natasha said. "Originally a successful enough infantry commander in the army before being transferred to the Red Room in the early 80s, he was an up-and-comer during the fall of the Soviet Union; old enough to have had real authority and to remember 'the glory days'." These last words had sarcasm venomous enough to melt steel dripping off them. "He's clever enough, but also ambitious, enough to take steps a more sensible man wouldn't. He kidnapped Harry, after all, despite HYDRA's collapse this summer showing exactly what happens to groups who take our people, and despite knowing that the Red Room as it is at the moment doesn't have the technology or raw power that HYDRA did. What it does have, however, is more manpower, more funding, bolt-holes all over this world and apparently the Nevernever, and the support of at least one national government. However, I'm pretty sure that that support will evaporate the moment that Volodya finds out what Lukin's done. He's not a fool, and while he's no friend to SHIELD or the Avengers, he doesn't want to be our enemy, etiher. Not openly, he knows he can't afford it."

"Hasn't Lukin made the same calculation?" Clint asked.

"He's gambling that he can get Harry under his control, turn him into the Red Son, before anyone has the chance to stop him," Natasha said. "He's also gambling that a converted Harry will be unstoppable – or at least, powerful enough to overpower or kill anyone willing to go all out against him, and with sufficient emotional ties to those who could overpower him in turn that they won't go all out against him."

The Avengers considered the list of people that they knew for certain were more powerful than Harry – or rather, powerful enough that they could feasibly overpower a Harry devoid of all conscience and likely out to kill in a set-piece battle without killing him – and that they trusted. It wasn't very long.

"There is a wild card in play," Loki remarked. "Harry's Phoenix fragment. I severely doubt that this General Lukin knows about it."

"He won't," Natasha said. "Though we don't know whether it'll do anything. It only activates when Harry's in mortal danger or when he consciously taps into it, something he's only done once."

"It isn't something we can rely on," Steve said. "We have to accept the possibility, the probability, that the Red Room will manage to force Harry to obey them." He turned to Ivan. "Who or what else will they be able to call on?"

Ivan shrugged. "Enhancements like those given to Natasha, cybernetics, sorcery, the implantation program, all have been used to create more efficient and deadly spies and assassins. Even genetic manipulation was added to the list, though it was in a relatively primitive state when the Soviet Union was dissolved and the Red Room with it. Now, however, the Red Room renewed will have all the advantages of the leaps in technology since then, as well as scraps scrounged from the Chitauri invasion and HYDRA's fall at the Battle of London, and whatever the creature known as Sinister gave them before his apparent demise," he said. "I suspect a few artificially enhanced mutants, perhaps some super soldier attempts, more advanced versions of their powered armour suits."

Steve nodded. "Can you get a more precise idea?" he asked.

"I will look into it," Ivan said.

Steve nodded again. "Thanks," he said.

"So, now what?" Thor asked bitterly, as the meeting broke up. "We simply sit and wait?"

"No," Steve said. "You think you can keep your temper?"

Thor gave him a dangerous look. Steve met it without blinking. Thor eventually nodded curtly.

"Good," Steve said. "Because we're paying a visit to the Kremlin."

OoOoO

Elsewhere, the Red Room were unaware and likely uncaring of the preparations made to a) retrieve their new prize, b) wind up to literally and figuratively smite them into the Earth's core.

Indeed, the view of the Red Room at large was fairly buoyant. They had done the impossible and escaped right from under the noses of the Mighty Avengers, something even HYDRA under the ever-slippery Lucius Malfoy had not been able to manage (though Malfoy himself had evaded all pursuers). True, they had lost several prisoners for whom they'd had high hopes, and the Avengers had mowed through their personnel like a scythe through dry grass, while the various monsters had also taken their toll. They had also lost a very large chunk of their base, and one of their senior operatives was missing a thumb, a lot of blood, and a good chunk of her remaining sanity.

However, they had retained the bulk of their important research, their key staff had survived (if, in the case of Doctor Essex, to whom the word 'staff' did not really apply, in somewhat puzzling circumstances), the Beast had been found alive and mostly intact, if severely injured after picking a fight with Thor, and Doctor Essex's greatest weapon's programming had triumphed over the attempts of the Avengers and others to influence her.

True, there were whispers among those on the base that it had glitched, but as the weeks went by – and most of a fortnight had already passed in this new location for their base, while less than a day had passed in the real world, it being far deeper in the Nevernever than the original had been – those whispers faded. After all, after that glitch had been repaired, she had apparently proved very useful, not just to her master, but to the Red Room.

Not only that, but Thor had hurled his hammer, Mjolnir, into the base in an apparently misguided attempt to destroy it or Essex's weapon, meaning that they could now study one of the greatest weapons in known history, while bringing in experts and equipment from other Red Room bases and departments, repairing the base and adding other assets to its arsenal. But the best part was that their prize prisoner had been delivered back into their hands by providence and his own misguided nobility.

And now, what with the difference in the rates of the passage of time, they had the time to regroup at leisure.

"Astonishing," Lukin murmured, as he watched the footage of Harry's fights, first with the Beast, then with the Red Room personnel, again. "Look at how he fights: his speed, his grace, his strength... even without enhancement, he has them in abundance and he uses them well. And when they are insufficient, he uses his powers with intelligence and skill." He snorted. "Of course, he has been well trained. By our wayward son, no less."

"Not just him," Belova said coldly. Her hand had been more professionally bound up and, though she was still pale as milk thanks to blood loss and chronic pain – enhanced by her refusal of painkillers – she stood up straight, eyes sharp. "He moves like a Widow." The milk promptly curdled. "Like the traitor."

"Yes," Lukin said. "He bears the mark of another of our wayward children, and a number of others besides. There." He pointed at one particular move, a variation on an Aikido technique. "The Banshee's influence. And then there is an certain ingenuity all of his own… useful as it could be, it is also indicative of a dangerous independence. That will have to be watched for, in case it recurs."

"You think that a mind that powerful will not throw off alterations?" Belova asked.

"Doctor Essex had over ten years to get his hooks into the boy and until now, he has proved capable of controlling the girl. Strong as the boy is, she is by far the stronger of the two, and she was most helpful when the time came," Lukin said. "I believe that they will hold."

"You think that Essex will remain biddable, simply doing as we ask him?" Karpov asked, breaking in. "Because I do not. If he can alter the boy's mind to make him compliant, he can make him compliant to _his_ wishes. With those two at his command, never mind his other freaks, he could do anything. If there are problems, Rodchenko will suffice."

"We cannot make him," Lukin conceded. "But we will need him to. Rodchenko is brilliant, but he does not know the boy's unique physiology as Essex does, as was demonstrated. In any case, Essex is a scientist. He is not interested in power, not beyond what he requires to acquire subjects for experimentation. He wants to study the boy, and now he has the chance."

He turned to live feeds of the other, completed super soldiers: a man with the build of a super soldier throwing a shield down an ever changing target range, a pale and cadaverous looking man with pale, metallic tentacles lashing around him like a cat's tail, a woman wielding energy so dark it seemed to absorb light around it, another woman whose arms morphed into weapons as she took down targets with robotic efficiency, and a man in a laboratory, customising a bulky, powerful looking suit of armour.

"The Winter Guard. Russia's shield against the West, the Chinese, HYDRA, Magneto, SHIELD and the Avengers. Shostakov, Rossovich, Petrovna, Shapandar, Bukharin. The Guardian, the Demon, the Shadow, the Sentinel, the Dynamo." His gaze turned to Belova. "And Belova, the Widow, their leader. For the time being." Belova bristled, but said nothing, as his gaze shifted one more time, to a live feed of Harry, who was sparring with Red Room instructors.

To a passing observer, it would seem little different to the sparring sessions he'd had in Avengers Mansion. But on closer study, differences revealed themselves.

This was not a lighthearted bout between friends, a way of working up a sweat and staying sharp, but an intensive test of skills, each blow snapping out with bone breaking force, with sharp commands being barked from the side lines. Both sides were attacking with intent to disable and incapacitate, with little care for the welfare of their opponent. And Harry, normally a fighter with a preference for ingenuity and doing the unexpected, mixing in multiple styles in his hand to hand combat, was moving through forms with clockwork precision and metronomic regularity.

And finally, the most important difference of all was in Harry's face and eyes. Both were remarkably expressive, usually alight with some emotion or another, or if they were closed off, at least visibly so. Here and now, however, they were completely and utterly empty, blank like a slate wiped clean of all the flotsam and jetsam, the details, quirks, and intricacies that made Harry who he was.

This was not Harry any more.

"Soon to be joined by their final, greatest member… the true _Krasnyy Syn_ ; the ever loyal Red Son."

 **Yeah. The** _ **Krasnyy Syn**_ **, the Red Room project that makes Ivan go pale and Pierce all but soil himself? It's Harry. I've been hinting at it ever since this arc got started, but it's quite a shock to have it confirmed, isn't it?**

 **But his repogramming, you ask. What about that? Surely he wouldn't have been so easily rewritten and enslaved by the Red Room? Surely it would be worth some attention? And what happened to Maddie? What role did she play in it? Well, it will be elaborated upon, in a flashback in the next chapter. Why there? Because it fits there, and because the exact details of what happens are going to be Very Important to that chapter, which will wrap up this arc.**


	12. Chapter 12: Forever Red - Part VI

**Okay, so I know I said that this one would be the last one of this arc, but I had to split it in two, because it was coming up on 25,000 words before it was even finished.**

 **Never fear, it is very nearly finished, and the second half will be coming soon.**

 **I also opted to change the formatting a little bit, mixing things up, breaking up the vast blocks of text, and making the shifting POV more of an explicit part of the narrative than mere stylistic choice, if you follow me. It's more of an after-action report. Plus, it gives opportunity for fallout feels.**

 **Anyway, by all means… enjoy.**

 _Now_

Maddie took a deep breath as the man opposite her turned on the camera and microphone again. They had stopped and started several times.

"Now, Miss Grey. Start at the beginning. How did it happen? Where did it start?"

"It started," Maddie said. "With the hammer."

OoOoO

 _Then_

Maddie wandered fairly aimlessly through the damaged Red Room complex. Going by the state of the repair works, she estimated that what the medical staff had told her was correct: she had been unconscious for two days. The surviving Agents, knowing who she was and who she served, gave her a wide berth, not that it was really needed – she didn't choose to associate with them, and they generally didn't have to associate with her, something they were profoundly grateful for. Additionally, her clearance could be summed up as Access (Almost) All Areas.

She was currently at liberty – Doctor Essex rarely cared what she did when her presence or skills were not required, so long as she was at his disposal at a moment's notice. When she was younger, he'd assigned her lessons, to ensure that she was suitably literate, numerate, geographically informed, and scientifically educated, to fulfil her function. More recently she'd mostly spent her time practising with her psychic abilities, sometimes using them to conjure images from the books she'd read as part of improving her literacy. Doctor Essex hadn't provided her with many, but one he had provided her with had been a collection of Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales. These were chosen for the lessons they taught, or were deemed to teach.

 _The Little Mermaid_ , for instance, was considered by Essex to warn of the price of lacking caution when bargaining with supernatural entities and, most of all, the folly and risks of stepping out of one's correct place and trying to be something one was not.

 _The Little Matchgirl_ warned of the cost of falling for illusions of happiness and abandoning one's purpose.

And _The Emperor's New Clothes_ proved the efficacy of the right degree of psychic persuasion on a large group of people and the ripple effect that it could have, as well as the necessity of ensuring that said persuasion was all-encompassing.

Naturally, these weren't exactly the original morals intended by Mister Andersen, though Maddie never knew to question Essex's interpretation of them. Not, that is, until she met Remy, and he had started sowing the seeds of doubt in her – or, perhaps, nursing seeds that had already been there.

In truth, she wasn't sure, the same way that she wasn't sure what had happened in between her defeat of Subject Thorson (and presumably she had defeated him, otherwise he wouldn't be on site, being studied by Doctor Essex – though going by the fact that she had been unconscious for two days, it had been a very hard fight), and in the same way why she didn't understand why she had doubts to begin with. Was it some flaw on her part, some failing that meant that part of her refused to accept her proper place? Or was it something else?

Whatever it was, she found herself thinking over those stories again. The mermaid chose to gain legs, yes, and yes, she didn't fit in with the human world, suffering horribly for her attempts to be something other than what she was made to be. However, she also chose to sacrifice her chance at returning to her own life for the sake of another, one who she loved, even if he didn't love her in return.

The little matchgirl died seeing illusions of happiness, yes, when she might have lived had she not fixated on those visions. But she died happy.

" _But are you happy?"_

Maddie jumped, eyes and psychic senses questing for the voice that had suddenly echoed in her mind. It took her several moments to realise that it came from inside her own mind, a fragment of something larger – was it a dream, or a memory?

And as she wondered, her mind returned to the third story, that of _the Emperor's New Clothes_ , where an illusion of what people thought was true, or at least, pretended to think for fear of being deemed unfit for their positions, for what they were, persisted. Persisted, that was, until it was shattered by an out of context moment of clarity, from the mouth of a child.

Why was she thinking of these stories? Why was her mind reinterpreting them, twisting them from what she had always been taught? Was this some symptom of her own flaw, of a part of her having to be reminded of her function and place?

As she wondered, her feet carried her into the central courtyard of the Red Room base, where Agents and minor functionaries were clearing away some of the vast amounts of rubble left behind. For a moment, she was puzzled by what that rubble had been caused by, then she remembered: an attack on the base by enemies of the Red Room, seeking to poach the Red Room's assets. None of her business, really.

It was at this point that she realised that she was being drawn to one of the enemy's discarded weapons, a large hammer at the heart of a large crater. There was something about it, she thought, as she squatted down to inspect it, ignoring the nervous Red Room scientists hovering around her and it, unsure whether it was worth the risk of a melted brain to try and stop her, or whether they were even meant to stop her at all.

She was Essex's Hound, after all, and she went nowhere that he did not wish her to go. Besides, the optimists among them thought that she might provide some unique insight – Mjolnir's unique connection to Thor, after all, was believed to be mystical, perhaps even psychic, considering his ability to summon it back to him. Perhaps she might have some insight into how this worked.

So they hung back as Maddie examined the hammer. Then, slowly, she reached out and touched it.

To her intense astonishment, she felt a mind. Well. Not quite a mind, but certainly something more sophisticated than a mere mystical algorithm designed to respond to certain psychological qualities. It was more primitive than a true thinking mind, but there was a sense of consciousness there.

 _What are you?_ she whispered in her mind.

She didn't expect an answer, but she got one, as the consciousness struck out. Instantly, Maddie prepared to defend herself, but as soon as she did, it had already retreated, having apparently examined her mind and come to the conclusion it needed to.

 _Not Worthy._

Peculiarly, Maddie felt somewhat stung by this, and reached out, irritated, demanding, _What is Worthy?_

Remarkably, her question got an answer, in a barrage of images:

An old man; or something more than a man, for even in image, he positively radiated Power, with a thick white beard and a single eye. He was powerfully built, clad in rich, strong looking armour, and bore an air of authority as he gazed into a blazing portal of rainbow light. He held up the hammer and whispered, "Whosoever holds this hammer, if they be worthy, shall possess the power of Thor." Some of that power settled on the hammer, forming the basis for what Maddie recognised as the consciousness she was interacting with, before it was hurled into the portal.

A blond man, also bearded, though it was a shorter beard, surrounded by devastation, standing between a vast metal golem that hummed with power and a group of the weak and wounded. That man being swatted like an insect, dying in a woman's arms with a satisfied smile as the golem strode away. The hammer soared to his hand from miles away, transforming him from dead man into a being of almighty power in a flash of lightning, a god, one who swiftly disposed of the imposing golem.

And a girl, several years younger than Maddie herself, with dark hair, smokey blue eyes and a desperate, determined expression, reaching for the handle of the hammer as her friends were bombarded by unbelievably intense energy blasts. The hammer responded to her, again in a blazing flash of lightning, and transformed her into a tall, grown woman, a goddess, who batted aside the energy blasts like they were raindrops.

These images were underscored with words:

 _Courage._

 _Compassion._

 _Sacrifice._

 _ **Worthy.**_

Just as Maddie was about to retreat to consider this, the consciousness struck out again, like lightning, aimed at what Maddie briefly thought was nothing at all. Then, she gasped as a barrage of memories hit her: Subject Thorson – Harry – talking to her in the strange mindscape; the other girl, Jean, who was identical to her, and the questions that raised about where she had come from; their bafflement at her remarks about her purposes, and exhortations for her to be free, just like Remy had talked about. Both begging her to come with them. Sub – Harry following her through and saying that she always had a choice. Her standing over him, protecting him, making up excuses to stay close to him and protect him further, her refusal to allow the Red Room to break his will… and then Doctor Essex spoke and all was darkness.

Before she could absorb this, the hammer spoke again, with just a hint of… satisfaction?

 _ **Worthy.**_

And then, the connection was broken, and Maddie stumbled back, staring at the hammer as the tumble of unlocked memories ran through her mind. She sat in the rubble for a long time, turning them over and over, dealing with the emotions they brought up and examining what they meant. It didn't take her long to come up with certain conclusions – for while she was not used to making her own decisions, she was an intelligent young woman with an analytical turn of mind.

First, Doctor Essex had used a trigger phrase to disable her, then erased certain of her memories, in order to ensure that she remained completely loyal to him. This was something she found offensive on several levels, namely that she was being treated like… like a machine.

Once, it wouldn't have occurred to her to be offended, as she thought herself simply an extension of Doctor Essex's will, and had been content with that. Now, though… now it was a very different story.

Second, if she confronted him with this knowledge, he would likely repeat the process, perhaps more thoroughly. While she was more powerful than he was by some way, something she had always simply accepted as part of her function as his bodyguard and enforcer, she knew that he would have installed further safeguards.

Third, it occurred to her that with Remy leaving, and Harry both echoing his words and attempts to coax her away, then following her, apparently to try and get her to break away, the two people who had treated her as something other than a living machine with a programmed function, who hadn't cared where she'd come from or what she had been, had been ultimately opposed to both the Red Room and Doctor Essex. Indeed, the latter was likely at this moment suffering at their hands.

And from what she had discerned of the other girl, Jean, the one so like her and so not, she had been concerned for her too, reaching out to her, despite the fact that she, Maddie, was aligned with Jean's enemies and had been fighting Jean's kin, Harry. Once, this would have respectively baffled and been dismissed by her, accepting as she had her status as living weapon, that it was what she had been made for and that it was her purpose. Now, crucially, she had doubts.

Everyone who had ever treated her as a person – a status that she was still somewhat bemused by – had been opposed to Doctor Essex and the Red Room. Why was that?

Fourth, helping others was a Worthy choice. It was Right. Which, to someone who had grown up being taught that the only relevant morals were pragmatic execution of one's set function and obedience to Doctor Essex, had only picked up others in a somewhat hazy fashion, and whose Jiminy Cricket had been a thief who was in the process of his own journey of moral self-discovery, was a profoundly strange feeling.

" _But are you happy?"_

The question echoed again in her mind and on consideration, Maddie realised it was one with two answers. Right now, she wasn't happy. She wasn't merely indifferent to serving Doctor Essex, accepting it as her lot in life, but she was actively unhappy with it. It felt… wrong. More than that, protecting Harry had… well, for want of a better way of putting it, it had felt good. It had felt _right_.

As she mulled this over, Maddie realised something else.

Like all those figures in all those tales, very soon she was going to have to make a choice.

Then, as she stood up, a psychic scream of agony tore into her mind, raw and undirected, sending her reeling. A quick glance around at the unaffected Red Room Agents and the undirected nature of the scream led her to concluded that this was something on a frequency that only she could sense.

As she realised that, she realised something else. It was familiar. It felt like Harry. And the Red Room had had him for two days.

A strange feeling settled in her stomach. Her sister could have told her what it was: dread.

It took her several moments to realise that she was on her feet again. And she was running.

OoOoO

It didn't take Maddie long to find the laboratory the scream had emanated from. Even the likes of Charles Xavier might have taken a few moments to consciously pinpoint the location of the outburst, especially considering that it seemed to have been a brief breach in an otherwise impermeable defence against psychic energy escaping (Doctor Essex and the Red Room clearly having learnt their lesson). However, Maddie's skills at psychic tracking had been honed to the point where her ability to home in on such discharges was instinctive and instant.

The two guards outside the room tried to stop her, and were promptly swatted against the walls as she passed them, bursting in.

The scene she beheld once she did would have horrified anyone.

The lab itself was fairly innocuous, all humming computers, scanners and other instruments. In the middle, however, was a chair built out of what the observant might recognise as a variant of Adamantium, one that hummed with power both technological and, as confirmed by the runes inscribed on it, mystical, all geared towards the utmost restraint of its inhabitant.

And that inhabitant was Harry, who was so buried in the restraints, which seemed to have contracted to fit him, that he might as well have been wearing them as a suit of armour. All that was clearly exposed was his head, clamped in tight metallic helmet. His face was visible. It was gaunt, drawn, and silent, as if he could simply muster no more screams. Maddie knew better – now that she was through the door, psychic screams, of agony and defiance, were all she could hear.

There were physical signs of that defiance too: a number of the walls were severely dented, likely by either persons or equipment prior to successfully restraining him. The presence of a tall, lean, almost cadaverous looking pale figure in the corner, metallic tentacles lashing restlessly around him as a cruel smile adorned his face, one that Maddie recognised, suggested how he had finally been subdued. Rossovich would have sapped his strength along with his lifeforce.

An unaccustomed surge of rage accompanied this realisation. Even before her more recent moral turmoil, even before she had met Remy, Maddie had recognised Arkady Rossovich for the monster that he was. Even living weapons have standards.

And there was another sign of that defiance, that it continued, one that resided in his emerald green eyes. You didn't have to be an expert at reading body language to see how they burned with rage and pain.

Yet, Maddie noticed as she struggled to control the unexpected tide of emotions, there was something else in there too. Something desperate, as if he was fighting against not just the programming that the Red Room were attempting to force on him, but against something else too. What could it be?

"Madelyn," Doctor Essex said, standing up and regarding her. "What is the reason for your being here?"

"I sensed the psychic outburst and feared that it presaged an escape attempt," Maddie said.

"It did not," Doctor Essex said coolly. "However, your presence may be useful." He beckoned, and Maddie followed, resisting the urge to rip this room, designed solely for the breaking of wills, apart. If she tried, Doctor Essex would subdue her again, and she would be back where she started, without this precious revelation – not the fact that she needed to make a choice, but the fact that she could.

"He is resistant to the programming?" she queried, keeping her tone calm and detached. Harry's eyes, bloodshot, rolled up to look at her, hope suddenly flaring in them. Then, as they saw her expression, that hope shrivelled and died. Maddie had to fight a puzzling urge to reassure him. Both their minds depended on her actions at this moment.

Doctor Essex nodded. "He has resisted all attempts made over the last 48 hours," he said, tone simultaneously intrigued and mildly irritated. "Sedation was the logical course of action, but while they and application of Rossovich's powers have lowered his defences, some aspect of his physiology keeps burning the sedatives out. Attempts to induce a coma have been similarly unsuccessful. Higher levels of sedative and other means have so far been refrained from because of the risk of permanent physical damage to the subject."

"You wish me to overwhelm or undo his defences," Maddie said, keeping her tone neutral. "Depending on their state, that may take time."

Essex nodded. "Do not waste too much effort," he said. "It may be easier simply to clone him and program the blank slate. It would be unfortunate: his development is unique, and owing to the precise environmental factors involved, impossible to replicate. I would like to observe it at closer quarters."

"Is that dependent on his being programmed, Doctor Essex?" Maddie asked. When Essex raised an eyebrow at her, she added, "As you say, the subject is unique. If I push too hard, I could kill him. However, if programming is impractical, I could lobotomise him, rendering him mentally docile, leaving him open for study."

Essex rubbed his jaw. "No," he said. "It is not. As I have said, cloning could yet be the more practical course, though it will take time to perfect."

"Time we may not have, Doctor Essex," Lukin said, standing at the door.

"We are hidden in one of the deeper habitable regions of the Spirit World," Essex said calmly. "We have time."

"We thought we had time before," Lukin said flatly. "And yet, within a matter of hours, we were found. The Avengers have the power and skill to pierce even your methods of cloaking this base, Doctor Essex, and the contacts throughout the Spirit World that they may not need them." He turned to Maddie. "You, girl. Can you lower his defences?"

"I believe so, General Lukin," Maddie said, maintaining her neutral tone.

"Do so," Lukin said. "Clones would be beneficial, but they are a secondary goal."

Maddie glanced at Doctor Essex, who nodded. Turning to Harry, she paused. "I will need the helmet removed. And a chair. This will take some time, and I need maximum contact."

Doctor Essex nodded, and one of the scientists scrambled to find a chair, while the others set about removing the helmet.

"And girl," Lukin said. "If you fail… lobotomise him. Your master may have him for study. One way or another, he will serve Russia. Just make your decision quickly."

Maddie nodded curtly, then sat down and laid her hands on the sides of Harry's face, finger tips pressing against his temples.

"Contact," she murmured.

The real world fell away as she entered Harry's mind, easily slipping through his mental defences; she'd learned the shape of them when they'd fought, and exhausted and strained as he was – he had been resisting the programming of the Red Room, what felt like the telepathic attacks of Doctor Essex, restraining that something else that she couldn't quite identify, and doing so for the best part of two days. Under the circumstances, it had been easy.

She looked around his mind scape. It was a strange mash-up of multiple buildings; stone towers jutted up on either side of the construct, framing a giant silvery glass and metal spire with a giant letter A emblazoned on the side, with the base being formed of some kind of large, red brick mansion, surrounded by the castle's curtain walls and with a roof replaced by ramparts from the same. It looked battered and battle damaged, hastily patched holes abounding, and the whole thing looked increasingly ramshackle.

Maddie looked around. "Harry?" she called out. "I… I'm here to help," she said.

There was no answer. Maddie wasn't exactly surprised. It wasn't like he had any reason to believe her. Before he'd been put through this, perhaps, when he'd begged for her to stay, but after what had been done to him… while trust wasn't something she was entirely familiar with (part of what she was increasingly aware was a very long list of things that she was unfamiliar with), she knew enough intellectually to understand that it was likely in limited supply.

So she opted for bluntness. "I am inside your mind," she said. "I am more powerful and skilled than you are, as well as being well-rested, and not having been under constant physical and psychic attack, or deprived of sleep. I will find you sooner rather than later. However, I may not have the time. I have been sent in as a last resort. If I do not find you, you will be –"

"Killed?"

She whirled. It was Harry, yet not quite. For starters, this version was younger; small, skinny, and thin faced, wearing old, oversized clothing, as well as a pair of battered and taped glasses. His hair also lacked the distinctive white forelocks. The only immediately obvious similarities were the emerald green eyes, the messy dark hair, and something about the expression – which was, right now, bitterly sardonic. He looked tired, tired and battered as the rest of his mindscape, but that same defiance she had seen in his eyes before remained.

"It's not like it would be the first time," he said.

Maddie raised an eyebrow. "Actually, you'll be lobotomised," she said. "Studied and experimented on. Meanwhile, the Red Room and Doctor Essex will clone you and program the clones in your place."

"Then I'll stop them, and you," Harry said flatly.

Maddie raised the other eyebrow. "Why haven't you done so yet?"

His eyes flashed, and he stepped forward. Suddenly, the little boy wasn't so little, transforming in mid step into something closer to the young man she'd fought, who'd pleaded with her, but different: this version was clad all in a red so dark that it was almost black, a sash like a flickering golden flame at his waist, boots of the same shade melding with the trousers of the suit. His features were lengthened slightly, somehow predatory and inhuman, and his skin seemed like a thin container for the inferno of power that roiled within him, one that found a way out through the strange, simplified bird shape emblazoned on his chest, and his eyes, blank white and blazing with that same power.

" _ **Just because I don't want to, Maddie, doesn't mean that I can't!"**_ he snarled in a deadly dangerous voice, one that crackled with fire and power and threat.

It was power unlike any she had felt before, one that made her breath catch, even in the real world. The closest comparison was the echo of the power that the old man – old god – had used to enchant Thor's hammer, Mjolnir, that she had sensed in the vision that the hammer had shown her, and even then, this was something else.

Yet… that wasn't quite true. She _had_ felt this power before, during the summer, and even beyond that, there was something achingly familiar about it, something terrifying and intoxicating and magnetic, something that drew her to it, whispering her name, calling to her in the language of souls.

The Harry in front of her closed those blazing eyes, shutting of their glow, and that seemed to be the signal for the clothing to vanish, that unearthly aura to diminish. But he didn't revert to the little boy, either, instead staying as something more like the young man she'd faced. Though the glasses remained, she noticed. It seemed to be something of a middle ground.

"So," Maddie said thoughtfully. "That's what you've been holding in check. What is it?"

"A side of me that you don't want to meet," Harry said darkly. "If I cut loose with it… I don't know what will happen. Though it won't be pretty." His eyes narrowed. "But if the alternative is being a weapon or an experiment while weapons are made out of me, then you'll get to see that side of me." He folded his arms. "So. Whatever plan of attack you've got, go ahead. Bring it on. I've survived worse."

"I'm not here to fight you," Maddie said. "I… I meant what I said just now. I want to help you."

"Why?" Harry asked, frowning sceptically.

"I don't know," Maddie admitted. "It isn't logical. I wasn't made for it. But… I do. I care." She stuck out a hand. "I'm not good with words. Let me show you."

Harry eyed her suspiciously, then reached out and took it.

And Maddie showed him, letting him into her mind and plunging him into her memories, of her confusion, her trying to protect him, Essex blocking her memory of it, the hammer unblocking it, and her dilemma: could she be Worthy? Could she make a choice, let alone the right one?

"You were part of it," Maddie said. "What you said. You said what Remy had been telling me. I suppose it took until now for me to understand."

Harry just stared at her. "You really do want to help me," he said, in a kind of wonder. The suspicion and cynicism seemed to have melted away, to be replaced by dazed amazement.

"You believe me?" Maddie asked, startled.

"Is there any reason I shouldn't?"

"Well, no," Maddie said, frowning. "It's just…"

"You didn't expect me to trust you again so quickly?" Harry suggested. When Maddie nodded, he smiled. "You're rebelling against someone who's had you under his influence or full on control for your whole life. Do you have any idea how amazing that is? You tried to protect me without even knowing why, without even having a reason. And whoever you are, wherever you came from, I know that you're family." He reached out a hand. "You may have made mistakes. You may have done terrible things. But so have Bucky and Natasha. My dad, my uncle, Tony and Clint too. I've done a few nasty things too. But you're trying to be better, and that's what matters. Put it together? It's more than enough for me."

Maddie just stared at him. Even Remy had never openly expressed such… she didn't even know what the word was.

"Faith," Harry said. "The word you're looking for is faith." He smiled crookedly at her expression. "You're in my mind, remember? And I might not be as good, as strong, or everything else as you are, but I'm not exactly useless, either."

Maddie nodded. "Clearly not," she said. "These last two days you have resisted the attempts of the Red Room and Doctor Essex to reprogram you."

"So that's his real name," Harry muttered. "I wondered. And it's been two days?"

"Yes. You didn't know?"

"Well, after the first couple of hours of screaming electrocution, drugs and telepathic attacks, it all kind of blurs. So, no, I didn't know," Harry said, then frowned.

"You thought that they would have found you by now," Maddie said, then nodded. "General Lukin is worried that they will. Doctor Essex says that we are deep inside the Spirit World. Time will pass faster here, relative to the real world."

Harry grimaced. "Wonderful," he said. "So for all I know, only five minutes have passed in the real world."

Maddie paused, then nodded. "Have they let slip any information about what you are intended for once programmed, or why they and Doctor Essex sought you out specifically?" she asked. "I know that he has an interest in your unique genetic development, but that does not strike me as the reason for the Red Room's interest. I inquired of General Lukin, but he did not say, precisely."

"Not really," Harry said. "Why do you ask?"

"I have a plan," Maddie said. "However, to enact it successfully, or to even have a chance of doing so, I need to know as much as I can about what your programmed self is intended for."

Harry frowned, nodding. "Near the start, when it was just him studying me, I did manage to get Essex talking," he said. "It might help." As he spoke, the scenery shifted around them, transforming into the laboratory that their bodies occupied in the real world. Though in this case, the only occupants were Harry and Doctor Essex, the former conscious and wary looking, while the latter calmly moved around the laboratory.

Maddie frowned and leaned forward, studying the memory as it began to play out.

" _What makes my family so interesting, anyway?" Harry asked. "It can't be dad – you didn't know he was a god, and pureblood wizards aren't that uncommon. So it must be mum, and her family. Jean."_

" _In that much you are correct," Essex said. "The power of your paternal bloodline was, at first glance, largely unremarkable. Later study proved otherwise, of course, but it was your maternal bloodline that first attracted my interest. The power of that bloodline goes back a very long way. I happened upon it by chance as a young man, investigating unusual abilities, ones that I believed could be inherited, that I thought represented an evolutionary leap. I delved into archives, travelled across Britain searching for folk tales, parish records, old stories. As I did, I spread my search, travelling across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, following the Silk Road east, before turning to the New World. Rarely, very rarely, I found what I was looking for. Most times, I did not. Once, I found something beyond my wildest dreams, something that opened my eyes to new horizons, that gifted me with the knowledge to extend my search indefinitely, to refine it immeasurably. And once, in Egypt… I found something else entirely."_

 _He was silent a moment, seeming to drift off into memory. Then, he snapped back to the present._

" _I found enough to establish a pattern, to realise that these were not simple one offs," he said. "Some were magically gifted, and while they were of some interest, particularly the more varied wandless breed, they were simply different approaches to the same template. There was another that caught my eye. More varied, more individually specialised than those with magical abilities, they fascinated me. They were the gold in the muck of ordinary humanity and your bloodline was a rich seam. While records were incomplete, with the aid of the magical contacts I had accrued on my search, some I managed to verify."_

 _He went to the computer banks and brought up images of manuscripts and inscriptions._

" _The Monks of Lindisfarne for instance, record a tale they had heard from their Scottish brethren. Ffion Grey, a girl in Kingdom of Dàl Riata in the 7_ _th_ _century: her coastal village was the victim of a Northumbrian raid, her father was killed, her mother and sister were raped and enslaved. She escaped thanks to her burgeoning abilities, which killed the three warriors who tried to take her. The Northumbrians retreated from what they believed to be a sorceress, while she remained, paralysed by terror of them and herself," he said. "She was taken in by a nearby nunnery and made a novice, despite protesting that she wanted to find her mother and sister. Through the enforced quiet contemplation, she learned to control her abilities of telepathy and telekinesis and stoked the fires of revenge. At the age of 15, she left the nunnery and used her powers to hunt down those who had taken her family. Several years later, she found them in Northumbria. Her mother and sister were both dead, the latter in childbirth. In rage and despair, she destroyed the village and everyone in it, burning it to the ground. Then, she took her sister's child and then disappeared from history, last being seen headed into the far north of what is now Scotland."_

 _He looked up and added, "you are of course directly descended from another branch of the family," as if this was the first question that would spring to any reasonable mind on being told this tale._

 _He turned back to the computers._

" _She was the earliest I could prove, though there were rumours and whispered tales of others before her. Others appeared as the family spread far and wide – one branch culminated in Lady Jane Grey, briefly Queen of England, though that branch exhibited few signs of anything beyond the ordinary. In the less politically significant branches, I found others. Sir Malkin Grey, a Marcher Lord of the 13_ _th_ _century who was considered a warlock by his peers and said to be capable of possessing others from afar. This was nonsense, of course – analysis of genetic material extracted from his skeleton proved that he was, in fact, a mutant. But there was truth in the myths, and so it went with the others. Lord Charles Grey was a moderately influential politician of the Tudor period noted for his ability to discern the feelings of others and his astonishing charm – a telepath or, more likely, a skilled empath. And Lady Elizabeth Grey, who became a sensation in the court of Charles II by reading the past and even the future of people and objects with a touch, even, some said, moving things with her mind. I verified each of these claims and many others by various means. Once that was done, once I had isolated the bloodlines of interest, I watched and waited. Sometimes, I intervened, to cure a disease or to divert the subjects from mortal danger. While a little peril and stress is in my experience a fine catalyst for the manifestation of both the X-Gene and the M-Gene, you can have too much of a good thing."_

" _So what were the Dursleys?" Harry asked bitterly. "Just right?"_

" _Suitable enough," Essex said, shrugging. "While I would have preferred that they fed you more – the body can do little without fuel, after all – your magic and your psychic abilities both manifested in satisfactory fashions while you were there."_

" _My psychic abilities didn't kick in until last year," Harry said, willing to play for time._

" _That was the first time you noticed them, to be sure, but they were present beforehand," Essex said. "That time you were chased by the young Dursley's gang, for instance, you jumped behind the bins and found yourself flying up onto the roof. A clear cut case of telekinesis, something that my instruments detected. At the same time, you showed a remarkable ability to fade into the background, to avoid the attentions of your peers and adults: your telepathy at work. Unconscious, of course, but still in use."_

 _He turned to Harry. "I also noticed that once other factors were controlled for, female Grey psychics tend to be the more powerful, something I confirmed in the observation of your generation. And the hair of male Grey psychics tended to go white early." He examined Harry. "It wasn't invariable, and like with yours, I suspect that it was a result of psychic trauma. Nevertheless, the pattern was distinct and interesting. And there was the one thing that all of them held in common: eyes like yours, eyes a unique shade of emerald green."_

 _His gaze met Harry's._

" _Madelyn is the peak of your bloodline's genetic potential, an Omega Class mutant. So is Jean Grey, your cousin. They are goddesses among men."_

" _And you use one of those 'goddesses' as your minion?" Harry asked, eyebrow raised._

" _That is how she is of most use to me," Essex said bluntly. "It also spurs her development. It is her sole purpose."_

" _What, giving you someone to hide behind?" Harry sniped._

 _Essex ignored that remark. "They are as goddesses. But you, Harry, while you are an Omega Class mutant, if of a lesser degree… you are also something else entirely," he said. "I had hoped to see perhaps an unusually powerful wizard with a greater predilection towards psychic abilities, maybe a Seer, or perhaps a rare combination of magical and mutant, like Wanda Maximoff. Yet nature, or perhaps supernature, surprised me once more. Your father was not merely a mortal wizard. And so you began to grow into something, potentially, even greater, a synthesis of the mightiest of mortals and the truly divine. You are unique in all of history, a hybrid evolved beyond even death itself."_

 _Harry said nothing, figuring that explaining the details of his mother and the Phoenix was pointless._

" _I say without ego that the two of you, yourself and Madelyn, are my finest works," Essex said._

" _Bullshit," Harry said. "You had no idea that my dad was anything other than a wizard until he got his memories back and came back to Earth. And you didn't make me into anything."_

 _Essex smiled. It was not a nice smile. "Didn't I?" he asked. "Oh, I didn't know exactly who he was or where he was from, but I knew that was something more than human in your DNA. It was well hidden, I'll say that much, but I wasn't lying when I said that I found it." He met Harry's gaze. "And you may continue to delude yourself otherwise, but the fact is this: your parents conceived you, but I have shaped you into what you are today. You will conform to my wishes, because that is what you always have done. Your free will is an illusion, soon to be shattered. You are my experiment, Harry. And now, I have reclaimed you."_

 _Harry stared at him, then said, "Me and my free will have a message for you."_

 _Essex arched an eyebrow._

" _Come closer."_

" _If you are planning to attempt to incapacitate me with a close range physical blow, likely delivered with your skull, you will only succeed in damaging yourself," Essex said. "And even if you did succeed, you would still be contained in this chair. All you would achieve is a pointless gesture of defiance."_

" _I know," Harry said. "But don't you want to know what it is?"_

 _Essex arched the other eyebrow, then shrugged infinitesimally and moved to Harry's side, at which point, Harry reared like a striking cobra, and spat full in his face._

" _That was the message," he said._

 _Essex sighed, stepping back and retrieving a handkerchief from his suit pocket. "Pointless," he said. "Absolutely pointless."_

" _Oh, I don't know," Harry said. "It makes me feel a lot better." He smirked. "Besides. If I was really just your experiment, doing what you want me to, do you really think that I would have done that?"_

 _Essex's eyes narrowed. "As I have come to discover," he said. "Even the finest programming has flaws."_

The memory faded.

"That was about when the torture started," Harry said conversationally. "You'd almost think I'd annoyed him." He looked thoughtfully at Maddie. "That bit about the programming, that was about you, wasn't it?"

Maddie nodded. "I believe so," she said quietly.

"Did it help?"

Maddie frowned. "Not directly," she admitted, not adding that it had bolstered her resolve. After all, if Doctor Essex saw Harry as simply something to be studied and used, he was hardly likely to see her as any better. He'd said so himself. In truth, she'd always known it. But now, it bothered her.

"Well," Harry said. "I kept the Red Room programming at arm's length, and didn't want to take a look at it, because I thought that if I did, it might start getting through. But if I had to guess…" He looked at Maddie. "This General Lukin. What can you tell me about him?"

"Middle aged. Moderately intelligent. Authoritative as Commander of the Red Room, but practically speaking, subordinate to Doctor Essex," Maddie said. "He is ambitious. He envies Doctor Essex's use of me."

Harry's lips thinned. "I'll bet he does," he said. "And the Red Room used to have the Winter Soldier." He looked at Maddie. "Which means that he wants me to be something that's part you, part Winter Soldier."

Maddie paused. "That would seem a likely conclusion," she said, as her mind ran over the implications of this, doubt flooding into her mind again. If Harry's will needed to be broken to turn him into something like her, did that mean that she had a will at all? Did it mean that she was, completely unaware, acting at Doctor Essex's will in trying to defy him?

"Hey."

She looked up. "It is a possibility," she said bluntly, not bothering to wonder if he knew what she had been thinking. The longer she spent in this position, in his presence, the lower her mental barriers were getting. It was unnerving, but somehow… liberating.

"Maybe," Harry admitted. "But like I said. I have faith. Faith in you."

As Maddie stared at him again, he sat down in a suddenly conjured squashy armchair. "So," he said. "What's your plan?"

Maddie hesitated, then told him.

OoOoO

 _Now_

"He just accepted the plan?"

"We had no practical alternative," Maddie said.

"You could have destroyed them all and freed him that way. So could he."

"With Doctor Essex having us both under close observation and Harry being exhausted and in restraints, we were in a poor position. I could not be sure of the outcome. Equally, Harry's only means of doing so was not a practical option," Maddie said, then hesitated. "It was a good plan."

"Under the circumstances, it was. However…"

Maddie nodded tightly. "That was when it all began to go wrong," she said.

OoOoO

 _Then_

Maddie emerged into the real world. "It is done," she said.

"He is compliant?" Essex asked.

"You broke his will?" one of the Russian scientists, a nervous looking man called Rodchenko, who seemed like this was the last place in the world that he wanted to be, asked.

"I erased his mind," Maddie said. "You said that a blank slate would be easier to program. Additionally, without a mind, he has no will with which to resist. So, with the exception of certain parts of the Cerebellum that govern muscle memory, including skills that I believe would be useful, I erased it. Certain basic memories may remain, but in a limited, fragmentary state. A new purpose and identity can easily be put into place."

This raised a muted but genuine cheer from the scientists around her, and murmurs of fear, admiration, and faint resentment. She, after all, had achieved in less than an hour what they had failed to do in over two days of constant work.

"Good," Lukin said gruffly from the gantry above, his tone belying the hunger and excitement in his eyes. "Now, Doctor Essex, Doctor Rodchenko. Do you foresee any further difficulties?"

"None," Essex said plainly. "Excellent work, Madelyn. Though I noticed that you forged a deeper psychic connection than expected, one that would allow him entrance into your mind. There was also no sign of telepathic struggle. Why was this?"

"Subject Thorson trusted me," Maddie said plainly. "An emotional attachment born out of a resemblance to certain female figures in his life, a shared power-set, and a desire to 'save me'. I encouraged him to connect to my mind to demonstrate that I shared that attachment, then used the opening to attack. Exhausted, inexperienced, and weaker than I was to begin with, he was easy to overwhelm."

Essex nodded. "Excellent," he said. "You are no longer needed here."

"I will retire to my quarters, Doctor Essex," Maddie said.

"No," Essex said. "I mean that you are no longer needed on this base. You will not be required for what follows. There are other matters for you to attend to elsewhere, in the physical world. You will attend to them while I continue my work here."

It did not take a genius, a telepath, or a body language expert to read the words _I do not trust you_ in the subtext. Certainly, Maddie could see it plainly enough.

Maddie hesitated, then nodded. "Of course, Doctor Essex," she said. "Do you wish me to retrieve Remy LeBeau, and the other escaped assets?"

"No," Essex said. "They can wait. I wish you to escort a subject of experimentation to one of my laboratories." And just like that, Maddie knew which one. "You will keep it contained. You will also perform a psychic self-diagnostic, to ensure that the destruction of Subject Thorson's mind, performed as it was while you were in connection to him, did not have lasting side-effects. When that is done, you will maintain yourself and ensure that you are ready for when you are needed. Is this understood?"

"Yes, Doctor Essex," Maddie said.

"And I will take that," Doctor Essex said, pointing to the golden phoenix feather pendant around her neck. "I believe it is worth studying."

Maddie nodded, concealing a racing heart, as Essex removed it from around her neck with his telekinesis. Because for all that she was a logical thinker, unlike Harry, she was not used to having to adapt her plans – indeed, she was not in the slightest bit used to making them in the first place. And this plan, her first real plan, had just started to go horribly wrong.

OoOoO

 _Now_

"I see," Agent Coulson said. "Okay, thank you. We'll take a break there, Miss Grey."

Maddie frowned. "You are unsatisfied with my testimony?" she asked.

"No," Agent Coulson said. "We're building up a fuller picture of what happened, which means multiple accounts of events happening at different times. Also, a rest will allow you to collect your mind and make your way through the testimony at your own pace, remembering things that continuing now, you might have missed. I also thought that you would appreciate the opportunity to visit Harry and see how his recuperation is going."

Maddie nodded, standing up. "I understand," she said, then hesitated. "And… thank you, Agent Coulson. I would like that."

Coulson inclined his head. "You're welcome," he said. "Could someone send in Miss Danvers?"

OoOoO

 _Now_

Carol sat down and folded her arms. "All right, secret agent man. Let's get this over with," she said. "Where d'you want me to start?"

"In the beginning, please, Miss Danvers."

"Okay. In the beginning, there was nothing, then it exploded."

"Maybe not quite that far back. How about when you were move to Asgard?"

"Fine. It went like this…"

OoOoO

 _Then_

A week had passed, a week which Carol, Jean, and Jean-Paul had largely spent in Asgard, having been packed off post-haste, despite their protestations that they could help. But they were coolly shot down. Carol and Jean were targets, and Jean-Paul likely was one now, and, more to the point, was still suffering from cutting loose with his speed.

"You know, I'm surprised I hadn't got round to asking this before now – or maybe not, considering how long you've spent having your body basically put back together, but where did you go, anyway, Jean-Paul?" Carol asked Jean-Paul, frowning. "That hour, where did you go?"

"To speak to Draco Malfoy," Jean-Paul said. "To discover if our suspicions were correct."

"Suspicions?" Uhtred asked, frowning. "This Draco, of the family Malfoy, you think he is a threat?"

"He doesn't act like one," Carol said. "But…" She laid out their suspicions, namely that Draco might be possessed and Up To Something. "What impression did you get?"

"There is some influence on him," Jean-Paul said. "Or so I believe. Though I do not believe that it is a possession, more likely a willing partnership." He drummed his fingers on the table. "In truth, we did not have much time to speak, before he pointed out that your and Harry's excursion took you away from the protection of Sergeant Barnes, and my visit to him took away your swiftest method of escape. After that…"

Carol nodded. "Okay," she said. "Now, stop bullshitting me."

" _Excusez-moi?_ "

"First, that wouldn't take an entire hour. Second, as far as I heard, you were the one who dropped Bucky and that psycho who was meant to get his attention off at the Mansion. Third, when you did, you'd taken off the suit. You were going at full throttle, despite knowing how insanely dangerous that is for you, and going at full throttle, you wouldn't have taken that long," Carol said. "You made at least one stop somewhere else. Where was it, and why?"

Jean-Paul stared at her for a long moment, then smiled reluctantly. "Sometimes," he remarked. "I forget how insightful you are, _ma cherie_." He paused, drumming his fingers. "There is someone I wished to check upon. Someone who is in many ways very normal, and in many others, unlike anyone, or anything, that I have ever encountered."

"What do you mean?" Diana asked.

"This person has believed for most of his life that he is human, perhaps a mutant," Jean-Paul said. "Yet he is most definitely not. In truth, I do not know what he is."

"How do you know that this person isn't a mutant?" Jean asked.

"He has too many powers," Jean-Paul said. "And… you recall when I lent you all my speed?"

Jean looked puzzled, but Carol, Diana, and Uhtred all nodded.

"In doing so, I felt you all," Jean-Paul said. "I know how an Asgardian feels, an Olympian demigoddess, an Asgardian demigod mutant, and a mortal super soldier."

Jean looked a little startled and Carol, noticing this, said, "I'm Steve's great-granddaughter. Long story."

"I… see," Jean said, having not previously been informed of this. "Why did no one mention it?"

"It never came up," Carol said. "And, frankly, it's not the sort of thing I talk about, because, you know, kidnapping psychos."

"Right," Jean said.

"If you do not know what he is, then what do you think he might be?" Diana asked.

"And is he dangerous, or in danger?" Uhtred asked, frowning. Jean-Paul was his sort of boyfriend, and he was concerned, even if Jean-Paul happened to be one of the most dangerous people on Earth when the mood took him.

Jean-Paul considered this. "He could be extremely dangerous," he said. "When I accelerated him, I felt his power. He is powerful, far more than he has even begun to realise. For the time being? He is superhumanly fast – not as much as I am, not even close, but faster on foot than anyone else I have encountered. He is strong, too. How strong exactly, I do not know, but at a guess… I would say that at most, he is Diana's equal, at least, Uhtred's. His durability I estimate to be equivalent. According to him, he has never been sick, either, suggesting a healing factor. And as time goes by, he is only growing stronger."

There was a stunned silence. Diana was, though she did not look it, one of the physically most powerful beings on Earth when she spent time there. Of course, there were those whose might was far beyond her, but they tended to be gods, godlike, or designed to battle gods and godlike beings, in the case of Tony's most powerful suits. For strength, she already had few peers who did not fall into one of those categories. Uhtred, meanwhile, was set to match and surpass Volstagg, himself the strongest Asgardian who was not part of the Royal Family, Heimdall, or, theoretically, Sif, accessing the full breadth of her powers as the Goddess of War, and officially ranked as a 'Greater God' on the hierarchy of divine power. Even now, for pure physical might, he was peerless among Asgardians of his age, stronger than many already full grown. For someone to be comparable to either was no mean feat.

"But he is not even close to being aware of the true extents of his gifts," Jean-Paul said. "He is also… sweet. Idealistic. And perhaps a little naïve. He is not stupid, and he is well drilled in the need to keep his secret from those who would exploit him, but… I would say that he could be dangerous, as much as any of us, save Miss Grey."

There was no dispute of this point. Diana could feel the raw psychic power that radiated off Jean, and was thus perfectly aware of how powerful she was.

Uhtred did not have any especial psychic senses either, but he knew Harry's power and trusted his judgement. So when Harry stated that Jean outclassed him the way the Sun outshone the Moon, he was disposed to take it seriously. And were that not enough, it was also common knowledge that Jean had been the one to undo the psychic effects of the dark spells Gravemoss had placed on the bullet that had put Thor in a coma, and had done so while remaining on Midgard. This deed alone, Cerebro or no Cerebro, was considered both a reason to honour her and a testament to the sheer depth of her power.

As for Carol, she'd seen both Harry and Jean going all out, and could draw her own conclusions just fine, thank you very much.

"However," Jean-Paul added. "What could be is not what is. And right now, I would say that he is far more in danger than he is dangerous."

"Why him in particular?" Jean asked. "And why are you so sure that he's not a mutant, or something else magical?"

"Yeah," Carol said. "I mean, Jean here's testament to how strong mutants can get. And believe me, that psychotic cousin of hers and Harry's proved that it can get into super strength and stuff too."

"What cousin?" Uhtred asked, frowning.

"You know how Harry grew up with an aunt and uncle who treated him horribly?" Carol asked.

Uhtred nodded, frowning.

"Harry's cousin, their son, who's also Jean's cousin, turned out to have superpowers too," Carol said. "Apparently he was a massive jerk to begin with. A few years in that weird spirit world place, with powers and pretty much a license to take whatever the hell he wanted? You've got a major league monster on your hands." She looked grim. "He's not even close to strong as Harry, let alone Jean. But he was strong enough."

"How strong?" Diana asked softly.

"Harry hates him and they went toe to toe," Carol said flatly. "He survived something that blew up half the complex we were. Maybe he only survived because Harry decided that he had better things to do, but that says a lot."

Jean-Paul, Uhtred and Diana all nodded grim, serious nods.

"And this guy still had enough left to take on me, grandma, uncle Jack, and a bunch of mutants, one of whom had serious super strength, and leave us all on the ground. Two of the mutants, Lorna and Noriko, channelled a couple of lightning bolts into my shield, and I blasted him in the eyes with that," Carol said. "He was still standing, though apparently it really fucking hurt. After _that_ , he _still_ had enough to attack Thor. Who, you know, took him out in one shot, but that's because Thor is fucking _Thor_."

"Survived?" Jean asked, noticing the inflection.

Carol and the others, who had seen Harry cut loose, shared looks. "Jean… Harry's a lovely guy," Carol said slowly. "But…"

"He has the blood of warriors in him," Uhtred said. "That blood runs hot."

"And cold," Diana said quietly.

"What are you saying?" Jean asked.

"I'm saying that I know you see him as your sweet little cousin, your baby brother – and he is that sweet," Carol said. "He's one of the best people I've ever known. He's got so much power and he holds it in check every single damn day, watching every single thought, and it is absolutely incredible. But he has been through hell in his life. And while it looks like he's shrugged it off, or at least survived it, there's a part of him that it twisted." She met Jean's gaze as the other girl looked away. "You know, don't you? You've been inside his mind, same way I have, and you'd know what to look for much better than I would."

Jean said nothing. But she didn't disagree, either.

"Yeah," Carol said, subdued. "I thought so. He keeps it boxed up, all the time. She met Jean's gaze. "He knows it, and it scares the hell out of him, which is why he locks it away and watches every thought every moment of every day. Except… except for those times when he's so angry that it gets out. And when it does, he's capable of some of the most pants-shittingly terrifying things I have ever seen." She looked away. "Am I saying that I think that Harry's capable of killing someone? Yeah. Because I know he is. I watched him rip Gravemoss' chest open like a book and tear his heart out. All of us did. It freaked him out when he stopped to think, and Gravemoss a) deserved it, b) survived – actually, being whatever the fuck he was meant that all it did was piss him off, but…" She looked up at the ceiling. "Honestly? If I was him, kidnapped by the guy who made my childhood hell, waking up in some kind of freaky Thunderdome in some sort of power suppressing suit on, with my childhood bully who'd into some giant _monster_ with superpowers, enough to hurt me – and he was hurt, believe me, I saw it, and badly… I don't think that I'd stop to think. I think that I'd stop holding back. Stop watching my thoughts. Take out a lifetime of hurt and anger on the guy." She shrugged. "Of course, Harry didn't go after him to finish the job, which probably says that he's a better person than I am. Maybe he wasn't out to kill, just to take out his anger on a superpowered punching bag, because it's not like he's short of that. But. Like I said. I can easily imagine that he would have been out to kill. Or at least, wouldn't have immediately cared if he did. He would afterwards, hell, he'd have been absolutely horrified. That's why he's the good guy. But he's got a dark side and more issues than the _New Scientist_." Her gaze slid to Uhtred and Diana. "And as those two could tell you, he's got that warrior's blood thing too. Which, frankly, is not a good mix."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Why am I?" Carol wondered aloud. "I mean, you're not the first person close to Harry I've had to tell; that Hermione chick, his friend from school. Smart, cool, and a tough cookie. A bit like you. But like you, she didn't get what Harry is capable of when he's really, really pushed. Like her, I'm not trying to warn you off or paint him as some kind of dark lord in waiting. I'm trying to fill you in, because it's something that you need to know – something, frankly, that you in particular should damn well know without me having to tell you!"

"Carol," Diana said softly.

Carol sighed. "Sorry," she said. "Bad day."

"I know," Jean said. "I had one of those once."

Carol eyed her, then smiled a crooked, disturbingly old smile. "I guess you did," she said. "Anyway – if, fuck it, when Harry has his mind fucked with, those Red Room psychos could find out that they've unleashed something that they've got absolutely no way to control. Worst case nightmare scenario? They unleash it, and he can't get it back under control. There aren't many people who could stop him in that case. Not many people who could, who would, and even fewer I'd trust to do it. You're one of them, and if you're going to fight him – and yeah, it's a possibility – you're going to need to be ready for what you might face."

There was a stunned silence.

" _That's_ what you're thinking about?" Jean asked, astounded and not a little angry. "He could be being tortured and –"

"And _twisted into a weapon_ , like the Winter Soldier or that psycho version of Natasha," Carol snapped. "They don't have any powers beyond, at most, super soldier level physicals, and Harry's got those, plus major league magic, psychic powers second only to you and that evil twin of yours – who, odds are, we'll be running into again – and two psychic teachers who are going to take his skills up to a whole new level if they succeed in turning him." She looked away. "I don't like thinking it. I don't like that when my best friend is in the hands of total monsters who I just _know_ are going to take him, hurt him, maybe even break him, and try and destroy everything he is, part of brain automatically starts a threat assessment and figuring out ways to stop him. I _hate_ it! But it's part of who I am, it's fucking necessary, and it is what he would want, because if he was under their control and he hurt one of us, when he got out from under it, it would absolutely destroy him." She looked up, tears in her eyes, but a diamond hardness too. "Look me in the eye and tell me I'm wrong, Jean. Look me in the eye and tell me that, and I might just believe you."

Jean looked her in the eye. But she didn't say anything of the sort.

"She is right," Jean-Paul said quietly.

Diana nodded, a sad look on her face.

"This is wrong," Uhtred said, in a low voice. "He is our friend, my liege, Lady Jean's cousin. We should be plotting how to help him, not how to destroy him."

"This is plotting how to help him," Carol said. "We don't have any way of helping to find him – and believe me, if we did, I would be on that – so this is the next best thing. Because not doing so, winding up helpless in the firing line – and you can bet that Jean at least is on their hit-list, because they'll be shit scared of her – and…" She trailed off. "That would destroy him. And you all know it."

"It does not sit right with me," Uhtred said eventually.

"Me neither, big guy," Carol said. "Me neither." She eyed Jean-Paul. "Speaking of being in the firing line… just why do you think that this guy of yours is so likely to be a target? And how do you know that he's not a mutant or something magical, like Jean said earlier? Because it sounds to me like he's done a pretty good job of pretending."

"I know how magic feels, and how mutants feel," Jean-Paul said. "He does not feel like either. As for why he is a target, that is simple. For some reason that I have been unable to decipher, he looks exactly like Harry."

There was a stunned silence.

"When you say exactly," Jean began.

"But for green eyes and certain, subtle differences in build, the messiness of his hair, and perhaps a touch in face shape, with only the eyes being obvious even on moderate inspection, I would say that they were born identical," Jean-Paul said. "The only immediately noticeable differences lie in the eyes, Harry's scar, and his locks of white hair." He shrugged. "The way they stand, the way they hold themselves, their attitudes in general, those are very different, of course," he added, as if these were all perfectly obvious and only of passing notice. "But still. They are near identical. And for the life of me, I have no idea why."

"I'm gonna be completely and utterly obvious and say that this isn't a wacky coincidence," Carol remarked.

Jean-Paul gave her a dry look. "It is unlikely, _cherie_."

There was a long silence.

"Why are we here, anyway?" Jean asked. "I mean, not that I'm grateful to King Odin for putting us up, but…"

"You are blood family to Prince Harry," Uhtred said. "You have done great deeds as a hero, including healing Crown Prince Thor. And Jean-Paul and Carol are honoured heroes, the latter of the blood line of Steve Rogers himself, the greatest of Midgard's Great Captains. Do you think that you are undeserving?"

"It is also beyond the reach of even this Red Room you speak of," Diana said.

"Yes, no, I… it's not about that," Jean said. "I don't think." She looked around. She'd seen Asgard before, but only in passing, on another mission. Now, having spent several days there… it was breathtaking. Overwhelming even, like something out of some kind of film fusion of high fantasy and higher sci-fi. "I just worry about the others."

"Professor Xavier, Loki and Wanda found somewhere for them," Carol said. "And between those three, it's probably safe as anywhere you'll find; probably off in some kind of pocket dimension somewhere."

"I wouldn't be certain of that," Jean said darkly.

Carol raised an eyebrow.

"That portal that led from Avengers Mansion to the Red Room," Jean said. "Remember it?"

"Vaguely," Carol said. "What with me being unconscious when I actually went through it and all. Jane's work?"

"Mine," Jean said. "I sensed Harry was in trouble, so I reached out and ripped a hole in the fabric of reality to get to him."

There was a stunned silence.

"Okay," Carol said. "I'll add that to the list of things that make you a terrifying super badass. But while trans-dimensional thingummy-whatsits…"

"Mechanics," Jean-Paul supplied.

"Right, aren't my strong point… isn't this Nevernever place meant to be way closer than Asgard is?" Carol asked. "Also, I'm guessing that this isn't a trick you could exactly repeat, or you'd have done it already."

"I've tried," Jean said. "Several times. But… when I helped Thor wake up over the summer, I used Cerebro – it's this machine that Professor Xavier built, it amplifies psychic powers – to project myself into Asgard, through the World Tree. Though, I had a bit of help from Huginn and Muninn in getting there on time. I'm pretty sure the skills are transferrable."

"And you did not mention this before?" Uhtred asked, anger and concern edging his voice.

"I did," Jean said. "To Huginn and Muninn." She shook her head. "Besides. I don't know how I did what I did, and of the two of us, I'm the one who has even a very vague idea of how to do that and find Asgard through the World Tree, not her." Her gaze drifted to the fire. "It's been less than three months since I found out just how strong I really was. Or I thought I did. Truth is, I don't have any idea how powerful I really am, let alone what I'm capable of. She does. She's been trained as a weapon from birth. Even Harry, who's not as strong and not even half as trained, has a better idea of what he, we, can do."

"Then you will have to find out," Diana said. "Even if you might be afraid of it." When Jean shot her a startled look, the younger girl smiled a gentle, wise smile. "You are not the only one who has been afraid to embrace their full gifts."

"That you are most certainly not," Jean-Paul agreed.

Diana nodded, then looked thoughtful. "You have a connection to Harry," she said. "When he was wielding his powers to their full extent, or near enough, you could follow that connection."

"And I could pour power into my end of the connection and follow it," Jean said. "I know. I tried. It didn't work."

"I know," Diana said. "I had assumed so. But you are not the only one with a psychic connection to Harry." She turned to Carol. "And I believe that he was not half as careful, or as skilled, when he made it."

Carol and Jean's eyes both widened.

"Loki said that Harry didn't protect his own mind when he went into mine," Carol said. "And I went into his."

"Meaning that there are parts of his mind in yours and yours in his," Jean said slowly. "They resonate."

Both turned to Diana. "Diana, you're a genius!" they said, in perfect unison.

Diana smiled. "I know," she said.

"Now," Jean-Paul said. "We need to find someone to help us make it work. Preferably before the Red Room manage to do what they have set out to do."

"Queen Frigga," Uthred said. "She must know of this, and she will be able to help."

As it was, however, their wonderful idea was too late.

OoOoO

"Your idea is a good one, Diana," Frigga said. "And it may still be needed. But."

"But?" Carol asked, before adding, "your majesty?"

"Please, Frigga will do," Frigga said, before her expression turned grim. "I am afraid that your task may well have become much harder." She gestured, and screens rose up, displaying footage from news organisations worldwide. And the news was grim. Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria had all announced their intentions to leave the European Union and NATO with immediate effect, returning to the Commonwealth of Independent States, now no longer a piece of post-Soviet hubris, and joining the Eurasian Economic Union, signalling far greater ties with Russia.

Were any more indications required, those same nations had expelled their American, British and Chinese ambassadors, with the French and Germans apparently remaining solely on sufferance. And a number of functionaries from those embassies, and businesspersons connected to those nations, had been steadily vanishing. Furthermore, economic alliances were being followed by talk of closer military and intelligence ties, "to ensure the security of our peoples and our common heritage in the face of an uncertain world." All the while, Russians signed up to the military in their thousands.

Event that was not it. For there were also reports of multiple sightings of the Winter Soldier, often followed by disappearances. And in some cases, when the disappearance was obvious, when a point was clearly being made, a red five pointed star was painted on the wall, with an inscription beneath, one seared into the walls: 'Forever Red.'

The message was clear: Russia was strong again. Russia would not bow to enemies of any kind. And if you joined up, if you served, then you too could share in the glory

"What the hell," Carol breathed.

"The Red Room have succeeded," Frigga said quietly. "What you see here are only the ripples perceptible to most mortals. The politicians and power brokers in the nations mentioned have had their minds altered. Loki informs me that agents of all powers opposed to the Red Room and their agenda are being hunted down, drained of all knowledge, then either thrown away as refuse, or executed as an example, with the knowledge taken leading to others. Internal dissenters are similarly treated. Others with secrets, of technology, of magic, or anything of value, are also being manipulated, though in more subtle fashions. The mundane world is also not the only one to feel the brunt of their wrath, of my grandson's power. He and a group of other enhanced mortals, ones apparently known as 'the Winter Guard', have hunted down and destroyed White Court, Black Court, Grey Court and Red Court enclaves. The White Council have withdrawn all their operatives from the Red Room's sphere of influence – they already have a war to fight. The wanded community, those not sensible enough to flee, and those with less power in the wandless community who could not, have been made to kneel."

"They can't hold down all that," Carol said. "No way. Not even with Harry."

"Right," Jean said. "Harry's strong, incredibly strong, but even he couldn't…"

"Control half a continent?" Frigga said. "They do not need him to. After all, to the mortal world, it appears that all of this is being done without supernatural intervention. And all they need him to do is to act in the right place, then exploit the changes he has made."

"And is no one trying to stop this?" Jean asked, stunned and horrified.

Frigga gave her an unusually cool, hard look. "Everything that can be done, is being done," she said. "My younger son, Professor Xavier, Lady Braddock, and the finest psychics and mental mages to be found are travelling far and wide, seeking to repair the damage and undo the alterations. Were it not for them, this would have happened far faster and been much worse. But this is not like HYDRA. To my understanding, this Red Room is backed by the might of a sovereign state, and though it now acts of its own will, its leader seeking to use my grandson to usurp his nominal masters, it has wealth, manpower, and rat-holes to spare. Additionally, the mortal organisation designed to combat it, SHIELD, was already weakened by HYDRA's poison, and is now in disarray." She looked grim. "Scum they may be, but they have chosen their moment well."

"And what has been Asgard's response, my Queen?" Uhtred asked, in a careful tone.

Frigga gestured, bringing up more screens. These showed failures at every mine, oil rig, gas pipeline, and every other source of mineral and metallic wealth in Russia, ones that spread into the lands where the Red Room was establishing its hold. All that came forth was a dry, dead, dust. "The resources they so prize, the ones that drive their machines and economy, turn to dust," she said, voice cold and hard. "Any they try to import will meet the same fate. Soon, their food will turn to ash in their mouths. Then, their water to sand. Their crops will fail, and any that they attempt to import will rot and wither. The land will become barren and inhospitable." Her eyes narrowed. "They may have the cruelty of demons, but they still have the bodies of men. They will not receive the honour of dying in battle, or of open war. They are vermin, and unless they learn the error of their ways very soon indeed, they will die as such."

Carol gulped.

OoOoO

 _Now_

"So, yeah, Harry's grandma is kind of terrifying. Who knew?" Carol said.

"It is fairly logical to expect the woman who raised Thor and Loki to be every bit as formidable as they are, and more besides."

"Good point," Carol said. "But yeah… everything was going crazy. I mean, the Red Room started with Eastern Europe, then they started turning to Central Asia; Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, those kinds of places. I even heard that they were gearing up to do something big on the Chinese border, though I never heard what."

"That part we know about, Miss Danvers."

"Yeah, well, there's one part you don't know about. At least, not how it happened."

"I know."

"And you want me to tell you."

"That would be helpful."

"Harry only told me –"

"Because he trusts you. I know. But we need to know what happened, and he's in no state to say. It's an important moment for more reasons than the obvious – the personal, the geopolitical…"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it," Carol said. There was a silence. "Who hears this?"

"Myself, Deputy Director Hill, Director Fury, and when she's reconfirmed, Deputy Director Carter. Your grandmother."

"I haven't forgotten who she is, you know. And who hears about it? The details, I mean, the report you put together."

"I can't tell you that."

"Not good enough."

"Then you can live without it."

"Miss Danvers –"

"You know what happened. It's not hard to figure out. And it's not exactly key to this story, is it?"

"It's more important than your realise."

Another silence.

"I can elide the details in the written report."

Another silence.

"Fine. I'll tell you about how that Lukin guy finally jumped off the deep end. I'll tell you how he killed the Russian President. And how he used Harry to do it."

OoOoO

 _Then_

In a location so secret that few knew existed as anything more than a patch of land, two groups drew up. At first glance, one gravely outnumbered the other; a cavalcade of jeeps and personnel carriers, carrying over seventy of the best trained and best armed soldiers in the Eastern hemisphere, if not the world, shadowed by ten 'Hind' attack helicopters, with five Su-25 jets optimised for ground attack circling 20 kilometres away.

The other, by contrast, was composed of nothing more than a middle aged man in a Russian general's uniform, a blonde woman with an artificial thumb, a practical looking set of tactical gear, and a cold expression, and a young man in a military baseball cap that concealed his face and fatigues, carrying a tray. On it were two glasses of vodka.

"Quite the entrance, Volodya," Lukin remarked, as another middle aged man, of average height, fine suit and furious expression, leapt out of one of the jeeps.

"What the hell have you done, Lukin?!" the other man snarled.

"Me?" Lukin asked, amused. "I have given Russia back the means to take what it is rightfully hers. I am making Russia great again, restoring her stolen might, regaining her lost respect. As I was doing before you called this meeting." He smirked. "If you had wanted a status report, Volodya, you could just have asked."

Volodya went nearly purple with rage. "'Making Russia great again'? _Are you insane?!"_ he almost screamed. "Explain to me, Lukin, how purposefully enraging Asgard by kidnapping _the son of its Crown Prince_ , upending the work of _decades_ in a _week_ , and in the process frightening every other nuclear capable nation on the planet so much that they are reaching for those weapons, is by _any_ measure making Russia great again?"

"They will not be a concern," Lukin said calmly. "Your plans were commendable in intent. But they were taking too long. And the world has changed, Volodya. Your plans are obsolete. They left us at risk of being left behind by the Americans, the Chinese, even the British, who have embraced the superhuman revolution. As for that fear, that is good. It means that Russia is being respected once again. You need not fear that they will reach for their nuclear weapons – even if they do, all I need do is say a word, and they will never fire them. Instead, they will fall on their knees in supplication and give them to us."

"And Asgard?" Volodya demanded. "Do you think that you can fight the gods themselves? My god, Lukin, they have already crippled our nation! Oil, gas, coal, metallic ore, all of it turns either to dust or to nothingness, and only, mark you, within our borders and those that your insane actions have prematurely brought into our orbit. Any we attempt to import meets the same fate. Soon, the country will grind to a halt, and then, it will fall to its knees."

Lukin shrugged. "The nuclear reactors will provide the necessary power," he said. "And soon enough, we will have the full secrets of arc reactor technology, not merely the crude copies we have scraped together from Anton Vanko's memories and Ivan Vanko's surviving blue prints. All will be provided for."

Volodya stared at him. "You have gone completely insane," he said slowly.

"Perhaps," Lukin said. "But if the alternative to insanity is cowardice, then I can live with it. As for Asgard, why would I worry? One god already does my bidding." He smiled pleasantly and took the glasses from the tray. It hadn't tremored by even a fraction, despite the heat beating down in the summer sun. "Vodka?"

Volodya stared at the offered glass, then narrowed his eyes and stared hard at the young man holding the tray. Then, they shot open wide and he took half a step back. "Is that…"

Lukin glanced casually at the young man with the tray, then knocked back his own glass. "Yes," he said. "Yes, it is. And no it isn't. He is something, someone, more than he was. Volodya, allow me to introduce you to the Red Son; a loyal child, unlike his wayward older brother, the Winter Soldier, and Russia's salvation."

Volodya looked at him, then narrowed his , he took a dozen deliberate steps back and raised a hand. Instantly, every single one of the soldiers, who had previously taken up positions of watchful readiness, dropped into firing positions.

"So, you won't be wanting the vodka, then," Lukin remarked, then shrugged, before knocking back the second glass, placing them both back onto the tray.

"I had a visit, Lukin," Volodya said. "From Captain America and Thor. They had a message and broke into my office in the Kremlin simply to deliver it, as a demonstration of how easy it would be for them to kill me. But it is not me that they want. They only want three things. The boy, unharmed. You, on a silver platter, preferably with the creature that calls itself 'Essex'. And the Red Room destroyed, for good."

Lukin's eyes narrowed. "And you mean to accept."

"In bringing him here, you have made my life much easier," Volodya said coldly. "A suitable recompense considering how much harder you have made it this last two weeks. And while I imagine they would prefer you alive, I am sure that your corpse would equally satisfy them."

Lukin's eyes narrowed further, then he barked out a curt order.

The Red Son discarded the tray and set himself, eyes aglow.

Nothing happened.

"I am not a fool, Lukin," Volodya said. "My men were equipped with the finest psychic shielding technology that can be found. Goodbye, old friend." He glanced at the soldiers. "Make sure that you don't hit the boy." He raised his arm again, then brought it down sharply.

Bullets roared out in a hail of metal.

Nothing happened.

" _Bozhe moi,_ " one soldier whispered.

As had happened only a few months before, thousands of bullets hung in the air like a curtain of metal. As before, they fell in a tinkle of metal at a gesture.

"You are not a complete fool, Volodya, but still fool enough," Lukin said. "My loyal son is not merely a telepath. He is a telekinetic too, as you should well know. Bullets are no trouble for him." He picked one up and examined it. "Even adamantium, enchanted bullets." He smiled at Volodya's sudden fear. "Red Son."

The boy snapped to attention.

"These men are traitors to Russia. Cowards, grovelling at American feet, doing the Americans' bidding. The soldiers are no longer fit to wear their uniforms or bear their arms."

The Red Son gestured, and all the soldiers' uniforms were ripped away, as their rifles rose away from their owners, sometimes dragging them along the floor as they tried desperately to cling on. Volodya snapped desperate words into his radio, and barely moments later, giant bullets, like fat, metal bees, arrived moments before the distant roar of their firing.

None of them had any effect, pinging off a barely visible shield as the rifles reloaded themselves.

"Destroy those helicopters."

The hail of gunfire continued for a moment, before their was a sudden, distant crunch of grinding metal, like five attack helicopters being turned into compacted scrap. Someone with especially sharp hearing might have heard some very brief, but nonetheless terrified screams.

Belova smirked cruelly at the shock and fear on the faces of the now naked and disarmed soldiers, and most of all on the face of Volodya.

"General Lukin, Alek…" the latter began.

"Make them kneel," Lukin said. "Oh, not you, Volodya. I want you to see this."

The Red Son, expression blank as a slate, didn't move. But each and every one of the soldiers was inexorably forced to their knees.

"Alek, please, don't!"

"Execute them."

Each of the rifles cracked once. There was a series of synchronised thumps, as a series of corpses with identically placed bullet holes between their eyes collapsed to the ground.

"You did not have to do that," Volodya said bitterly.

"Of course I did," Lukin said calmly. "Power is not power if it is not accompanied by respect. They did not respect me. You did not respect me. And now I will demonstrate why you should have done. Red Son. Make him kneel. No, make him crawl to me."

The Red Son looked at Volodya, forcing him to do as Lukin bade, slowly dragging him across the stony ground until he knelt before Lukin.

"Any last words from a traitor?"

"You call me a traitor? It is you who is the traitor!" Volodya snarled. "Your madness will be Russia's ruin. You have won the opening battles, but you will not win the war. The boy is your slave for now, but for how long? His family will reach across the stars to find you, and when they do, I will watch from heaven as you burn in the hell reserved for _traitorous scum!"_

Lukin snorted. "So you say," he said. "I think that you will be disappointed." He drew a pistol and pressed it against Volodya's forehead. His lips quirked in a wry smile. "Goodbye… old friend."

The pistol cracked.

Another body slumped to the ground.

The Red Son watched dispassionately, merely noting it as one less potential hostile and a completed objective, then turned to his master, awaiting further orders.

"Yelena," Lukin said. "Are those Rooks getting any closer?"

"No," she said.

"Good," Lukin said. "I would hate to waste more Russian blood." He glanced at them both. "Come. We are done here."

The Red Son nodded and obeyed.

It was his purpose, after all.

 **And on that dark, ominous note, we end. Maddie's plan is in pieces, Carol is practically plotting, Asgard are cranking up the vengeance, and Lukin has gone completely off the deep end.**

 **What will happen next? Where will Lukin's hubris lead? What will happen as plan after fractured plan collides? And just what did Maddie do with Harry's mind?**

 **Wait and see. In the meantime, please review.**


	13. Chapter 13: Forever Red - Part VII

**Right, here it is, the big one. The final chapter of** _ **Forever Red.**_ **And boy oh boy, is it going to be spectacular.**

 **Or rather, it was originally going to be the final chapter, but I quickly realised that it was too much for one chapter. But I promised and a promise is a promise. So, conscious of that, my promise, and the fact that the arc was getting rather drawn out, I wrote and wrote and wrote until I'd finished the arc. Then, also aware that most people don't want to read a 62,000 word chapter, opted to divvy it up into multiple chapters.**

 **Also, I'm knackered now and I have a job, so perhaps don't expect an update for a while after this.**

 _ **PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT:**_ _ **I am NOT INTERESTED in Anime or Manga, beyond a loose fondness for the works of Hayao Miyazaki. Equally, while I am pleased that my work gives people ideas,**_ _ **please**_ _ **don't bombard me with plot bunnies you want to see. I have very specific plans about what I'm going to do next. If you have so many ideas, adapt them and write them yourself.**_

 _ **Also,**_ _ **please**_ _ **stop copy and pasting bits from power set listings on the Marvel Wiki. It is**_ _ **very**_ _ **boring and completely unnecessary. While I am human and fallible, I am thoroughly familiar with the history and canon powers of every character I use, and many others besides. What I do or don't do with them is my business. If you want to discuss this with me, do it by PM.**_

 _ **Sorry for getting a little shirty, but it was getting on my nerves.**_

 **Guest:** **Oh yes, Harry dealing with what was done to him, what the Red Son did, and events that take place in these following chapters, informs his character development throughout much of this book.**

 _Now_

"Okay, Miss Danvers, you're done for now. Thank you for your testimony."

"Yeah," Carol said, standing up. "Whatever. Call me the next time you want me to relive one of the worst weeks of my life."

"I will. Please send Miss Grey back in."

"Which one?"

That got her an unamused look.

"What? There's two of them now."

"Madelyn. Otherwise known as Maddie or, indeed, Rachel."

"Okay, okay, I'm doing it."

A long few moments pass. The door opens.

"Okay, Miss Grey. Are you ready?"

"I think so."

"Good," Coulson said. "Now, how about we pick up where we left off. You had been sent away to another of Doctor Nathaniel Essex's… I'm not sure if the appropriate word is laboratory, base, or possibly morgue."

"They served all three purposes."

"Fair enough. You were sent away with a consignment for study. Your plan had gone wrong. What happened after that?"

"Well…"

OoOoO

 _Then_

Maddie had obeyed Doctor Essex. She hadn't really had any other choice – if she'd blinked, he'd have been onto what she'd done. If he hadn't been already.

Worry and fear ran in circles in her mind, gnawing away at her, so that her body had worked on autopilot, taking the consignment to the designated location and easily packing it up with a few thoughts. She was so deep in her worries, over what would or could happen next, so frustrated in her helplessness about what to do next, that she almost didn't notice that when her psychic powers touched one of the containers, they made contact with a brush of psychic energy.

Frowning, she examined the container. It was a smooth cylinder, with an interface that she recognised as fitting in to certain parts of the lab for analysis.

For a moment, she stared at it, wondering what it was, and what she should do with it.

Then, she made her decision. Childish as it might be, the idea was simple. Doctor Essex was going to hurt that which she cared about - or, at least, she dimly recognised Harry as fitting the criteria for something/someone she cared about. Remy excepted, it wasn't something which she'd had any experience with. Therefore, she was going to hurt something he cared about.

With a thought, the canister broke neatly in half and an orange energy seeped out, forming into a cloud.

"What are you?" Maddie murmured.

The reply was almost instant.

 _I'm the genie of the lamp, luv, and as thanks for freeing me, you get three wishes._

There was a pause.

"None of that made any sense."

 _No, I suppose it wouldn't, not to you_ , the voice replied. It was telepathic, that much was obvious.

"You're a spiritual entity," Maddie said, frowning and getting down on her haunches to examine the orange cloud. "Except… there is something about your mind that is familiar."

 _Yeah, we've met, luv. You were mind-controlling me and my friends into sitting back down onto our beds and being good little prisoners. Which makes it all the more surprising that you're popping the one me out of my prison – not that I'm complaining. It was bloody boring in there. I'm just not sure why you did it._

Maddie frowned. "Subject Starsmore," she said, then paused. "Jonothon. Jonothon Starsmore. A living chamber of psychic energy, a psionic reactor. I remember you. How did you come to be in this state?"

 _Jono for short, luv. And I got a little too close to that big friend of yours, 'the Beast'. Turns out that he's apparently the cousin of Thor's lad, according to the lovely Carol. Who'd have thought it, eh?_

"He is no friend of mine," Maddie said. "And really?" She frowned. That would mean that 'the Beast' was related to her. Not a notion she enjoyed considering, she had to admit.

 _Anyway, yours truly was wrung like a chicken. Next thing I know, I'm an experiment in a jar._

"Not any more," Maddie said, then frowned. "Your essence… it isn't stable, outside of your body."

 _Well, no, I'd think not. I'm sort of a ghost now, luv._

"Ghosts are psychic imprints left by the dead," Maddie said. "Usually, they simply go through the motions of their old lives. Or go insane. You are more like a free-willed spiritual entity."

 _There's a difference?_

"A significant one," Maddie said, sitting cross-legged and frowning at the cloud of energy that made up this particular spirit. "You should be able to manipulate your essence into a solid form."

… _What?_

Maddie stared at him, then nodded as she understood. "Doctor Essex never taught you what you were capable of," she said. "For fear that he wouldn't be able to contain you." Her expression turned bitter. "A being like you, after all, couldn't be _programmed_."

 _Excuse me?_

"You have no reason to trust me," Maddie said. "But…" She related her recent revelations, and her recent desire to be something… worthy. She poured it all out, in fact, not knowing why she was confessing all this to a disembodied spiritual entity, just that she had to talk to _someone_.

 _Well,_ Jono said eventually. _Can't say I'm entirely surprised. Carol reckoned you were a clone of wonder boy's cousin._

Maddie took a moment to parse this. "Yes, they thought so too," she said. "But I am the same age as she is. And much of my life has been spent in the real world or dimensions close to it, where the temporal disparity is limited. Equally, I remember my early life and training well enough to know that it isn't simply programming."

 _Well, that's a puzzler. Are you sure?_

"Doctor Essex would not bother to implant false memories into me. He believes that I am totally under his control," Maddie said bitterly.

 _Bloody hell. I'm sorry, luv. I'm really sorry._

Maddie's brow crinkled. "Why? You had nothing to do with it."

 _What? Oh. I mean that I feel sorry for you, luv. It's called sympathy._

"Oh," Maddie said, frowning. "I see. I… thank you."

 _Yeah, well. You've been dealt an absolutely rotten hand by the sounds of it. But now you're trying to change things._

"Trying, but not succeeding," Maddie said unhappily. "What is the point if all my attempts to improve matters for others and myself simply make them worse?"

 _Hey, hey. From what I understand, you've already made it a bit better. Your kid cousin's mind is somewhere safe –_

"I would question that definition under the circumstances."

 _Relatively safe, then. Safer than it would have been. He ain't been lobotomised, his mind is intact. You can still fix things,_ Jono said, tone reassuring.

"But how?" Maddie wondered aloud, then paused. "I may not be immediately able to help my… cousin." She stopped again. Cousin. She was uncertain of her status, of what kind of being she was. She'd never questioned it before, but she was now. And it had certainly never occurred to her before now, even when both Harry and her doppelganger, Jean, had offered her kinship, to think of herself as part of a family.

"But," she continued, after a long moment's thought. "Being Worthy does not mean merely protecting my cousin. You are here. I think that I can help you." She started to reach out.

 _Whoa, wait up, luv. I appreciate the offer, but what are you planning?_

"To help you form your energy into a practical physical form," Maddie said.

… _Bloody hell. You can do that?!_

"I believe so. You are composed of psychic energy. I have been learning various means and methods of manipulating psychic energy all my life. Illusions are simple enough, and with your energy to give it solidity, I believe I can help you create a psychic construct body," Maddie said.

There was a long, stunned pause.

 _Bloody hell._

"You have already said that," Maddie pointed out.

 _And I'm sayin' it again. Bloody hell. Bloody fucking hell._

Maddie waited as Jono deliberated.

 _All right. Let's give it a go. But next time, ask first, okay luv? If you're trying to be better, rule one is not going into other people's minds and messin' about with them without asking. Not unless you don't have a choice. Or they're trying to kill you. Which, I suppose, falls under 'don't have a choice'._

Maddie paused, then nodded, reaching out again, then hesitated. "If you will permit me?"

She felt… the psychic equivalent of a smile, she supposed. _Yes, luv. I do permit. Just be gentle. This is my first time, remember._

Maddie stopped and narrowed her eyes at the energy cloud. "That was sexual humour, wasn't it?" she said. "Remy sometimes made such jokes."

This time, there was a psychic laugh. _You're learning, luv. It's a way to break the tension._

"Understood," Maddie said. "Though at least next time have the courtesy to be funny."

That got another, louder laugh. _I'll do my best, luv._

"I suppose that that will have to do," she said, in arch tones. "Now," she said, taking a deep breath. "Let us begin."

OoOoO

 _Now_

"You can create psychic constructs that complex? And maintain them?" Coulson asked.

"That was a unique scenario," Maddie said. "What I was doing was less the creation of psychic construct, more the manipulation of existing energy into construct form, then leaving the guiding sentience behind that energy – Jonothon – to maintain it. It helped that he had… memories, I suppose, of being in human form and shape. Those were a useful framework."

"So you used his memories as a framework, guided the energy into place, then let him hold it there?"

"An apt summation."

"That is genuinely remarkable, Miss Grey."

Astonishingly, Maddie blushed slightly. "Thank you," she said.

"You're welcome. What happened after that?"

"In truth? Very little, for some time. My next serious involvement was… was when matters came to a head."

"I see. Very well, Miss Grey. Thank you for your time. We'll adjourn for now, and fill in some of the gaps. Send in Agent Romanova."

A pause.

"Hello, Natasha."

"There's no need for the soft serve, Coulson. Where are you up to?"

"Miss Grey and Miss Danvers have covered their sides of the missing two weeks – or at least, the relevant parts."

"And you want my side of it."

"Correct."

"Okay."

OoOoO

 _Then_

"Twelve days," Fury said. "Twelve days. Is that really only how long it takes to set a continent on fire?"

"So it would seem," Loki said quietly.

Thor's jaw muscles clenched, and he said nothing.

Fury sighed, and rubbed at his eye. He looked exhausted. To be frank, they were all exhausted, emotionally if not physically.

"Just about everywhere East of Berlin and West of Kashgar is following the Moscow line – the new Moscow line, since the Russian President has mysteriously resigned his position, along with just about all his hardcore loyalists, and gone into seclusion. They've been replaced by a bunch of malleable nobodies who are almost certainly Lukin's patsies," he said. "We've got good intel that suggests that Red Room bases are opening up all over Asia and Eastern Europe, and they're reactivating a few old ones, including Mount Yamantau."

"Yamantau?" Thor asked shortly.

"One of the last big Red Room facilities to open up before they were originally, unsuccessfully shut down," Fury said. "The Russians insisted on decommissioning it themselves, and considering everything else we had to handle at the time, we weren't that interested in pushing. As far as we know, it's a research and development facility specialising in alien technology."

"Like Area 52," Tony said. "Or are they calling it Project Blue Book again?" When Fury eyed him, he smiled an unpleasant smile. "Like a SHIELD Agent of my acquaintance once said to me, if I can get into it, so can someone else less friendly. Tighten up your security."

Natasha rolled her eyes, but said nothing.

"Oh, believe me, I will," Fury said, in tones that suggested that SHIELD's Cyber-Security unit was about to have a rocket put under them again. "Point is, the Red Room are flexing their muscles, spreading as fast as they can. They don't want to get caught cold in one place like HYDRA were, and by taking out the Russian President and replacing him and several others with puppets on telepathic strings – which I think we can safely assume they have – they've got one of the most powerful nations in the world at their disposal." He glanced at Thor and Loki. "Asgard's intervention has put their power projection, internal and external, on a timer, though. No army in the world can function without transport, much less support systems. Which leads to the question of what they're going to do next. Hill reckons that Lukin will turn his people inwards, consolidate what they've got, and start by bringing the Chechens to their knees. Or killing them. I don't think he's that picky."

"Perhaps he has already tried, and," Thor began.

"Harry as we know him is off the board as an effective player," Fury said. "Red Room programming isn't infallible, as we well know, but it's damn close. And that's before you take into account an Omega Class telepath who's ever stronger than he damn well is. She's got under his guard before, and from all you've said, she was having the better of their brawl. Factor in exhaustion, drugs, starvation, thirst, and probably torture, and stubborn as the kid is, he is not going to be able to resist her."

"You assume that she would betray him like that," Thor said.

"LeBeau may believe that there's something in her, and the prophecy and his letter may hint at it, but for now, I am going with the worst and most likely case scenario," Fury said. "It's not a betrayal if she was never loyal to him in the first place. Harry's a smooth talker when he wants to be, and he's magnetic, thanks to Wanda's blessing and his own personality. But I somehow doubt that that is going to overcome a _lifetime_ of programming. Especially since her boss is apparently dead – odds are that she'll fall back on old ways."

"He is dead, Nicholas," Wanda said. "I made very sure of it."

"Considering that we once thought the same thing about Arnim Zola, and if I remember what Strange said right, we're talking about the creature that damn well taught him everything he knows, I'm disposed to suspect otherwise," Fury said. "For one thing, cloning technology exists and I believe that they possess it. For a telepath that strong, it's a get out of jail free card – the Shadow King proved that."

Wanda's hands clenched into fists. "Then I'll kill him again," she said coldly. "And again, and again, and as many times as necessary."

"Careful Wanda," Clint said.

"Now is not the time for careful, Clint," Wanda snapped. "At best, we've been firefighting! The Red Room are always one step ahead of us because they have Harry and unlike us, they know what they're doing!"

"That and the fact that they have a hideaway where time moves far faster than it does here, meaning that they can conduct multiple missions back to back in normal time," Natasha observed.

"I wasn't talking about that," Clint said. "You're sounding a lot like your father used to, was what I meant."

Wanda's eyes widened, a spark of something furious, something that bordered on madness, something that had once driven her father to become a whispered fear equalled only by the Winter Soldier, a nightmare with the powers of a wrathful god.

Clint, a man whose powers extended to an enhanced set of eyeballs and a casual disregard for his own safety, stared at her down.

A lot can be said in a locked stare, even when one of the participants isn't a sorcerous mutant without equal and the other a man who can see souls. More still can be said when the two participants were once lovers.

Ultimately, Wanda looked away. "I suppose I am," she said. "But that's not important right now. What are we going to do?"

"The only thing we can," Steve said. Everyone turned to him. It wasn't a conscious thing. It wasn't even the words. If he'd said 'I think we should have lunch', everyone would have still turned to him, attentive and waiting on what suggestions he would make about the composition of their midday meal. "The Red Room are playing their own tune. We have to make them dance to ours. We need to draw out the Red Son."

"What do we have that would persuade them to send him?" Bruce asked.

"Me," Natasha said. "You have me."

OoOoO

 _Now_

"So, you volunteered yourself as bait."

"It was the logical choice. Lukin was driven by ego and pride, to recreate and expand the old power of Russia and the Red Room. The existence of three high profile defectors from the Red Room, even if one of them wasn't publicly known as one, would be a sore, niggling away at his pride. I estimated that he would want to take out at least one of us, to show his power, Russia's power, and to demonstrate that we were obsolete. Ivan's main value is as an information broker. With an Omega Class telepath on their side, even one not fully grown, they didn't need that. He's also low profile, and has spent a lifetime ensuring that. He could wait. Sending out James, Bucky, alone and making him look vulnerable would immediately raise suspicions of a trap. The Winter Soldier is never vulnerable. He is never easy prey. And, again, he is publicly believed to have spent most of the twentieth century as a HYDRA trophy," Natasha said. "I am public, an Avenger. I am widely known as a defector from Russia, and those who know anything about the Red Room know where I come from. I am the Black Widow. And I have a lifetime of experience at making myself look more vulnerable than I am."

"You staged a press conference."

"Discussing the Red Room, blaming them for what was happening, with a few coded insults slipped in," Natasha said. "That would draw mixed reactions from Lukin. On the one hand, he wants the Red Room to be feared. Public awareness helps with that. On the other hand, they, we, always did their best work from the shadows. We, the Avengers, didn't know the details of Lukin's endgame, how he planned to take on the world when they inevitably figured out what kind of weapons he had at his disposal and went after him out of self-preservation. But we _did_ know that it wasn't ready yet. The Red Room was spreading again, but too fast. Lukin didn't want to be caught cold like HYDRA were, and he had a lot of people he could just recall to the ranks, by persuasion or force. He'd already been doing it for over a year, after all. A telepath and the resources of a nation, even crippled by Asgard, meant that he could do it a lot faster. However, they didn't have time to consolidate. SHIELD and Yeltsin's purge, plus the passage of time and the chaos of nineties Russia and its former satellites, meant that a lot of key players from the old days were gone." She folded her arms. "His inevitable reaction was obvious – kill or capture me and the Red Room's reputation for terror gets bolstered even further. They're revealed, so run with it."

"And that's when they attacked."

"Yes."

OoOoO

 _Then_

Natasha opened the door of her safehouse. Well, one of them. One of the better concealed ones, at that. But concealment was as concealment did.

That was why she was not surprised to Yelena Belova lounging in her armchair, a cruel smile on her face, as a fire crackled in the grate and cast deep shadows. "Hello, Natasha," Belova said. "Tell me, do you have any refreshment to offer a weary traveller and countrywoman?"

"Sure," Natasha said, putting down her bags and going to the fridge. "I could spot you a beer." She pulled one out, lobbing it at Yelena, who caught it easily. Then, Natasha paused, frowning exaggeratedly. "Oh, damn. I don't think I have a bottle opener. That's a pity." She smirked slightly. "Does your fancy new thumb come with a suitable attachment?"

Belova's eyes narrowed.

"No? That's a pity. You'd think that the Red Room's budget would extend to a swiss army thumb," Natasha said, pulling out another bottle. "I mean, they value you so highly, don't they?"

"All these jokes do is show your fear, Natasha," Belova said, cold, seething rage caressing every syllable.

"Last time we fought, I took your thumb," Natasha said. "The only reason I didn't take everything else was because I was hoping that the lesson would get through your skull. Apparently not." She casually knocked the top off her beer on the table's edge. "I'd suggest you try that trick," she added. "But it's a skill that comes with age." She sipped her beer. "So. Lukin didn't like my little press conference, then? Was it the part where I revealed the return of the Red Room and that they were behind this, or the part where I implied that he was an arrogant little man over-compensating for his many personal inadequacies?"

"A little bit of both," Belova said.

Natasha nodded. "I thought that'd be it," he said. "You really think that this'll go better than last time?"

"Last time," Belova said. "We were alone."

The deep shadows vanished, or at least, thinned, revealing a series of figures.

First, a man of little more than average height, hard, tight muscle, lean, verging on cadaverous, and unnaturally pale, with gleaming metallic tentacles lashing idly.

Second, an Indian woman with a blank, almost mechanical expression and an arm that had transformed into a cannon that hummed with power.

Third, a man in a suit of red, blue and white striped armour, almost as streamlined as Iron Man, with the glow of an ersatz arc reactor at its heart.

Fourth, a blonde woman whose expression of intense concrentration was fading as the darkness receded, gathering around her hands.

And finally, a tall young man stood in the middle of the room. He had the build of an athlete, or a martial artist, though now he was bulkier. He was taller, too, though only slightly – in general, he seemed to have grown into his proportions somewhat. He had pale skin, paler even than before thanks to a lack of sunlight, messy dark hair with a white streak at the front, and green eyes that were as flat, hard, and blank as the emeralds they so often resembled. The Red Son stood in Natasha's living room, and there was no recognition in him of her as anything other than a target.

Natasha looked at them all, expression impassive, then turned to Belova. "A psychotic failure and Weapon X reject, an Iron Man knock-off, a mutant with some talent for concealment, what looks like a robot, and my teammate's brainwashed teenage son. I'd be disappointed if I didn't know that this was the best you could scrape together," she said. "Seriously, If you're expecting shock, fear, or even surprise, Yelena, you're going to be very disappointed."

Belova let out a mocking chuckle. "Always the brave face, Natasha," she said. "You claim to be better than me. And when we last fought, you were. Why? Because my mind was clouded. Drugged. Obsessed. Now, I realise what makes me truly better than you. You broke the cardinal rule of the Widows. Not leaving – caring. You care about others. Others who will inevitably leave you, fail you, and never, ever return your affection. I have you to thank for this realisation, actually. So... thank you, Natasha. Thank you. You have taught me well. Now, let me teach you."

She strode over to the Red Son and idly trailed a finger across his shoulders, then around his face. "You and I both know the turmoil you feel deep down. Because you care for this boy. Why? Is he the child you and Comrade Winter could never have? Or is it because you resemble his mother and feel you can fool yourself that you are playing a part when you take her place in his life, maybe as a prelude to taking her place in his father's bed? Or…"

She took the Red Son by the chin and examined his face, cruel smile widening. "Is it his bed you are preparing? It took a long time to break his resistance, Natasha, a very long time indeed, even with the help of two telepaths. It took so long and was so thorough that there wasn't really much left. Well, anything, really. But as we broke that resistance, we saw all sorts of memories. Including one where the two of you shared a bed. He was a boy then, sickly, though old enough to know that he shared a bed with a woman." The cruel smile showed a tooth or two as she cast a look at Natasha. "Old enough to enjoy it."

She turned back to the Red Son. "But he is more than that now. Time passes differently where we are. Soon enough, he will be a grown man," she said. Suddenly, she lunged, capturing his lips in a ferocious, hungry kiss, hand slithering down his back to grab his rear in a vicious, possessive gesture. The Red Son didn't respond. She didn't mean him to. That, after all, was not the point. After a few moments, she broke away. "Mmm. Still cooking, but almost done. And when he is, Natasha… I will show him the real meaning of pleasure."

Natasha barely blinked, coolly categorising the act, noting its intent to provoke, then filing it away to be addressed at a later date. She also noted that the woman with black energy humming around her hands looked profoundly disturbed. From his body language, she could tell that the armoured man was similarly unnerved.

"Would you like a white cat to stroke during your next villainous monologue about how you intend to molest a child, Yelena?" she asked. "I don't have one to hand, but I'm sure that I have a white fur hat somewhere that could serve the same purpose."

Blotches of red appeared high on Belova's cheeks.

"Enough of these games," Rossovich, Omega Red, snarled, tentacles twisting in earnest now. "Let us take her."

"Hey, at least let me finish my beer," Natasha said, casually knocking her bottle back. She put it down on the table and grimaced. "Warm. Disgusting. These American beers never do well in the heat."

Belova paused, glanced at the fridge, then touched her previously discard bottle of beer. It was warm. Too warm.

"I know you're kind of new to this," Natasha said, as the house began to melt away around them. "So I feel I should give you a tip. This is what we call 'a trap'."

Belova didn't even have time to snarl as a large blur slammed into Omega Red, sending the vampiric mutant cyborg flying. A mere half instant later, that blur resolved into Thor.

Belova's eyes widened and she spat an attack order. But as the Red Son raised a hand to unleash psychic destruction, nothing happened, and for a moment, there was the almost comical spectacle of the world's deadliest super soldier staring at his hand like it was a malfunctioning piece of machinery. Belova stared at it too, expression one of dawning horror.

"Like I said," Natasha said casually. "Trap."

In that moment, the rest of the Winter Guard attacked, thinking/hoping that an unnarmed Thor was a less dangerous Thor. They could not have been more wrong.

First, the Dynamo and the Sentinel unleashed powerful energy blasts, sufficient to reduce concrete to rubble, steel to a twisted ruin, and humans to ash. Thor shrugged them off like a warm shower, delivering a brutal body blow to the Sentinel, doubling her over, then reaching out and grabbing the Dynamo armour's arms and easily dragging it downwards, crushing the gauntlets and forcing the armour to its knees, then ripping the metal mask off, before reaching out, grabbing it by the torso and ripping outwards, tearing it open like wet cardboard. After that, he reached in, grabbed the stunned pilot, ripped him out with little care for the damage that sharp edges and detached neural links might have, and hurled him to one side.

The Sentinel recovered faster than expected, being mostly cybernetic and the doubling over a mere side-effect of a mostly human nervous system, closing at blurring speeds to deliver a textbook series of brutal disabling attacks, catching Thor off-guard. This culminated in a savage elbow strike that would have torn through a foot of titanium and actually drew a spot of blood from Thor's lip. He wiped it away and smiled a hard smile.

"That's good," Natasha said. When Belova turned to her, disbelieving, she added casually, "He's been looking for a punching bag to take his frustrations out on for a little while now. We let him have this because we figured that your minions might actually make him sweat a little."

"We will do a great deal more than make you sweat," Belova said darkly. "Even though your sorcerous murderer has dampened his psychic abilities –"

"Oh, that's not Loki," Natasha said. "And his abilities aren't dampened, as such, just blocked. He'll figure a way around it any… moment… now."

And indeed, the Red Son's eyes suddenly flared with a dark golden light, the area around him humming with deadly power.

"Then why are you smiling?" Belova asked suspiciously.

"Because that psychic block was just to keep him out of the way while Thor tore through your team," Natasha said. "The Iron Man knockoff is down and out, Omega Red is probably still healing and being dealt with by Steve and Clint, Loki's got your darkforce manipulator, in case you were wondering where she went – so you aren't teleporting out of here – and Thor's busy turning your fembot cyborg into scrap."

"But he has them back now," Belova said, smirking. "And you have no one to protect you." She looked around. "You did not mention the Hulk, or Stark. Perhaps I shall make them watch as I destroy you, or as he destroys you. Or perhaps I'll make them do it. Either way, Natasha, the Red Son will be my instrument of your destruction."

"Good luck with that," Natasha said calmly. "I think that he won't be destroying anything any time soon."

Belova frowned, then barked out a couple of orders in Russian. The Red Son did not comply. Instead, he was locked in place, power flaring around him, sweat pouring down his forehead, as a telepathic battle raged.

"When you succeeded in taking away his mind, you effectively crippled his telepathic abilities," Natasha said. "Your 'Red Son' still has all the power in the world, and against someone with no or rudimentary telepathic abilities, that means he can roll right over them. But when you bring the most skilled telepath in the Nine Realms into play…"

Belova's eyes widened.

"… He's in trouble," Natasha finished, then set herself. "So. Since it's just the two of us, how about a round two?"

Belova glared at her, icy blue eyes burning with cold fury.

OoOoO

 _Now_

"You beat her."

"Obviously. She wasn't drugged up, like last time, but she was frustrated to begin with and didn't have the strength the drugs gave her. Additionally, she hadn't changed her style that much, despite having had ample time to do so. It didn't take long."

"And Professor Xavier subdued the Red Son. With Cerebro?"

"No. He had an uplink in case it was needed, but using it came with the risk of overwhelming an already fragile mind. As a result, Xavier preferred to use skill rather than raw power to beat the Red Son. Since he didn't have any will of his own and Professor Xavier was familiar with the psychic combat techniques he'd been taught – though precisely how he was familiar with them he hasn't said – it didn't take all that long."

"All the Winter Guard members were apprehended."

"All that were there, yes."

"Oh yes. Alexei Shostakov. The Red Guardian. The supposedly dead Red Guardian."

"A clone. As we found out, the Red Room could easily clone people, through use of Essex's technology, and a derivative of the serum in Carol's blood ensured stability."

"It must have been quite a shock."

"You could say that."

"Also a logical tactical choice – no one would be expecting a dead man. But the Avengers were."

"We were expecting an infiltrator, yes. Even Lukin wouldn't simply send the entire Winter Guard to kill me, not just to make a point. A sniper could do that. Two tried. James and Clint disposed of them."

"For the sake of clarification, James is…?"

"James Buchanan 'Bucky' Barnes."

"Okay. So, the Winter Guard were sent for another reason. A Trojan Horse?"

"An attempt at one."

"They weren't counting on you to break their control on the Red Son."

"Not exactly. We weren't counting on what we found out."

OoOoO

 _Then_

"So," Steve said. "This is the Raft."

"SHIELD's newest top security prison," Fury said. "I'll admit, we took a few cues from Azkaban, though without the Dementors, of course."

"Of course," Steve echoed, as he looked down from the observation room. In the centre of the room, the Red Son was strapped into a restraining chair, and covered in so many clamps, bindings, cuffs, inhibitors that only his eyes were clearly visible. As cold and dangerous as an icy green sea, they focused on some point in the middle distance, flicking to track any movement they picked up.

All of the Avengers, though they had done their best not to show it, had been watching him, looking for even the slightest sign that Harry was in there somewhere.

So far, the evidence was next to non-existent.

"Who else is in here, anyway?" Tony asked, looking to change the subject.

"Couldn't you just hack in and get that answer, Mister Stark?" Fury asked pointedly.

"I could, but that would take too long."

Fury eyed him. "Strictly because it could be relevant, aside from the Winter Guard and Sabretooth, this facility currently houses Count Nefaria, still in that wine bottle Loki stuck him in, Emil Blonsky, otherwise known as the Abomination, Doctor Samuel Sterns, who has taken to calling himself 'the Leader', Carl 'Crusher' Creel, otherwise known as the Absorbing Man, and Cain Marko, otherwise known as…"

"The Juggernaut," Bruce said quietly.

"We also have cells prepared for Arnim Zola, Baron Zemo, Lucius Malfoy, and Magneto," Fury said. "In the latter case, just in case he decides that playing nice no longer suits his agenda."

"And for me," Bruce said. "At my own request." He nodded down at Harry. "In case something like this ever happens to me."

Tony's expression had darkened and he was clearly about to cut loose with something scathing aimed at Fury, when the door to the room below opened and Loki walked in, pushing the wheelchair of Professor Xavier.

The Red Son did not recognise them, not as Harry would, merely watching them with cold, hard eyes. Even when the gag was removed, he did not speak, merely continuing to watch them.

"Hello, Harry," Professor Xavier said. "I am Professor Xavier. The man with me is Prince Loki, your uncle. You may not recognise us at the moment, but this is because of damage done to your mind. We can help you rectify this. Is there anything you would like to say?"

The response was in curt Russian. The Red Son's expression did not change, not even when Loki waved a hand, and unconsciousness began to claim him.

"What was that?" Tony asked.

"He stated that he was the operative designated 'Red Son'," Thor said shortly. "And then a number."

"Name, rank and serial number," Steve said. "More or less."

"Except that they have stolen his name, his rank, and given him this number," Thor growled.

"It's the same formula that I was supposed to spout during my Winter Soldier days," Bucky remarked.

"We'll get through to him, Thor," Steve said.

"I am beginning the examination," Professor Xavier said, pitching his voice to carry to the intercom. The Red Son was completely unconscious.

"Acknowledged, Professor," Fury said. "Go to work."

"Get settled in," Bucky said, looking to Thor. "This is going to take a while."

The examination dragged on for several hours.

Finally, it ended, with both Loki and Professor Xavier looking tired and grim.

"Well?" Thor demanded.

The two men exchanged a look.

"Thor," Loki said. "I am sorry. But…"

"What?" Thor demanded. "What are you sorry for?"

"It seems that the Red Room decided that Harry's mind was too much trouble to simply warp and manipulate," Xavier said heavily. "Beyond six relative months ago; two weeks, in normal time, I can only find echoes of memories. Harry's personality, his inner self, has not simply been buried, Thor. It has vanished."

The expression change on the faces of the Avengers was near instant. Some faces, like Tony's and Clint's, went dark with anger. Bruce closed his eyes, veins throbbing green. Bucky and Natasha both went blank. Steve's face went pale.

And Thor…

"You mean," he said, in a very distant voice. "My son is… gone?"

"His mind has vanished," Loki said. "Normally, I would say erased. But considering Harry's power, what we know of the future, and the involvement of Harry's mother, I would say that the fact that the world has not been devoured either by a collapsing paradox or an enraged Phoenix would suggest something else: when he could bear the pain and psychic assaults no more, his mind fled. The Red Room did not care, and programmed the empty shell."

Tony's eyebrows shot up. "That can happen?"

"It can," Professor Xavier said. "Sometimes, when put under great strain, even an ordinary mind can flee to the depths, hiding in the subconscious. A telepath, especially one of Harry's power, could flee much further."

"Then where would he have gone?" Thor demanded impatiently.

"Somewhere he feels safe," Xavier sighed. "That is all I can say for certain."

There were a number of traded looks. "What candidates are we looking at?" Steve asked eventually.

"Hogwarts," Loki said. "Asgard. He could even have found his way to the Dreaming – Dream is his uncle after all, after a fashion through Lily, and he believes greatly in obligation and duty. He would give a fleeing nephew sanctuary. Or…" He trailed off, going pale. "He couldn't. No, that's _impossible_. Well, impossible for anyone who isn't him, I suppose…"

"Loki," Thor said in the growl of a man who is on his last nerve, and it is _fraying_.

"You recall when Doctor Strange opened a doorway for Lily in London?" Loki said.

"Yeah," Natasha said, remembering as the others did a crack in reality out of which poured blazing white light. "You said that it led to somewhere called 'the White Hot Room'."

"Otherwise known as 'the Heart of the Phoenix'," Loki said. "It is the sanctum of Destruction, of the Phoenix. Lily's home." He sighed slightly. "And while Harry is in many respects a young man and proven as such, he is still a boy in many others. What young boy in pain and fear, so much so that he has literally been driven out of his mind, would not wish to flee to his mother?"

"Except that if he had, his mom would have fried every single one of those Russian sons of bitches about five seconds after he turned up on her psychic doorstep," Tony pointed out, then looked up. "Oh, and if you're planning something like that, can you give us a heads up? I'd like the chance to make some popcorn first. Thanks."

"This is not a joke, Tony," Thor growled.

"Who's joking?" Tony asked, tone completely serious. "You want to kill every last one of those Red Room scum for what they've done to Harry. I was kidnapped, I know the look; I saw it sometimes on Happy, Rhodey and Pepper, usually after a bad nightmare and when they thought I wasn't looking. And I will help you. I will dedicate every last cent, every last scrap of armour, every last bit of brilliance that I have to help you do it, because your kid is my friend, one of not all that many, Pepper loves him to bits, and he's one of my daughter's fucking godfathers. He's protected my family, and since I can't return the favour, I can do the next best damn thing – avenge him. Avenge what was done to him, and burn those motherfuckers and all their creepy minions to the fucking ground. If that means sitting back and watching while his mom does it, fine. I'll happily do that. I'd just like the chance to get some popcorn and enjoy it as they get what's coming to them."

Everyone was silent for a long moment.

"Thank you, Tony," Thor said eventually. "This will not be forgotten."

Once, Tony would have shrugged and played it off. Now, eyes fierce and hard, he nodded.

"Heartwarming as this may be, none of the suggested locations are anywhere nearby, save for Hogwarts, and that's relative," Fury broke in. "However, considering that Dumbledore noticed when JARVIS briefly took up residence in Hogwarts when Zola attacked him, and that I somehow doubt that Odin or Frigga would miss their grandson's disembodied and doubtless freaking the fuck out spirit wandering Asgard, I think we can rule both of those out."

"Agreed," Steve said. "But they're still worth checking. I'll call Albus. He's been Harry's headmaster for three years – even if Harry's mind isn't in Hogwarts, he might have some idea of where to look. Thor, head to Asgard to check it out. While you're there, get Jean. She found him before, she's one of our best bets for doing it again. Loki, check out the mystical options. I know that you've said that Dream and the like are higher up the mystical totem pole than you are –"

"Just a tiny bit, yes," Loki said dryly.

"I also know that if there's anyone in the universe who can do it and do it fast, it's you," Steve said. "An old friend of mine likes to say that he's the best there is at what he does, even if it's not very nice. That phrase applies to you too." He turned to Xavier. "Professor, I know you're not part of my team, and you've already done a lot tonight, but…"

"The Cerebro remote uplink is in my car," Xavier said.

"Thank you," Steve said simply.

Suddenly, there was a loud explosion.

"What was that?" Bruce asked, worried.

"Natasha's Creepy Wannabe, the Queen of Emo, Dracula with Tentacles, and the Russian murderbot are loose," Tony said.

"Actually, she's Indian, Tony," Bruce said. "And a cyborg."

"Whatever."

The room the Red Son was in went dark. When the emergency lights turned on again, the Red Son was gone.

"The Darkforce teleporter," Loki said grimly. "The Red Room have their weapon back."

Fury glanced at his watch. "And a whole ten minutes later than I expected," he said mildly. "They're slipping."

OoOoO

 _Now_

"So, it was all a plan."

"Obviously."

"They thought that you were trapping them, when in fact they were trapping you, but really, you'd built in a further trap."

"That makes it sound unnecessarily complicated. The short version is this: we outsmarted them."

"Though you didn't anticipate Harry's mind not being present."

"No. We didn't. That was… an unexpected complication."

"So, what happened next?"

"They did exactly what we expected them to do. We leaked them some bait. They took it."

OoOoO

 _Then_

"Colonel Shostakov, right on time," Belova said, smiling faintly as her cell collapsed. "We are all here? Good. And Creed?"

"I felt that he could be useful," Shostakov said. "And it was the work of a moment to release him."

Creed smiled, or more accurately, bared his fangs. "Miss me, frail?" he asked.

Belova's lip curled. "Not likely," she said. "Now, we have work to do before we leave."

"Like what?" Shostakov asked.

"The Avengers as a collective are immovable," Belova said, as she led the Winter Guard into the depths of the deserted prison. "Every time they seem set to topple, they right themselves, and become twice as hard to shift as they were before. So… what do you do when you wish to move an immovable object?" Her smile widened as they descended to the very depths of the prison, to a stasis chamber, containing a vast, even gigantic, man, with buzzcut red hair, a face like granite, and muscles like beer barrels. "You unleash an unstoppable force, of course."

OoOoO

 _Now_

"You expected them to unleash the Juggernaut?"

"Of course. The realistic options were him, Blonsky, or Nefaria. Blonksy and Nefaria have their own, uncertain agendas, and Blonsky is particularly mercurial. The Juggernaut, by contrast, is consistent. He can be relied upon to be himself, to do what he is inclined to do. He would make sense as a target. Additionally, of the three of them, he is, to be blunt, the stupidest, and most vulnerable to telepathy," Natasha said. "Powerful and dangerous enough to be attractive to the Red Room as a distraction, while also remaining relatively easy to contain with Xavier on site."

"It was still a big risk. You couldn't be certain of what the Winter Guard would do next. Belova, after all, is infamously unpredictable."

"Actually, since we'd had Xavier implant suggestions into their minds while they were unconscious and in transit to the Raft, we knew exactly what they would do next. And we'd prepared for it. Conveniently, it fit her pattern of behaviour: it's not enough for her to know she's good, she has to prove that she's the best. In other words, a simple escape from SHIELD's highest security prison wasn't enough. If she could regain lost assets, right under the Avengers' metaphorical noses…"

"She took them to the Institute."

"Yes."

"I know that a number of the students at the Institute are powerful, and so are their teachers, but at night, against trained agents and sadists like the Winter Guard? Only Wolverine has experience of that kind of work."

"That's why we'd already evacuated the Institute. And we left someone to house-sit."

OoOoO

 _Then_

"This is a mistake, Belova," Shostakov said grimly, as they advanced on the sprawling manor house. "Bukharin was stripped of his armour, you are still injured, and who knows what has happened to the Red Son." He glanced back at the young man. "And who is he, anyway?"

"As General Lukin told you, Colonel," Belova said, inwardly reflecting that unfortunately, while Essex had succeeded in bringing back Shostakov with all his memories, restored from some kind of back-up, he had brought back his conscience as well. The same conscience that had, in her view, led to his original body's death at the hands of Director Fury. "He is a Russian youth, one born with great power, and eager to serve the state. Regrettably, recently his mind was damaged in an accident, meaning that now he has trouble making decisions for himself outside of proscribed mission parameters. We guide him and assist him in serving his country, much as you do."

Shostakov looked a little sceptical. A problem, Belova thought, but one for later.

"And our mission now?" he asked. "I was informed that I was to extract you once you had acquired what knowledge you needed."

"And you succeeded admirably, Colonel," Belova said. "We achieved what we needed to within that prison."

"Unleashing the Juggernaut, a monster, on the world?" Shostakov demanded. " _That_ was what we were supposed to achieve?"

"Yes," Belova snapped. "It was. The Avengers will contain the situation, but it will occupy their full attention, as it will of the master of this school, Charles Xavier, who has imposed his will on several volunteers that the Avengers captured from our Academy. We are here to free them, and perhaps others as well, from his will, with the power of the Red Son. As for my health, I will be fine. As for Bukharin, he could yet be useful disabling and repurposing various of this mansion's defensive measures, along with the Sentinel. Now, be quiet!"

Shostakov subsided unhappily.

Belova nodded, satisfied, then turned to Bukharin and the Sentinel. "Situation report," she said curtly.

"Defenses deactivated," the Sentinel said, syntax as blank and robotic as her expression. "All registered lifeforms are in an unconscious state."

"And if they wake up, this Mansion… oh, it has some of the most marvellous technology," Bukharin said. "I recognise Stark's work, Banner's, and a few others, all creating a wondrous synthesis –"

"Yes, yes," Belova said impatiently. "I get the idea. Red Son, link us up."

The telepathic connection snapped into place.

 _Bukharin,_ Belova continued mentally, without missing a beat. _Stay out here, monitor the situation, warn us if anything changes. Sentinel, guard him._

 _I obey,_ the Sentinel replied. Interestingly, her mental voice had a bit more personality than her physical one. Another potential problem for later.

 _Shostakov, Petrovna, Red Son, Creed, with me,_ Belova said. _And Creed… unless you encounter a fully awakened Wolverine, you are to behave, is that understood? Or you will be explaining to Doctor Essex why you did not._

Creed growled soundlessly. _I was running ops like this when your great-grandpa was a twinkle in his papa's eye, Belova_ , he said. _You do your part, I'll do mine._

 _Good,_ Belova said. _Alarms are disabled?_

 _Yes._

 _Good. Open the doors._

The doors opened silently, revealing a hallwork drenched in shadow.

 _Agent Belova,_ Petrovna said, tone uneasy. _Something is not right. Something about the shadows. Some of them are not right._

 _She is right,_ Shostakov said. _I could not tell you what it is, but something is wrong._ He cocked his head sharply. _Listen. On the edge of hearing._

Belova did. While she derided Shostakov for his soft heart, the man – or clone – was no fool and as a super soldier, he had very sharp sharp ears.

At first, she heard nothing. Then, when she really, properly strained herself, she heard a low, dangerous hum.

 _Red Son_ , she began.

 _Don't bother,_ Creed said darkly, sniffing the air. _It won't do any good. I know that sound. And that smell, too. We've been played._

 _Who?_ Belova demanded, unnerved by the touch of grim fear in his voice. _How?_

Before he could answer, Bukharin broke in, panicked.

 _Agent Belova! All the life-signs have vanished, like… like they were never there!_

Suddenly, the doors slammed shut behind them, and a cold feeling settled in the pit of her stomach as the humming grew louder.

"I am afraid that if you are looking for my friend old friend Charles, his colleagues and his students, you are going to be extremely disappointed," a cold, cultured voice said suddenly, apparently emanating from every metallic fixture in the room, from the very walls themselves. "I, on the other hand, have been very much hoping that you would pay a visit."

Then, a large patch of shadows at the start of a corridor was sloughed away, revealing a tall figure, eyes glowing a deadly, electrical blue.

"Good evening. My name is Magneto," he said. "You kidnapped my daughter. You kidnapped my daughter's godson. You tortured them both. You have twisted the latter into your weapon," he said. The glow in his eyes blazed brighter, in concert with the soft, cold rage infusing every syllable. "I would like to discuss this."

At that last word, defensive emplacements all over the lawn and within the house, previously deactivated, emerged.

"And once we are done, if you are _very_ lucky… I might actually allow some of you to live."

OoOoO

 _Now_

"And did he?"

"Yes, though Harry excepted, he only did so because he thought that Thor would want a piece of them too."

"How public spirited of him."

"When it comes to revenge, Magneto believes that sharing is caring."

"So I see. What about Harry?"

"We didn't expect him – or rather, the Red Son – to be there. However, the back-up, just in case, was for Magneto to subdue him."

"That didn't work out so well."

"No. No, it didn't."

OoOoO

 _Then_

The Winter Guard were scattered across the lawn of the Xavier Institute for Gifted Children.

Bukharin, his pulped remains slowly dribbling out of the crumpled ruins of the armour he'd summoned about himself.

Rossovich, flayed with his own tentacles, spikes formed from the metal that had been torn from hem pinning him to the ground.

Shapandar, the Sentinel, on her knees, sobbing, as the emotional inhibitors that had cut off her free will and prevented her from realising what she had been turned into had been destroyed.

Creed, bound in place by metal railings, much like the one that Bucky had stabbed him with, railings that pierced his body and bound his arms and legs in place, his body closely resembling a pounded hamburger as it healed.

Shostakov, dangling from powerlines that held him by each limb, suspended in mid-air.

Petrovna, fumbling around, helpless after being blinded by a carefully calibrated twist of the signals from her optic nerves to her brain.

Belova, unconscious, her hands and feet engulfed in metal that had flowed into shape around them, holding them at angles that would not be possible without broken and dislocated bones, ripped muscles and torn sinews.

The pride of the Red Room, defeated, crippled, and bound. All in less than two minutes.

This was not surprising. After all, they were merely men and women, however armed, however enhanced. What they had faced was nothing less than a force of nature.

So it was fitting that the only one still standing, still fighting, was one who could contend with Magneto on even footing. For the Red Son was a force of nature in his own right.

This time, unlike his last battle as Harry, the roles were reversed. This time, the Red Son was going in for the kill, while his older, more skilled, and more powerful opponent attempted to avoid direct confrontation and instead outflank him.

Of course, unlike last time, he was not facing a fellow psychic, and attacking telepathically was not an option, thanks to the helment. Harry might have thought of getting in close and forcing telepathic contact through skin contact, but the Red Son didn't. Instead, he unleashed a series of by the numbers attacks: telekinetic blasts, the transformation of objects into bullets, manipulating the earth, surrounding plants, trees and other objects to trap his opponent, and the manipulation of ambient defence systems to attack from all angles.

Each of these attacks would have left many opponents dead, or at least, severely incapacitated. Even some of the Avengers would have been in trouble.

But Magneto was not.

Blasts were blunted and bullets batted away, while the earth and greenery reached up in vain as he rose above them, and the control of wires and ambient weaponry was decided by the greater will – and while the Red Son had no real will of his own, if there was one thing that Magneto did not lack, it was willpower.

"Give up, boy," Magneto said, tone inexorable as his advance, though not without some strain. While he dealt with head on attacks easily enough, and telepathic attacks were blunted by his helmet, he had to work to make sure that the helmet was not telekinetically flicked off, while also blunting a hundred telekinetic attacks to his veins, brains and other innards every single minute.

And what made it all the more difficult was that he was trying to contain this situation without doing the boy too much harm – he was a victim in this, as Magneto's own daughter had been, something that made the blood boil in his veins. Those responsible would scream his name as they died, if they did not scream the names of Thor, Loki, and Wanda instead, those others who were owed vengeance.

The boy stared at him, expression blank. Then, in curt but flawless Russian accented English, he said, "I cannot. I am the Red Son, formulated for the purpose of defeating Russia's enemies. By opposing our mission, wounding and killing my comrades, you have made yourself an enemy of Russia, Erik Magnus Lensherr. And for the honour of my comrades, my country, and my general, I will ensure that you are defeated."

Magneto's eyes narrowed. "You may try, boy," he said. "But the only reason you still stand is because of my forbearance."

The boy, the Red Son, simply stared at him. Then, he blurred, and only Magneto's instinctive shielding prevented the punch from taking his head off, as an instinctive wave of omnidirectional power sent through the earth prevented a follow-up.

"So, they have taught you to enhance your speed, and your strength," Magneto said, rubbing the blood from his mouth. "Impressive. But my son is far faster than you are, and without the advantage of surprise, that trick won't work a second time." He stood up straight and stared the Red Son down. "I would tell you the truth of what you are. I would tell you how you have been lied to, and used, by the masters you proclaim such loyalty to. But I have seen situations like this before. It would do no good. My only recourse is to subdue you."

"You may try."

"Oh, my dear boy… I will do far more than try," Magneto said, as the basketball opened up behind him, and something huge rose out of it with a building, thrumming roar that set every loose granule of dust and earth vibrating into the air. "And once I am done, I will likely owe Charles a new jet."

The Red Son set himself.

OoOoO

Less than a minute later, a man-sized object same sailing down to land in the middle of Bayville's thankfully deserted main train station, smashing through the glass roof and putting a significant crater in the concourse.

Just as the figure, a young man with dark hair that had a strange streak of white in it, struggled to his feet, he immediately had to throw up his arms as an empty passenger train reared up like a striking snake, and struck like an avalanche with a horrifying shriek of screaming metal.

The train drove him back a good seventy feet, pressing hard against a dark, red laced golden bubble of telekinetic energy, before that bubble surged outwards and forwards, power condensed behind a razor's edge, slicing the train's carriages in half, before ultimately batting them to one side.

Then, the young man soared up into the air, through the hole in the glass that he'd left. And as he passed through the hole, the rest of the roof fractured and shattered into deadly shards, shards that followed him like a sparkling, silvery cloud, lit up by the flames below and the starlight above.

With a gestured, he directed the cloud into two pincers, which swung out wide, then converged on his opponent, an older man in black and grey white edged clothing. The older man, unperturbed by this assault, raised two clouds of metal shards, condensing them close, into a net, almost, then slamming them into the glass, pounding it to sand, which whistled harmlessly past him.

Then, gesturing, his two clouds of metal debris roaring towards his younger opponent, who swatted them away ably enough, but as he did, a skip summoned from far below slammed into his back, stunning him. That opening was enough to send bands of metal to bind his hands, ankles, and eyes, through which was transmitted a savage electric charge, one that would have felled most men and women of any age.

But the young man he was facing was not most. His physiology, growing stronger and stronger by the day, could take far more than most could even survive, while his Red Room conditioning meant that even if he felt pain, it was categorised as an operational irrelevance unless it signalled critical damage.

So instead, he accelerated forward towards his enemy, who reordered the cloud of metal into a series of hammers that pounded away at the young man, driving him lower, and lower, and lower… until a vast fist, the size of a passenger plane, moulded from the station, roared skyward, clamping shut around around the Red Son. Golden red-streaked power flared from within it, but all that did was cause the fist, now glowing a deadly electric blue, to hold even tighter.

Then, the counter-blow came, in a huge, twisting column of water struck at Magneto, as if the river was being fed through a fire-hose. That broke the giant hand's grip, allowing the Red Son to soar free, battered, bloodied, but not broken, and to reach up with much of his remaining strength. At first, nothing seemed to happen. Then, a passenger plane found itself hijacked and dragged down, transformed into a giant, 575 ton metallic bullet full of explosive fuel and screaming civilians travelling at hundreds of miles per hour, aimed straight at Magneto.

But as Magneto had underestimated the Red Son, so had the Red Son underestimated Magneto, who reached out and, stopping it with a roar of effort.

"No," he said, as the shocked, terrified, and relieved pilots stared at him through the cockpit windows. "I will not allow you to further stain the body you have stolen with innocent blood." As easily as breathing, he reached out to the cockpit radio. "Gentlemen, I apologise for this brief interruption. My opponent clearly never learned any manners. Allow me to send you back on your way." With that, he shot upwards, enveloping the plane in a magnetic field and taking it with him.

But as he did, the Red Son followed, power glowing around his fists, soaring up the outside of the jet.

"All right, you little bastard," Magneto muttered. "If that's how you want it." Then, now sure that the plane had regained flying speed, he levelled it off, and summoned iron particles from the earth and sky, forming them around him in battle armour that would have honoured a medieval knight. Then, as the winds roared past him, sending his cape billowing out behind him, magnetically clamping his feet to the skin of the jet he let the Red Son come.

This was going to get messy.

OoOoO

 _Now_

"So, that would be why we're in the process of replacing a bisected, crumpled train, and most of Bayville's train station, and dealing with hysterical reports from an A380 full of passengers that God and the Devil were fighting in the skies over Bayville."

"I'm sure that Magneto will be pleased by the comparison."

"Which one?"

"Either. Both."

"He started to take it too far, though, didn't he?"

"He didn't have much choice. The Red Son was programmed not to stop, not to give in, not to submit, ever, outside of certain programmed circumstances – when playing Trojan Horse, for instance. And someone that powerful can be very hard to stop if they don't respond to normal things like pain, even for Magneto."

"And the Red Room didn't care."

"No. No, they didn't."

OoOoO

 _Then_

Anyone who looked up into the skies over Bayville that night would have seen many strange things: flashes of blue and golden-red light that lit up the clouds like Chinese lanterns. Lightning that was only occasionally followed by thunder. And a hint of the Aurora Borealis, many hundreds of miles to the south of where it should be.

And to a select few within relatively close range, all of these strange sights and many, many more, were sometimes accompanied by a sound, a sound only heard by those who really strained their ears: a clash, as of metal striking metal, like the knights of old locked in battle.

Then, all of this was dwarfed as every light in the city abruptly went out. Those still up muttered in confusion and switched their lights off and on. But soon, it became clear that the lights were not the problem. Because streamers of light were reaching up from the ground and down from up in the sky, converging on a dimly visible figure.

It was often argued, by those who witnessed – or claimed to have witnessed – these events, as to what exactly happened next.

Did the figure around whom the light converged raise a hand? Did he – or was it a she? – point at their opponent? Did they wait, perhaps saying something, a final warning to bow down or be destroyed?

No one knew.

Then, a fearsomely bright burst of energy, a beam so bright it was almost a physical object, lashed out like a spear and hammered into something unclear, something humanoid.

And when the spots of light faded from the witnesses eyes, it seemed that everything was gone, and the battle was done.

But some claimed to have seen something else, after the burst of light: a figure, falling, trailing sparks of dying golden light like a comet, while their opponent followed – whether to minister to their wounds or to ensure that they were fatal, no one knew.

No one, that was, but for Magneto himself, who slowly descended to land beside the smoking, scorched and blinded Red Son, who'd left a considerable crater, ten feet across and six deep, where he'd landed. He was a horror to behold.

His combat gear had been largely burned, blasted or ripped from his body, and almost all visible flesh discoloured in ugly scorched reds, bruised purples and browns, pus yellows, and burnt blacks. His hair was scoured clean off, even his eyebrows, leaving behind only very faint stubble and a smell of scorched keratin. His right hand, instinctively curling into a fist, was horrendously damaged, the result of even enhanced flesh repeatedly impacting reinforced steel, like a bloody bag full of cracked nuts, fingers, some broken, ending in cracked and torn nails, where those nails were not ripped away entirely. But the left hand, the left arm was far worse, the majority of it being a blackened ruin, where one of his own fireblasts had been contained, lashing back at him, and leaving only a few parts still intact, those defined by patches of angry red amidst the blackness and weeping pus. The trail of horror crawled up the left side of his face, a puckered, angry red, and covered his left eye, which looked to have been boiled in its socket. It was all the evidence, were any needed, that this fight had been absolutely savage.

Magneto himself was not unscathed. He had his own bruises, his own cracked bones, to attend to when he had the time. But they were far fewer in number, and compared to his opponent, he was almost fresh, while the other was a nigh broken ruin. Anyone else would have simply folded, have given up, accepted that they could do no more.

Yet still the Red Son was not done, having blunted the worst of the blast with his telekinesis, and he stumbled to his feet, though carefully – some of the pain he felt, while mostly ignored, signified torn tendons and ligaments, ripped muscles and damaged joints, meaning that care must be taken. But that care diminished as he forced his telekinesis to help him stand, providing an unbroken framework of pure thought, and began casting about for Magneto. He could not use the eyes of another – Magneto had ensured that by making sure that he had landed in a scrap yard – so he had to rely on his own senses, even though his ears were most probably ringing profoundly from impact, if not already half deafened from the roar of jet turbines.

"Don't do this, boy," Magneto said quietly. "You've lost. Accept it."

"Never," the Red Son spat, sounding almost like Harry for the first time, and lurching towards Magneto.

Who sighed and raised a hand. "So be it," he said. "I had not wished to do this, for it comes with terrible risks, risks of permanent damage. But frankly, the risk is far less than what you would inflict on youself, and others, given the chance. I am sorry."

Then, he clenched his hand into a fist.

The Red Son froze. It was clear from his expression that he wanted nothing more than to surge forwards, but his very body had betrayed him.

"What is the nervous system?" Magneto asked. "It is a network, one through which countless electrical impulses are fired, following commands from the brain, the body's command centre and supercomputer. What is blood? A vehicle, for oxygen, which is carried by blood cells which in turn require a protein called haemoglobin. To make haemoglobin, they require iron. 'Iron enough to make a nail', as the old rhyme has it. That is true, more or less, and your blood, for whatever reason, has enough metal in it to make several nails. Which means, my boy, that I can stop both the signals from your brain from reaching your muscles, and I can stop the blood in your veins from, frankly, going anywhere. Were it not for the quite serious risk of seizures, strokes, heart attacks, and other forms of unpleasantness, I would do this more often. Once upon a time, I did."

Then, suddenly, he grunted, and his eyes flared electric blue with newly expended power. "Hmm. Internalised telekinesis," he said. "I thought that was what was boosting your strength earlier. Clever trick. But you have already lost the contest of power, boy. And as for a contest of wills, that is one that you will lose before it even begins. While you have no will of your own, will is something that I have never lacked – and while I did not write the book on willpower, I most certainly fought the man who did." He brought his clenched fist down slowly, forcing the Red Son to his knees. "And that is what this has culminated in. You have fought far harder than any I have faced in many years, far harder than your masters deserved. But this battle is done. And your theft of this child's body is over."

And the Red Son just stared at him with his one remaining eye. For he had been programmed never to give in, never to surrender. And though neither of them knew it, this fight was not over yet.

OoOoO

 _Now_

"I would have thought that that would quite definitively end the fight."

"So we all thought."

A silence.

"From the sounds of things, Magneto was quite brutal."

"If anything, he wasn't brutal enough."

"That's…"

"Cold? I know. But necessary. He wasn't, we weren't, dealing with Harry. We were dealing with a Red Room weapon. Worse, we were dealing with something that wasn't even human – normally, the Red Room programming overlaid and partially incorporated the subject's previous memories. For one thing, it helped in infiltration. But the Red Son was a blank slate. There was little or no humanity in him, meaning that it was more like dealing with a robot, one with uncompromising fundamental programming. If it had decided that it couldn't defeat or escape Magneto by conventional means, it might have decided to flatten Bayville and its surroundings, killing hundreds of thousands in their sleep. I understand why Magneto did not want to use his full strength, but that decision came with risks."

"Very well. In the meantime, the Avengers were fighting the Juggernaut."

"We were."

"Anything to add about that?"

"Not much. We fought. We won. Marko isn't really bright enough to do anything unusual."

"Still, for the sake of completeness…"

"Fine."

OoOoO

 _Then_

When Thor had come to Earth as an Avenger, he had been both astonished and delighted that, in the Hulk, Midgard had produced a being that could equal his physical might. When a new champion of Cytorrak had arisen, he had been similarly delighted; for while he no longer fought simply for the joy of combat, he was not so much a fool as to deny the thrill of a challenge, to deny that he enjoyed the chance to, for once, not have to hold back.

Right now, however, that challenge meant that he was being delayed from finding and retrieving his son's body, so as his son's mind could be found and restored to it. And to make matters worse, as soon as Marko had sensed his step-brother's touch in his mind, he'd immediately gone mad with rage and tried to find and kill said brother. Since Xavier was in the prison complex with him, he had not had to go far. And because of that, the Hulk could hardly be unleashed; if nothing else, he would be needed if one of the other prisoners got loose. Meanwhile, the rest of the Avengers were occupied evacuating non-combatants or ready to prevent a prisoner escape.

Which meant that Thor now had to not simply beat the Juggernaut into submission, but restrain him, which was an entirely different and very difficult proposition. Especially since he currently lacked Mjolnir.

"What's wrong, Blondie?" the Juggernaut taunted, as he bore down on Thor. "Had to take your toy back to the toy store?"

"I have no need of Mjolnir to defeat the likes of you," Thor growled, managing to divert the Juggernaut's forward and downward momentum to one side, before countering with a brutal uppercut to his descending jaw. The blow would have levelled the prison complex if delivered to its foundation, and much else besides. As it was, all it made the Juggernaut do was spit blood and chuckle.

"Is that your best shot?" he sneered.

"Not even close, monster," Thor snarled.

"Too bad," the Juggernaut said, still sneering. "Because this is one of mine."

With that, he wound up for a punch that would have sent Thor to the Moon – and possibly through it.

But when it struck, the Asgardian was not there. Instead, he'd swerved out of the way, then, while the Juggernaut was off-balance, moved in with a series of short, brutal and efficient strikes to the Juggernaut's mid-section, bending him over and sending him stumbling away.

"Heh," Marko said, satisfied. "That's more like it. I don't know why that freaky-deaky lady with the metal thumb let me out, but…" He chuckled. "If I get a chance to beat on the people who put me in here, and little Charlie too, then I'm not gonna complain."

Thor's reply was a savage snarl, striking Marko in the face so had that magically enhanced bone cracked under his fist, as the bones in his knuckles cracked in sympathy. He didn't notice. He didn't care. All that mattered to him was that this creature was standing between him and his chances of helping his son. Something had snapped deep within, and now, two weeks of frustration and grief and barely repressed helpless rage coalesced into a single point of something dark, red and incandescent, that manifested in white-hot lightning crackling around his fists. And just before his vision clouded over, he heard himself roar, "The only beating, _monster_ , that will be received today… _IS BY YOU!"_

OoOoO

 _Now_

"So, Thor lost his temper."

"He had reason."

"I'm aware of that. Still, the results cracked the foundations of the prison, were heard two hundred miles away, and set off seismometers across the Eastern Seaboard. Ultimately, it took the Hulk to restrain Thor, and both Loki and Xavier to calm him down – after they got done with putting the Juggernaut to sleep again, not that he really needed much help with that."

"I'm not one to endorse an emotional reaction like that. It was unhelpful at best and doubled up the problem. But with what had happened to Harry, what Thor had just discovered, and my own experiences of the Red Room and what they do to people, I am honestly surprised it didn't happen sooner."

"That much is true. There's a reason Thor's not taking part in these interviews yet, one quite apart from the fact that even his father couldn't pry him away from Harry's side at the moment." Some papers were shuffled. "Okay, thank you, Natasha."

"Not a problem. You want to speak to Maddie again."

"Yes, I do."

"Parts of it, she might not be able to describe in detail."

"I'll get as much as I can."

The door opened. The door closed. The door opened again.

"Agent Coulson."

"Miss Grey. How are you feeling?"

"I… I am well, I suppose."

"Good. Now, I'm going to ask you to relive what is quite probably a very difficult memory –"

"I know which one you mean, Agent Coulson. I am ready."

"Good. If you need to break off at any time, feel free to do so."

"Thank you, I will."

OoOoO

 _Then_

Maddie had not been idle this last couple of weeks. The first few days had been spent granting Jono physical form, then teaching him how to maintain, and the basics of manipulating it. This part he was less eager to learn about.

"I'd rather master what I've got in front of me, luv, if you follow what I mean," he'd said. "For one thing, thanks to you, I can actually speak physically for the first time in for-bloody-ever, for which, luv, I am eternally in your debt."

Which also explained why he was still around, despite Maddie's offer to acquire transport for him wherever he wished to go.

"I've still got plenty to learn," he said, when she asked him about it. "And if I do wind up collapsing back into a ball of floating orange mist, I'd rather do it around someone who can put Humpty-Dumpty back together again, rather than in public, where I might cause a bit of a scene." He raised a hand, which was currently grey. "Also, luv, I'm still working on the finer points of my appearance. I'd rather not wander out of here resembling a bloody Care-Bear, thank you very much." His expression softened. "Also, luv, I owe you. And while I might not be capable of turning reality upside down when I'm in a snit, or close enough to reality as makes little difference if you're at ground zero, at the very least I can offer you someone to talk to."

"I'm not sure if I want to talk," Maddie had said. "I'm not sure if I would know where to start."

"Well, that's your choice, luv," Jono said calmly. "But I'm sticking around, for the time being. Being on your own is no fun at all."

Maddie suspected that there was more to it than what he was saying, but since she didn't consider him a threat to her and she was trying to stick to the 'don't enter the minds of people you don't have to without asking' thing, she wasn't picking up any indications. Besides, his state as living psychic energy made him peculiarly both easier and more difficult to read – easier when she actually tried, harder to pick up anything passive.

And she had had a greater priority: figuring out how to get back to the Red Room base and getting the golden feather back, then returning it and what it contained to their proper places.

The former was manageable, if not easy – while she had never been taught how to tear through the walls between various dimensions, let alone how to identify which one to aim for, she had observed how to operate the technology at Doctor Essex's laboratories that made it possible.

The latter, however, was more problematic. She could get to the Red Room base and was fairly confident that she could take it and everyone within it out by herself – an assertion made with such calm confidence that it had made Jono's jaw hang loose. Literally, in fact: it fell off before he hurriedly reshaped it. She could even find the feather quite easily, if it was there. However, the problem lay in three parts:

First, finding Doctor Essex, since there was no guarantee that he'd be present. As she explained to Jono, Doctor Essex had a tendency to vanish periodically and turn up in some very unexpected places. He could quite easily be off doing research. However, she calculated that it was most likely that he would not be far from the Red Son, as he wished to study in detail the physiological development of the young man in question

Second, Doctor Essex was still suspicious of her, suspicious enough to send her away even when the prospect of the Avengers and their righteous wrath loomed, a prospect that loomed larger with every atrocity the Red Son committed on the Red Room's behalf. If she turned up, he would know it, and he would be prepared, with control phrases and who knew what else. Unless she was very fast and quite lucky, he'd be able to get at least one out, and then it was all over.

Third, finding and subduing the Red Son. Despite the number of missions she could comfortably attribute to him, he'd been given sufficient cloaking technology that she mostly had to do so by looking at the negatives (where there should be a psychic spike associated with a psychic of a certain calibre using their powers to a noticeable degree and there wasn't), which was largely guesswork, and by picking out those incidents where the sheer amount of power used had exceeded the ability of the cloaking technology to mask his presence. This took time, and by the time she could pin him down, he'd already gone. Indeed, with the time differential, he was sometimes already on another mission.

No, finding him would not be easy. Not unless he was forced into a lengthy fight where he had to use significant amounts of power and she could catch him in the act, so to speak. One advantage of attacking the Red Room base to get the feather back was that it might draw him to her – he was the logical choice of asset to go up against her, if only because he was the only one (in his former incarnation as Harry) to have done so and given a good account of himself.

Subduing the Red Son, though, was not a prospect that worried her. The kind of programming that they'd put in place might have begun developing its own personality, but she doubted it. It was still relatively early days, it hadn't had anything to define itself against thanks to Harry's actual mind having left the building, and she was certain that it was being kept on a very tight leash.

Going by her analysis of the strikes and examination of the sites via Astral Projection – while she was hardly a trained assassin in the style of the Black Widows or the Winter Soldier, she could read the operations of a combat psychic like a book – the Red Son functioned as little more than a literal living weapon: he had enough brains to take orders, and that was about it.

This meant that what she would be facing would, essentially, be a psychic robot that was less powerful and less experienced than she was by some margin. What had made Harry a difficult opponent was his ingenuity, his adaptability, the wild card of his magic (and while she couldn't rule that out, she hadn't seen any real evidence of its usage), his intelligence, and above all, his willpower. In stripping him of his mind and will, the Red Room (though, technically, she had done it, they'd intended to do much the same) had also stripped him of any real chance of matching her in psychic combat.

Of course, he would occupy her attention, so if she was attacked by Doctor Essex and/or Red Room assets in the midst of overpowering the Red Son, then things could get difficult. That was why Jono was coming along, despite her insistences that it could be dangerous.

"Luv, I'm basically a bloody ghost, who's had his chest blasted open, his neck and back snapped like dry spaghetti, and been stuck in a fucking jar," he said. "I'm not one to tempt fate, but I would honestly like to see them try to come up with something worse to do to me." He folded his arms. "Besides. You can operate through me – point me in the right direction, tell me what I need to grab, and you won't even have to get near that Essex bloke."

Maddie had to concede the logic of this. "Very well," she said. "Then we had best move quickly. Every moment we wait, there is a greater chance that Doctor Essex will discover the truth about what I did."

So they did.

"This machine, then, it opens doors into that weird bloody dimension they were keeping us in?" Jono asked, examining the machine in question. It looked very much like a circular gate, approximately 7 metres across, and Maddie typed in commands on a strange symbolic keyboard.

"It opens doors to specific locations in the spirit world with suitable receiving stations," Maddie confirmed, as the gate suddenly flashed with blue light, a horizontal burst of almost watery energy shooting outwards, before stabilising into a puddle like disc.

"Fuck me," Jono said, startled.

"Maybe later," Maddie said dryly. When Jono's eyes popped, she smiled faintly. "You are not the only one capable of sexual humour."

"So I see," Jono said, voice slightly strangled – an interesting feat, considering that his throat was, like the rest of him, a psychic construct, and his need for air was not so much a pressing need as a bad habit. "You're a quick learner."

"Indeed. You can take your eyes off my rear now."

"Right," Jono said, eyes guiltily darting away. "Sorry, luv."

"Thank you. While I can understand how it would attract your attention, with your known heterosexuality, the fact that Remy informs me that it is perfectly formed, an assertion supported by attention previously garnered from the majority of heterosexual and bisexual men, and lesbian and bisexual women, I would prefer if you did not stare. With your known energy projection abilities and the instability of your psi-form, it is entirely plausible that you could end up staring so hard that you end up staring so hard that 'you burn a hole in them'," Maddie added mildly. "I would rather you didn't do that. I like these trousers."

"I… you're screwing with me again, aren't you, luv?"

Maddie smiled faintly. "Perhaps."

This light interlude was brief, however. Because that's when things took a turn for the unexpected.

OoOoO

 _Now_

"Unexpected. In what sense?"

"We expected to arrive in Doctor Essex's laboratory in the Nevernever, specifically the one merged with a Red Room base. We expected to face armed and dangerous enemies. We did not expect to arrive in a strange land where we saw one man kill another, then the dead man greeted us and, on our asking where we were, he and his brother informed us that we were most certainly not in the Nevernever. Or at least, not in the part of it we had expected. If anything, they said, the Nevernever was a small part of the realm we had now entered."

"So, very unexpected."

"Yes."

"What was this realm called?"

"It had many names, apparently. But the part we were specifically in was known by one above all: The Heart of the Dreaming. And its master had diverted us there. He was expecting us, the dead man said."

"Who was he?"

"Dream. Dream of the Endless."

OoOoO

 _Then_

"Okay," Jono said, in a low, uneasy voice as the passed through gates made of what looked like ivory. "I'll say it right now, luv. This place is weird.

"It is," Maddie conceded, glancing around, expression grim. It wasn't anything overt, but there was something off about their surroundings. Something not quite right.

"Right. So, why aren't we just turning back around, saying, 'sorry, wrong number', and redialling?"

"For a number of reasons. First, the dead man, the one who called himself Abel, said that his master had diverted us here. From that it can be inferred both that he intended us to be here and that he is a being of truly vast power. While we cannot tarry, we also cannot afford to offend such a being," Maddie said. "Second, while Doctor Essex did not encourage my study of mystical beings, I know that ones of such power do not intervene in mortal affairs lightly. It could be worth our while, if the lord of this place seeks to aid us."

"You think he will?" Jono asked sceptically.

"Perhaps. Or he could seek redress for the damage I and Harry wrought upon the Nevernever in our battle, though I do not think so. While the shockwaves spread far and wide, structural damage was localised and temporary," Maddie said. She paused. "And as for the third reason… while Doctor Essex did not encourage my study of mystical beings, he encouraged my study of certain realms, like the Astral Plane. This place feels alike to that realm, very much so – the Astral Plane is a realm of dream and nightmares, after all. The Nevernever is a similarly malleable realm."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that if what I suspect is true, even if we redialled and it did not lead back to here, we would still be travelling through this being's realm."

Jono slowly absorbed the implications. "… Bloody hell."

"You say that a lot."

"Only when it's justified, luv. And it has been, recently. A lot."

Maddie considered this. "I suppose that is so," she conceded, then paused as an astonishingly tall and reedy man in old fashioned formal clothing with pince-nez glasses perched on a long, pointed nose opened the double doors in front of them.

"Lady Grey, Master Starsmore," he said. "I am Lucien. My lord bids you welcome to the Palace of Dreams."

"We accept your lord's welcome," Maddie said formally, while frowning slightly at the name given to her. "Though, we…"

"Have a matter of great urgency to attend to," Lucien finished. "I know. That is the purpose for which my lord had you diverted. He and his sisters wish to speak to you of it. If you would follow me?"

Exchanging a look, Maddie and Jono followed the tall man through the ornate black and white double doors. This was, they both noticed, the general theme of the palace, save for where older stonework intruded, and patchwork wooden walls, corridors and tapestries intruded, as if they'd been stuffed in almost as an afterthought. Yet despite that, it retained a certain elegance, as if this hotch-potch design had been the intention all along – like modern art, but not quite so pretentious.

After a walk that was both very long and very short, and sometimes took them along walls and up ceilings, they emerged through another set of double doors, opened by beings that looked almost, but not quite, human, into a throne-room.

At the end of the room was a dais, on which was a throne seemingly carved of white bone. On it sat a tall man, almost as tall as Lucien himself, with a raven sitting on his shoulder. He was, to Maddie and Jono's eyes, pale as snow and had black hair, the messiness of which put even Harry's at its most unruly to shame. With his height, skin tone, build and hair, he could actually have passed comfortably for an uncle of Harry's.

Yet he did not seem scruffy (as Harry frequently did), and unprepared (which Harry sometimes did), or even uneasy (which Harry occasionally did), for all that, with a fine black robe seemingly sewn from the essence of midnight, with flickering flames along the bottom, flames that reflected the starlight that glimmered in his black eyes, and his bearing was, even to Maddie and Jono who were not familiar with the ways of royalty, unmistakably that of a King.

Surrounding him were three women.

One, behind him, her pose one of relaxed insouciance as she rested her folded arms on the back of the man's throne and looked over it, shared his monochromatic colour scheme. She was as pale as he was, her clothing as dark, though not nearly as formal – instead of a robe, she favoured a strappy tank top, against which lay a silvery ankh, and a pair of black jeans. Her hair was similarly messy, though apparently artfully so, and she had a black tattoo like a tear running down from one eye, one that accentuated a kind smile.

At first, she looked young, but on closer inspection, a better description would be ageless. At one glance, she could be a fresh-faced 20 year old. At another, she could be a 40 year old who had aged well. In any case, it was easy to believe that she and the man were siblings, even aside from their physical likeness – for though she wasn't formal and regal, anyone with eyes sharp enough to see could tell that this was a woman of Power. Power and Authority, both well deserving of the capital letters, and both very much present, no matter how lightly they were worn.

One, on his left, was definitely young, a girl of maybe thirteen or fourteen at the very most. She had a serene demeanour, distant, as if her attention was focused elsewhere, but those pale eyes were also unsettlingly knowing, as if they could see right through you. Dressed as she was in an astounding variety of colours, with hair that flickered from a basis of dirty blonde to every colour imaginable, and some that weren't, she immediately stood out. Yet dressed as she was rags and tags and perhaps the remnants of a velvet gown, with a circlet of wire-threaded corks around her head, there was still a hint of that same regality about her. A beggar queen, perhaps, but a queen nevertheless.

And finally, on the right, there was a woman who at once looked the most and least human of the lot. She was not tall, nor imposing, seeming to be a woman in the prime of life. She was dressed fairly simply in a long, floaty white dress, tied at the waist with a girdle that flickered and danced like golden flame, shaded at the wrists with golden embroidery that looked almost like rising sparks, and a simple golden bird, as if someone had taken every bird ever to live and stripped them down to their very essence, then emblazoned it upon her chest. She had long red hair which that caught the light like the sparks of a fire, skin roughly the same shade as Maddie's, features similar enough that she would find them familiar, and eyes that until recently Maddie have only seen by looking in the mirror.

She looked the most human of the lot of them, easily capable of passing as an older sister or a younger aunt to Maddie herself. The expressions of worry, pain, and impotent fury that chased each other across her face, that curdled in her eyes, were very human indeed. And yet… in those eyes was something else, too. In those eyes smouldered a fire fit to consume stars, black holes, and galaxies whole. In those eyes burned the rage that only a mother whose child has been wronged could know.

It was a frightening combination, and it would have made almost anyone else take at least an instinctive half-step away, as Jono did now. But Maddie was not almost anyone else. She saw the fire, she saw the danger, but she saw something else. Something calling to her, singing a siren song that was familiar beyond words.

Even if it had not, though, Maddie would have noticed that power. She would have noticed all of their Power, Power unlike any she had ever known, power that made her own look like the tiniest spark of light in an infinite abyss of shadow and darkness. Even so, the others masked their otherworld power, their authority, behind human guises, or recognisably human-like formality. This one, by contrast, was so angry that she did not feel the need or the inclination to hide.

But there was one thing they missed, for neither Maddie nor Jono were immediately trained in, or focused on mystical patterns, recurring motifs. Not even when, at the very heart of the Dreaming, they were at their most important. For this was one of the oldest ones of all:

Maiden.

Mother.

And… the Other One.

They might reasonably have asked what the significance of such an arrangement was, especially under such circumstances. To which the equally reasonable, if maddeningly vague, reply would have been that under no circumstances could they possibly matter more.

"Lady Madelyn Grey, Master Jonothon Starsmore," Lucien said, bowing to the dais and its inhabitants. "I have the singular honour of introducing you to my Lord Morpheus, who is Dream, is the King of the Riddle Realms, the Prince of Stories, the Monarch of the Sleeping Marches, and the Sandman, with his raven, Matthew. I also have the honour to introduce you to my lord's sisters: Lady Teleute, who is Death, the Queen of the Sunset Lands, the Bringer of Rest Eternal –"

"But you can call me Didi," the ageless woman said cheerfully.

Lucien coughed, as if faintly annoyed, then continued. "To Lady Luna, who is Delirium, the Queen of Could-Bes, the Dauphine of Delight, the Lady of the Shifting Lands, and the Monarch of the Could-Have-Beens and the Never-Weres."

"It's lovely to meet you," Luna said, with a kind, somewhat misty smile.

"And finally to Lady Lily, who is Destruction, the Queen of the White City, the Lady of Light and Life, the Princess of the Burning Lands, the Keeper of Creation's Heart, the Bringer of Renewal, and the Phoenix," Lucien finished.

"And the mother of Harry James Thorson, born Harry James Potter," Lily said, stepping down the dais, though not without a cursory glance to Dream, who nodded ever so slightly. Her gaze turned to Maddie, bestowing a smile on her that felt like a warm hug, a snuggly blanket, and a hot chocolate on a chilly day all at once. "As well as as the first cousin once removed of you, sweetheart." She then looked at the both of them. "I will make this very quick and very simple: I want to help my son. My adopted family, his adopted family, want to help him too. And so do the two of you. What say we all help each other, hmm?"

OoOoO

 _Now_

There was a stunned silence.

"Agent Coulson?"

"Yes? Sorry. I was just a little…"

"Shocked."

"Yes."

"You are familiar with the entities I have described?"

"I've met two of them. The other two, I didn't know of."

"I see."

"Please, carry on."

OoOoO

 _Then_

Both Jono and Maddie just stared at Lily for a long moment.

"H-h-how can we help you, ma'am?" Jono eventually managed, stuttering. He faltered under the combined gazes of the occupants of the room. "I mean, if you're this bloody powerful, 'scuse my French, then…"

" **We are bound by Rules,"** the King on the throne, Dream, said, the enunciation of the capital letter being clear despite his strange voice. **"Which circumscribe our intervention."**

"Roughly translated, we're not allowed to step in," Death (call-me-Didi) said.

"Even though we want to," the being called Luna said in a soft, almost ethereal voice. "We're not people, you see? We're personifications."

"… I'm not seein' the difference, m'm," Jono said.

"The very basic version is that we're what happens when the fundamentals of existence get given human faces," Death said helpfully. "Human to you, anyway. You're thinking that we're like gods – not quite. We're another order of being entirely. Gods are more human than we are. They bend a bit to their function, and the stronger they are, the more they're not allowed to do. But they're still fundamentally living beings. We're a bit different. We can choose to do things, most of the time, but we can't go against what we're meant to do."

"How does that prevent you from intervening?" Maddie asked, frowning.

" **The Rules are very clear on the subject of offspring,"** Dream said, shooting Lily what seemed to be a pointed look. **"Especially when they have already been bent."**

Lily ignored him. "We need you to do for us what we can't," she said bluntly. "We can help you do it, but that's as far as we can go." She looked profoundly unhappy about this.

"Then what do you propose to do to help?" Maddie asked.

"You have to ask," Luna said.

"Like in stories?" Maddie said sharply, and got an approving smile.

"Exactly," she said.

"And why would it work on storybook logic?" Jono asked, now too puzzled to be intimidated.

"Because this is where stories are born, of course," Luna said, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. "And gods," she added, as an absent after-thought. "Or at least, their godhood."

"Right," Jono said. "Of course. We need…" He scratched his jaw. "What do we need, Mads luv?"

"Don't call me that," Maddie said absently. She was thinking. "We need time," she said, after a moment. "Time to consider."

" **Time in my realm is relative. Mere picoseconds have passed since you entered it."**

Maddie inclined her head in thanks, then bowed her head in thought for some time. Then, she looked up. "First, I need to know what kind of triggers Doctor Essex installed in my mind. Then, I need them removed."

"Easily enough done," Lily said, stepping forward. "Just stand still and relax. This won't be comfortable, but it won't be made easier by tenseness, either."

Maddie nodded and closed her eyes as Lily laid one hand on her shoulder to steady her, then gently pushed her head down and pressed what appeared to be a gentle kiss on her forehead.

Maddie stayed still for a long moment, then suddenly began to cough and retch.

"Maddie?" Jono asked, alarmed, going to her side as she doubled over, Lily soothing her and holding her up. "What's happening to her?" he demanded.

" **She is purging the implanted suggestions."**

"Yeah, and why is Maddie practically coughing her guts up?" Jono snapped, forgetting for a moment that he was talking to a being that was infinitely more powerful than he was.

" **This is a realm where the immaterial is material,"** Dream replied in cryptic tones.

"Not real stuff becomes real stuff," the raven chimed in, scratchy voice helpful.

Before Jono could demand a more detailed explanation, Maddie promptly vomited up what looked like a ball of wiry black steel wool, a spider's web of cold artifice, with hooks attached to the ends – which is why the ball was followed by blood as well as phlegm, and it twisted and writhed on the floor as if alive. From what was visible of Maddie's drawn expression, she was staring at it with utter hatred.

"Better out than in," Luna said, with a certain sympathy.

"… Oh," Jono said, going a little green. "Right. Yeah, definitely," he added, before weakly joining Lily in patting Maddie on the back. "There, there luv."

Maddie shot him a look that conveyed both gratitude for support and irritation at an obvious platitude, before her upper body convulsed again. This time, the ball was larger, causing her throat and cheeks to bulge as it travelled up her throat, almost choking her before she desperately hacked it up.

The last one was smaller again, thinner, but far more reluctant to leave, digging in to her mouth with barbs, and all the coughing and hacking in the world woudn't make it leave. So Maddie responded by reaching in, and, apparently careless of the damage it might do to her mouth, ripping it out by main force, a spray of blood following it.

The final ball landed with a splat, mingling with the others, shifting and changing, then gathered itself to leap at Maddie. Who stopped it cold with a glare and an effort of will. Then, eyes burning with rage through tears of pain and effort, she stood up straight, raising the dark, twisting ball with her.

She stared at it for a second.

Then, with a sharp gesture and a flare of blue power, she blasted it into nothingness, then wiped her mouth, then her eyes, on a towel that Lucien silently provided.

"Well done," Lily said, tone gentle and encouraging. "Very, very well done."

"Too bloody right," Jono said fervently. "Nicely done, luv."

"Thank you," Maddie said, voice a little scratchy. "Now, we need a map to Harry's true self."

" **Lucien,"** Dream said.

Lucien bowed his head and vanished out the doors.

"Traditionally in stories, things come in threes," Luna observed in her misty voice.

As hints went, this was not especially subtle and Maddie and Jono shared a look.

"It's your party, luv," Jono said after a moment. "I'm just along for the ride. Your call."

Maddie frowned, then nodded. "Very well," she said. "Then I have a question. Doctor Essex has told me my whole life that I am his creation and that I have no purpose beyond serving his interests. I have always accepted this, for I had no reason to do anything else. The psychic conditioning likely assisted in this, but I doubt it was necessary. I had no idea that I could be anything else. Remy, then Harry, helped me realise otherwise. This would suggest that I was not created, or at least, not as I had been led to believe, an experiment created by Doctor Essex that yielded unexpected power. Yet I have also encountered another like me, called Jean, whose powers at least equal my own. She and Harry assumed that I was a clone, and this would seem a logical assumption. Yet I am the same age as she is and have spent most of my life in areas of normal or near normal time. While Doctor Essex has studied her family and Harry's for many generations, from the memory Harry showed me of this discussion, by inference I concluded that he was not expecting the levels of power I displayed."

She paused. "The question of 'Who am I?' is one that I can resolve myself. 'What am I?' is another one that I can also resolve myself. A key to both, however, is encapsulated in my question: Where did I come from?"

The four beings exchanged looks.

"She should know," Luna said.

"She will know, soon enough," Death replied.

"It will help her settle her mind, which she will need for what is to come," Lily said.

" **Or unsettle it further, which could be disastrous,"** Dream countered.

"Scuse my manners, my lord and ladies, but the lady asked you a question," Jono said. "Doesn't she deserve an answer?"

"She does," Luna said mildly.

"Everyone deserves answers," Lily sighed.

" **But not everyone may receive them,"** Dream said. **"Especially since this is a question with many answers, and many more implications."**

Death coughed, and the other three, including Dream, whose domain this was, turned to look at her. "We can't give you the complete answer yet," she said. "You'll find that one out on your own. But we can say this: you're flesh of Jean Grey's flesh, blood of her blood, and bone of her bone. And you are your own person, with your own destiny, free to make your own choices."

Maddie frowned, then nodded. "Very well," she said. "Thank you."

Dream suddenly looked up, then spoke quietly to the raven, which bobbed its head and flew off. **"Your escort has arrived,"** he said.

"And who would they be?" Jono asked, faintly suspicious.

" **The Queens of Faerie have resented the intrusion into their territory by a mortal organisation, one that has antagonised Asgard, a power that both of them are careful to remain on good terms with,"** Dream said. **"And the disruption to their realms that the resultant battles of have caused. They feel that they are owed retribution, and owe Asgard their assistance in retrieving its heir, whose body and spirit have been imprisoned in their realms."**

"Roughly translated, they want revenge," Lily said bluntly. "And to dress it up in something politically suitable in the process."

" **Hrrm."**

Lily arched an eyebrow at Dream, as if daring him to disagree. He did not, and the double door swung open, to admit two men.

They were a study in contrasts.

One was of average height, verging on short, though he was built with the muscle of a swordsman, as befitting the blade at his hip, and held himself with a calm self-assurance that made one believe that his lack of height wouldn't matter one bit. His hair was white as corn silk, neatly managed, and fell to his shoulders.

The other was tall, astonishingly so, in fact, with close cut messy dark hair, appearing at first glance to be built like a particularly skinny and angular scarecrow, something emphasised by the long rune carved quarter-staff in his hand and the black duster that swept his ankles. He looked nervous.

One of Dream's other retainers bowed before his master and, in lieu of Lucien, said, "Lord Dream, Lady Death, Lady Destruction and Lady Delirium, I present to you Sir Fix, the Summer Knight, and Wizard Dresden of the White Council, Apprentice to the Sorceress Supreme-In-Waiting, and the Winter Emissary."

" **Champions of the Queens of Faerie, be welcome in my home,"** Dream said formally.

Sir Fix bowed. "Thank you, Lord Morpheus," he said. "It is our honour."

"Right," Dresden remarked a little hastily. "Definitely our honour." His gaze swept the room, never meeting anyone's gaze for more than a second – and twitching slightly when Lily gave him a familiar smile and a wave – before stopping very suddenly on Maddie, his expression turning to a puzzled frown, before his eyes widened a fraction later with understanding.

" **Sir Fix, Wizard Dresden, these two are Lady Madelyn Grey and Master Jonothon Starsmore. It is they who you have been bidden to escort and assist by your Queens,"** Dream said.

Sir Fix bowed again, this time to Maddie and Jono. He bowed less deeply, but with no less sincerity. "We will be happy to aid in any way we can, my lord, my ladies," he said.

Dresden's expression hardened, determined, and Maddie could now see why he had been chosen. He did not have Sir Fix's calm confidence, but nevertheless… there was a hardness, a determination that made bedrock look like marshmallows. And as she saw that, she noticed how those long bones carried longer muscles, muscles that were only made to look thin by a matter of proportion, and that he carried his staff, a scarred and nicked weapon that had clearly seen extensive combat, with utter assurance.

"There's a kid out there who needs to be brought home," he said, and the runes on the staff flared with power. Maddie took note. While judging magical power was not something she was expert in, she could tell that this man was most certainly not short of it. "We'll help you do it. By any means necessary."

" **Well spoken,"** Dream said. **"I will also provide you with a guide."** He waved a hand and a male figure, tall, though not even close to as tall as Dresden, stepped out of the shadows as if he had been one with them. He was hooded, his face indistinct, and around him was a subtle thrum of power. **"While the maps are clear enough, the routes are complex and can betray even the wary. He knows these lands and begged for the privilege. He will aid you in any way he can."**

"Yes," Lily said, eyeing him. "You will, won't you?"

The figure gave her a low bow and said nothing.

It was at this point that Lucien re-entered the room, carrying a large rolled up scroll.

" **Thank you, Lucien,"** Dream said, standing up and descending the dais to take the scroll, laying it on a table that had not been there before, and was very much there now. **"This is the route you will need to take…"**

OoOoO

 _Now_

"So, they didn't tell you."

"No. Their reasoning was logical, but…"

"You resent not being informed."

"Yes. It's illogical."

"It's human."

"I suppose."

"But they did provide you with maps."

"And safe passage through Dream's realm, escort through the relevant portions of the Nevernever, and a guide." A pause. "Dream also stated that as 'a being of thought and imagining', Jono was very much like a being of Dream's realm and thus welcome to return some day."

"I see. Didn't you earlier suggest that they; the Nevernever and Dream's realm, were one and the same?"

"The dream spirit called Abel suggested that that was the case. I believe it likely, but I received no independent confirmation."

"Understandable. What happened next?"

"The journey was uneventful and swift, thanks to our escort, who knew the lay of the land. When we arrived at the Red Room base, Doctor Essex's laboratory, however…"

OoOoO

 _Then_

"Well," Jono remarked. "This could be a bit difficult."

The Red Room base had not merely been repaired and restored. No, it had been expanded, to something more closely comparable in size to Camp Bastion, looking considerably more permanent and even more heavily armed.

"Not really," Maddie said. "The only one aside from Doctor Essex with the authority to stop me is General Lukin, and even then, that authority is tenuous. He can stop me, but he cannot strictly command me. He, and others, will simply assume that I have been ordered back. If they question me, I will simply say that you are my prisoner." She shot a glance at him. "Try to look appropriately depressed."

"We're walking right back into the bloody place where I spent over a year as a guinea pig, had my spine and neck snapped, and probably houses the people responsible for both, which is considerably bigger and badder than it was before," Jono said. "I'm not going to have to try, luv."

"I am sorry."

Jono shrugged. "It needs to be done, luv," he said. "Besides – wonder boy risked himself to spring me and the others. Least I can do is return the favour."

Maddie inclined her head, then turned to the escorts. "You have discharged your obligation and done so well," she said formally. "While your help would be welcome, you need remain here no longer. You may return to your respective mistresses and master with our thanks."

"Mab is no mistress of mine," Dresden said flatly. "I'm a temp worker, nothing more. And I'm not doing this for her or for any obligations she might owe." He looked down at the base. "The way I understand, there's a kid's spirit trapped down there, in the hands of one of the closest things to pure evil I've come across in a while, while a bunch of washed-up Cold War era assholes are using his body as a damn puppet, after he got screwed over for doing the right thing." His hands tightened around his staff and his eyes narrowed dangerously. "And that kid is my girlfriend's godson. She loves him to bits and all this is tearing her heart to pieces. Personally, I like him too. Am I letting all that pass? Am I hell." He turned to Maddie, wearing an expression that would have made any self-respecting demon think twice. "Whatever you've got planned next, I'm in."

Sir Fix flashed her a quick smile. "Leave? And miss this party? Not likely," he said, then sobered. "If you have no further use of me, my lady, then I will retire rather than hinder your mission. But if I may still be of use, then I will gladly lend you my sword and my strength."

Maddie dipped her head. "Thank you," she said quietly, then turned to the last.

He was a moderately tall man, hooded and cloaked, his face mostly concealed. What his hood did not conceal, however, was the thrum of power around him. This man, or being, had been chosen by the Dream King as their escort for reasons other than his unerring command of the terrain and the route.

"And you, sir? You need not feel the need to remain if you do not wish to do so, as helpful as that would be?"

In reply, there was a soft chuckle, and for the first time, he spoke.

"A kind offer," he said, and pulled down his hood with a triumphant flourish. "But one I must decline." At first, Maddie did not recognise him. Then, she did, and she took half a step back in instinctive fear.

"Maddie, luv?" Jono asked worriedly, as Sir Fix and Dresden's eyes both widened in astonishment, the later swearing in surprise.

Maddie just stared fixedly at their guide. He had dark hair and was pale, more so than was natural thanks to visible tiredness and stress that carved new lines on his face, lines that were, with the white wings of hair at his temples, the only visible indications of ageing. A goatee beard encircled a mouth spread in a gleeful, wicked smile, and rested beneath blue eyes that sparkled with anticipation. He looked like little more than a well-to-do businessman in the midst of a prank, or perhaps a fancy dress party. But appearances were deceptive. For though he would never say as such, this was possibly the one man that Doctor Essex truly feared.

"Good afternoon, Miss Grey, Mister Starsmore," he said. "While your companions are familiar with me, at least in a professional capacity, I feel I should introduce myself. I am Doctor Stephen Strange, Earth's Sorcerer Supreme. And it is my pleasure to make your acquaintance."

 **Yep, Strange finally makes his bow in this arc.**


	14. Chapter 14: Forever Red - Part VIII

**Now, the second chapter of this monster of a three part finale to the arc (seriously, I had no clue it would balloon like this). Anyway, this is when we get into the meat of matters.**

 _Now_

"So, Strange finally got involved."

"Yes. I presume you expected him to act a great deal earlier."

"We did. Usually, this was the sort of situation that he nips in the bud. However, Essex could evade magical tracking, and even Strange's temporally based foresight. We're still not sure how."

"The former is technologically related. The latter… I do not know."

"Okay. Anyway, he was your guide through the Nevernever. Did he explain his presence? For that matter, while Sir Fix's is fairly obvious, did Dresden?"

"Yes, to the both."

OoOoO

 _Then_

"Who the bloody hell are you?" Jono asked suspiciously, hands glowing dangerously.

"I think I just answered that question," Strange said dryly. "What am I, I think, is what you meant. That is a question with many answers, but first and foremost, I am a friend. And I am here to help." His gaze shifted to Maddie and became much, much sadder. "If only because it is my fault that Miss Grey here suffered for so long at the hands of Nathaniel Essex."

"You know him?" Maddie asked, then shook her head. "Of course you do. He knew to fear you."

"Many who don't know me personally know to fear me," Strange said, in a matter-of-fact tone that said that this was a statement of fact, not a boast. "And are very wise to do so." His expression hardened. "But yes, I know him, he knows me, and he knows very well to fear me. I have been trying to find him, thwart his various schemes, and preferably, stick his miserable head – his _real_ miserable head – on a rusty pike for a very long time. Which since he is immune to all of my conventional and unconventional tracking methods, and has the sense to keep his head down most of the time, is an absolute bastard." His gaze shifted to the base. "But I've come close, once or twice, I've come close. I've come _very_ close."

"You used us and the aid we were given to get close to him," Maddie deduced.

"Not quite," Strange said. "That would imply that I deceived Death, Dream, Destruction and Delirium – or as you better know the latter, Lily and Luna. That is something that even I could not hope to do. And no, much as I would enjoy it, I am not here simply to kill Essex. Instead, I am here to help you find Harry's mind, contained as it is in what you so charmingly think is simply a phoenix feather."

"Then what is it?" Maddie asked sharply.

"Something that you will discover, soon enough," Strange said, regarding the fortress. "For now, it is serving as a kind of sanctum – in this case, a sort of psychic womb, which is apt, considering its connection to his mother. He is in a semi-conscious state, in that he is loosely aware, but mostly asleep. Returning to his body will be a shock, far more than you originally intended, I think. His control, his defences, within and without, will be weakened. You must be prepared for the consequences of that."

Maddie looked away and nodded.

"It was a good plan," Strange said, gently. "And under other circumstances, it might have worked beautifully. At its core, it still can."

"How do you know about it?" Jono asked suspiciously.

"Normally, I know things," Strange said. "It is what I do. Here, however, it was mostly a matter of deduction, aided by the fact that I know things."

"Do you ever give a straight answer?"

"No," Dresden said. "He doesn't." He was eyeing Strange with a dark, wary scowl, one that said very clearly that he both disapproved of what Strange had been up to, and that Strange as he was at the moment gave him a profound case of the creeps. Maddie could see why – she did not know Strange as a person, what he was normally like, but it wasn't hard to see that at the moment at least, this was not a man overly burdened with sanity.

"Young man, if you knew the kind of things I did, you would not be inclined to give straight answers," Strange said curtly. "Nor would you be able to get a full night of sleep ever again." He turned to Maddie. "I have much to explain, and little or no time in which to do it. Normally, I would have been able to prepare circumstances so that I would have the time to explain what I needed to, but your former master's involvement and his immunity to my knowledge gathering talents means that everything is in flux. In language suitable to the Nevernever, I shall put it like this: A very long time ago, I failed in an obligation. As a result, I owe you a grave debt. I wish to discharge at least part of that debt by assisting you in the restoration of Harry Thorson. I swear by my power and all that I hold dear that if you accept my assistance, I will do everything in my power to help you."

Maddie considered this. "Doctor Essex fears you," she said. "From what I can tell, you speak the truth. If you were capable of deceiving such beings as we spoke to earlier, then you would not need to even have this discussion. If you had wished to harm us, you could have done so many times already, and led us astray." She looked at Sir Fix and Dresden. "Is his word good?"

"Doctor Strange is renowned for never speaking a lie," Sir Fix said, tone measured. "And his reputation is good. However, I must admit, I have not had many dealings with him." He turned to Dresden. "Harry?"

Dresden eyed Strange, then nodded. "Yeah," he said. "You can trust him to tell the truth, even if he usually twists it into knots. And by the sounds of things, he's on the level about this."

Maddie nodded, then turned to Strange. "I accept your offer. Though be warned: if you breach it, the penalty to your magic will be the least of your worries."

Strange bowed his head. "Time is of the essence," he said.

And so the three made their way towards the camp.

True to expectations, they didn't encounter any trouble – the gate guards were Red Room old hands, and were familiar with Maddie, meaning that they let her and Jono in without batting a eyelid. Strange was allowed in to, though this had more to do with the fact that he was nowhere to be seen, detectable only by Maddie's abilities – and she had the feeling that was only because he desired that it was so. Her presence was apparently self-evident; she was Doctor Essex's Hound, and she was returning with fresh prey. They did not need to know anything more, and did not wish to, either.

Some of the younger, more excitable soldiers catcalled her, but that stopped as soon as the first one who did it collapsed, bleeding from every visible orifice. After that, they figured out who she was and shut up very quickly indeed.

 _Bloody hell, luv. A bit much?_ Jono thought at her.

 _It is how they operate here. If you have power, you do not tolerate insolence from those beneath you. If they do not know to respect you, they are taught the error of their ways,_ came the crisp reply. _Besides, it looks worse than it is._

 _She is right,_ Strange said. _The common language of the Red Room is not Russian. It is power._

 _Walk around looking like you want to rip someone's throat out and that you can do it, and not many people are going to want to mess with you,_ Dresden remarked. _Predators react well to that kind of body language. And everyone around here is either a predator or…_

 _Dead,_ Fix finished. _Or dead._

 _Right._

 _Indeed,_ Strange said. _Turn left here._

 _Why?_

There was the psychic impression of a smile. _Didn't I mention? I can detect the feather, no matter how many layers of technological shielding it is under. It is, once you know what to look for, not the kind of power you can easily miss._

Maddie frowned inwardly, debating whether to trust him. For a wandless magical practitioner, breaching an oath sworn on their power reduced that power significantly and permanently. However, someone like Strange might consider it worth the risk.

She felt a touch on her hand, and Strange's mental presence. _Miss Grey_ , he said, voice gentler, sadder, and frankly, saner than it had been before. _I am many things; among them, a manipulator, a murderer, perhaps even something of a monster. I have walked too many dark paths for too long to be anything else. But the one thing I am not and will never be is a liar._

And with that, his mental defences, near-perfect even at a close look, melted away, allowing Maddie to sense the sincerity behind them. She delved a little further, to ensure that this wasn't simply a clever fake, but it wasn't. It had none of the tell-tale signs. And frankly, she felt that if he could deceive her so thoroughly, then she was likely doomed no matter what she did. Additionally, he'd taken a massive risk opening his mind to her. If he was capable of such deception, then, frankly, there were far easier ways for him to do so. Logic dictated that he was being sincere, if only to undermine Doctor Essex and make him easier prey.

She nodded inwardly and forged onwards, skirting the command centre. Even from a distance, however, the air of tightly controlled panic was palpable to Maddie, who paused for half a step as she felt words bubbling on the top of the thoughts.

 _What's happening?_ Jono asked. He sensed it too, but he couldn't pick out details.

 _The Winter Guard has been defeated,_ Strange said grimly. _At least one of their members is dead. At Magneto's hands._

 _Winter Guard?_ Sir Fix asked, puzzled.

 _The Red Room's strongest, collected into a team,_ Maddie said. _With the exception of the Beast._

 _He's not on it? There's a surprise,_ Jono remarked.

 _He is stupid and has little concept of discipline,_ Maddie said. _Despite his power, he would likely be a liability. Additionally, he is primarily under Doctor Essex's jurisdiction. He will likely be around here somewhere._

 _His abilities?_ Sir Fix asked briskly.

 _Significant superhuman strength, durability, and a healing factor,_ Maddie replied. _His weakpoints are his eyes, joints and other soft tissues._

 _Yeah, and don't let him in grabbing distance either,_ Jono said darkly. _Eyes, eh? Good to know, luv. Good to know._

 _Don't go looking for him,_ Maddie said sharply. _While he cannot kill you, he can disrupt your form, which will waste time._

 _Wasn't planning to, luv. But if it comes to a fight, it's good to know what to go for,_ Jono said.

 _She is right, we cannot dally,_ Strange said, a note of urgency in his voice. _We must move quickly. The Red Son is programmed never to surrender, and he is fighting someone that he could never hope to defeat._

 _You mean,_ Maddie began, then her footsteps quickened as it sunk in. Not to a run – they couldn't afford that. But she sorely wished that they could.

OoOoO

Lukin grimaced as the visual feed from the Red Son's remaining eyeball, transmitted via nanite cameras, crackled and showed little but red as blood began to cloud the eye. The vital signs were decreasing too, and would soon be well into the territory of unconsciousness.

"So, the Red Son's limitations are exposed," he said. "A pity." He turned to Essex. "When can you have a replacement ready?"

"Several already are," Essex said mildly. "And this fight is not over yet. I recall that you worried about the lack of physical enhancement in the Red Son comparative to his non-physical powers?"

"Yes," Lukin said. "You said that you would attend to it. And a fat lot of good that has done!" He sighed. "Nothing for it, then," he said, and reached for a red button marked 'Remote Detonation'.

If he could not have the Red Son, then no one could.

Essex smiled. It was the sort of smile usually seen either in boardrooms or on sharks.

"I would not be so hasty, either in judgement or action," he said. "It has done nothing because it has not been activated yet." He turned to his computer and began typing away. "It is in a passive state, absorbing data about the Red Son's opponent – in this case, Magneto – so that if it is activated, it will already have countermeasures prepared."

"What form does this enhancement take?" Lukin asked, curious despite himself.

"In my studies, I have come across many unusual things," Essex said. "Viruses, serums, ideas, and technologies, left behind by all kinds of visitors to Earth. This one, which I have adapted to my own purposes, is particularly ancient, dating back to Atlantis itself: it was an attempt at technology so sophisticated that it could mimic life itself, to copy, to replicate it. The Asuras project, the ancients called it. And while I normally consider such things a poor copy, I found it interesting - it was not quite organic, yet it was more than simple technology, being more like a combination of the two - something techno-organic, if you will. So I altered it and renamed it." He typed in a final command, then pressed enter.

On the screen, red letters flashed.

 _Project Transmode Activated._

OoOoO

 _Now_

"Okay, thank you Maddie. I think you can take a break there. Can you send in Mister Dresden? I'd like some background on his involvement, and Sir Fix's."

"Very well."

The door closed. The door opened.

"Hello, Harry."

"Hey, Coulson."

A silence.

"You want me to talk about Mab, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Do you really need to know?"

"It would be helpful."

"That's a no, then."

"You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

"But…"

"Mab doesn't appear openly on Earth often. She plays her cards exceptionally close to her chest."

"She's the freaking Winter Queen, what do you expect?"

"Exactly. She's a very powerful player, and every little bit of information could be vital."

A sigh. "Fine."

OoOoO

 _Then_

I sat in Avengers Mansion and sighed. Another time, I might have appreciated the fact that I was in the rather fancy headquarters of Earth's Mightiest Heroes (patent pending). I might even have been awed, though my capacity for awe had been significantly diminished since I'd visited Asgard. Once you'd been to a shindig to celebrate the universe not ending in the palace of the Norse Gods, it's kind of hard to be impressed by any mortal habitation, no matter how fancy.

Then again, this _was_ where Captain America lived. Which was, you know, something to take in. Especially since while he'd been a good sport about the fact that the second time I'd met him, I actually had kind of melted into a puddle. The first time had been in the middle of the world ending, so I was kind of distracted.

These last couple of weeks, I'd been distracted too. I'm rated as one of the better magical trackers out there – SHIELD puts me in the top five in the world, which I think is a little generous. For one thing, the guys and girls who're really good at it rarely advertise. Then again, I've learned to customise my tracking spells to deal with technology and the sort of stuff that SHIELD deals with. I'm not sure how well some of the older and more experienced Wizards would do in my shoes – with age may come power and wisdom, but it also comes with getting set in your ways.

But none of that rep seemed to matter, because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't find what I was looking for. A kid. Specifically, Wanda's kid – or rather, her godson, but since her mom was dead and he thought the world of her, the way she did of him, he was basically her kid. I'd tried all the tricks I knew, I'd called in as many favours as I dared, and a few that I normally wouldn't have done, and picked Bob's insubstantial brains time and time again. Putting my meagre expertise together with Wanda's, Loki's, and Albus Dumbledore's, in a series of discussions that confirmed to me just how very little I actually knew, I'd managed to expand and refine my tracking spells more than ever before. Nothing.

I'd even called the Council; specifically, my old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy. While he might not be able to customise the tracking spell, I'd hoped that either he or the Council, who I knew had had dealings with the Red Room before, might have some insight into circumventing their defensive measures, beyond the original plan of working through Mjolnir. Still nothing.

And the reason, by the way, that we weren't simply relying on Mjolnir which Thor, in a moment of exceptionally quick thinking, had thrown after the vanishing Red Room base (yes, their base moves. It would be cool if what they used it for wasn't so horrifying) as a beacon. Unfortunately, the base had moved to somewhere called 'the Shifting Zones', meaning that a clear fix was nigh impossible, and whateve we picked up would only be useful if we could use it in conjunction with something else.

Then, all of a sudden, I'd got a hit, a few days in, after I went out on a limb and took one of the ways to Eastern Europe. Using some of my own techniques and one or two Wanda had taught me, I managed to triangulate it and call it in. By the time Loki got there, however, he'd gone.

It was a positive hit, he'd been there. But he wasn't any more. And our tracking spells got more and more hits like that as the days went by – hits that showed he was there, but by the time we rolled out, he was gone. Then, about three days after that, the hits vanished, as someone on the Red Room's end figured out that we were successfully tracking him and found out how to block us out. That was when the 'Forever Red' and red star graffiti started popping up en masse. They were taunting us, saying that we'd never get him back.

And so it was back to square one.

Captain America, being the Man With A Plan (if no longer quite as star-spangled), had brainstormed with the Avengers a new plan, based on a new approach – make the Red Room, and the Red Son as they were calling the poor kid, come to them.

That plan had actually worked – the Winter Guard, the Red Room's hit squad, had been trapped, and the Avengers apparently had the kid in custody.

I should have felt relieved.

Instead, I just felt tired. Tired and afflicted by just a hint of dread. Because my gut, rightly or wrongly, was telling me that this wasn't over just yet.

"A knut for your thoughts, Mister Dresden?"

I looked up, and repressed an instinctive twitch. Albus Dumbledore was looking down at me. He was Harry Thorson's headmaster at Hogwarts, one of the big wanded academies in Europe, and he had an air of benevolent and grandfatherly eccentricity about him. However, it did not do to forget that behind the strange dress sense, twinkling blue eyes and affable demeanour was quite possibly the most powerful wanded wizard on Earth. He'd taken the most powerful Wanded Warlock in the world, a fully fledged Dark Lord called Grindelwald with a full blown magical empire behind him, in a straight fight. Everything I heard, mainly rumours and stuff from Bob, put him on par with a member of the Senior Council for raw power. Going by what I'd seen the last couple of weeks, and things Bob had mentioned, he more than had the smarts and finesse to back it up.

This in itself did not scare me too much. Make me aware that I was dealing with a big gun, sure, but I was also hanging around Wanda, who had even more raw power, and Loki, who was the actual Norse God of Magic, both of whom had badass reputations of their own. And, frankly, he seemed like a nice enough guy. But with his overall wizard classic look, air of power and piercing blue eyes, plus an understandably grim mood, he also reminded me unsettlingly of the Merlin of the Council, a man with whom I did not have a good history. It was enough to make me a little uneasy around him.

That said, his question made me blink.

"A _what?_ "

Dumbledore smiled slightly. "Wizarding money," he said. "British wizarding money, to be specific. Perhaps I should have said a penny. Or maybe a cent."

I snorted. "Just mulling over how useless I'm feeling," I said.

Dumbledore sighed and sat down next to me, in one of the Mansion's ludicrously plush armchairs. "That is a feeling that I have become very familiar with in recent days," he said. "And it is one I have dealt with before." He gave me a sidelong look. "I am afraid that it does not get any easier."

"Good," I said, after a moment. "It shouldn't."

Those blue eyes regarded me for a long moment, and for a moment, I thought I saw a gleam of approval. "Indeed," he said. "But you have done your part, Mister Dresden, all that could be expected of you and more."

"I don't know if I have," I said. "I mean, I have other contacts. Ones…"

"Ones that you have not called upon because you are afraid to do so," Dumbledore said calmly. "I know."

I blinked. "You do?" I asked, unable to hide my surprise.

Dumbledore smiled thinly. "I have lived for a very long time, young man," he said. "And in that time, I have passed through some very dark places. One does not get into, or out of, such places without making some very dangerous acquaintances. And sometimes, one has to fight fire with fire, darkness with darkness." He looked off into the distance. "Many years ago, I faced Gellert Grindelwald in a duel. He was my contemporary and we had known each other quite well as young men. As a result, I knew very well that he had been my equal, perhaps even slightly my superior – though I fancy that I was a shade more skilful. If there was a contest for the title of most powerful wanded practitioner, I do not think that I am being immodest when I say that we were the two stand-out candidates of our generation. And that was before he began to make dark compacts, serious ones. Oh, he'd dabbled in the dark forces as a young man, but that was nothing to what came next. He was brilliant, exceptionally powerful, and a visionary with a desire to transform the world into what he genuinely believed to be a better place. He saw the world, the darkness, and the things and groups that shaped mankind's destiny from the shadows, and he hated it. He demanded to know why they must hide away, why they must horde their gifts like misers, and not share them with the world. In his world, the strong and the wise, those with the power and the learning to understand the dark places of the world, could help mankind shape a new destiny."

"That doesn't sound so bad," I remarked. "On the face of it."

Dumbledore smiled thinly. "So many thought," he said. "And, once upon a time, I was one of them, even though Gellert was fairly clear that the core of his vision, his solution to the problems that blinded and bedevilled humanity, was to provide a firm, guiding hand. But in truth, Gellert was never content with mere guidance. His ambitions were greater."

"To rule," I said quietly.

"Exactly," Dumbledore said. "So, recognising that the old world would not give up without a fight, he began to gather an army. They were the ambitious, the directionless, the desperate, and the idealistic. They were both the cream of the magical world, of both magical worlds, and the scum. All who were willing to serve, to give themselves over to Grindelwald's ideology, were welcome. And in return, they would have a great destiny laid out before them. They were a scattered lot at first, flouting the Statute of Secrecy here and there. Terrorists, in a word. A threat, and a serious one, but only a glimpse of what was to come. For he knew that that was not enough. He needed allies, not merely in the mystical world, but in the mundane one too. So he turned to a man called Johann Schmidt, who is better known to posterity as…

"The Red Skull," I said, wondering where this was going. I didn't voice this thought, but Dumbledore seemed to catch it anyway.

"Yes. And I assure you, this is not merely the ramble of an old man," he said. "Grindelwald recognised that even allies such as HYDRA, and through them, the Nazi regime – Himmler, in particular, was obsessed with magic."

"And Hitler?" I asked.

"Interested enough, though mostly for practical and propaganda uses rather than for its own sake," Dumbledore remarked. "Grindelwald considered them to be useful idiots, for the most part, providing cannon fodder on an as needed basis. Except for Schmidt. He knew that while the Red Skull wielded the Tesseract, even if he tapped only a fraction of its infinite potential, he was not someone who could be taken lightly. Even without it, he was someone to be reckoned with. But it was the Tesseract that really made him dangerous: as Arnim Zola, one of Schmidt's chief scientists and most vile underlings remarked when he was captured towards the end of the war, with the Tesseract, the sanity of Schmidt's plans was immaterial: whatever they were, he could pull them off. This was a philosophy that Grindelwald, in part, shared. He felt the need to gain power, more power, so he could shape the destiny of the world unimpeded. So he made dark compacts with just about any greater being that offered him power: Dormammu, Mephisto, Trigon, the Fallen… his only discrimination was against beings that actively wished to erase the world, such as Chthon." He sighed. "I even think that he might have summoned the Phoenix, had he known but how."

"The Phoenix," I said. "As in, Harry's mom?"

Dumbledore smiled a slight, sad smile, and I abruptly remembered that this man had known Harry's mom, taught her, seen her grow from child to young woman, picking her out to be part of a hideously outnumbered and outmatched volunteer force against a Warlock who'd have been a continental scale monster if he'd ever felt like it. She might not have been as close as an apprentice or a daughter, but he'd known, trusted and cared for her, casting what, to hear Wanda tell it, was one of the strongest and most complex wards in wanded magic on her safehouse to keep her, her husband (latterly Thor, not that anyone knew it), and their infant son safe. And it had failed, because the lynchpin of that ward had been someone who'd turned out to be a traitor.

Then, with that failure new to him, he'd taken the miraculously surviving infant from the rubble of his family home and given him to what he sincerely believed was the boy's only surviving family, creating yet more powerful enchantments to protect him, and setting trusted people to watch over him. Yet once again, while the spellwork had worked just fine, the human factor had not – the family had abused the boy horribly, in a way that I knew from personal experience would leave scars far deeper than the physical, and the trusted people had not raised the alarm because of another person trusted by all those around them, who was secretly working their own dark agenda.

In this case, this agenda had been to study and manipulate the boy, to keep him isolated and helpless, and to fake kindness, the sort of kindness that an abused child could not help but respond to and trust, while all the while treating him like an experiment in a petri dish. And that wasn't even getting into the other things that that dark presence, the one variously called Milbury, Essex, or very aptly, Sinister, had got up – stealing children from their cradles came to mind and whenever it did, it made me want to start breaking things.

Anyway, finally, that boy had come to Dumbledore's school, and all his attempts to protect the kid came to nothing, partly through misfortune, partly through very human mistakes, and partly through the sheer cussedness of a stubborn kid who just refused to stay out of trouble and not stick his nose into whatever mystery was going, no matter how far out of his depth it took him.

And yes, before you say it, I had noticed the parallels.

Anyhow, I could see what Dumbledore meant by being used to that helpless feeling. It's not easy for anyone to feel helpless. It's a terrifying feeling, of being adrift, like being in quicksand, with nothing solid to cling onto, as everything seems to spiral out of control. It follows you around, a sick feeling deep in your stomach that you just can't shake, joining the associated feelings of fear, shame and pure misery and mixing itself up into a vile cocktail that permeates and paralyses your entire being. It's why psychologists recommend finding something simple, something even like brushing your teeth, to do. Something that you can control, to help you centre and balance yourself. To make a start. It's also why, if someone wants to control you, they could make a worse start than by making you think that you can't control yourself. For wizards, though, it's worse – when you're used to being able to make the fundamental forces of the universe sit up and beg, it's hard to deal with the fact that there's something you can't do, someone you can't help, no matter how hard you try.

"Yes," Dumbledore said. "Though she was not back then. And it is a very good thing that he did not. The best case scenario would be that she would simply incinerate him for his impudence. The worst case scenario, if Grindelwald had actually managed to sequester a portion of Her power… you were at London, over the summer."

"Yeah," I said.

"You met Lily."

"Briefly, but yeah," I said. "I mean, she was mostly talking to Wanda, Thor, and her kid." I shivered. "I felt how strong she was, if that's what you're getting at."

"In part," Dumbledore said. "What you felt, and saw, however, was the Phoenix at Her most controlled. Power, yes, but disciplined, and wielded with a level head. I have seen Her in other situations. Before and after Lily's time, when she was enraged almost beyond control, and even then, acting in honest and justifiable outrage. The differences were marked. Coming into contact with Grindelwald as he was then… any fragment of her power would either have destroyed him, or been corrupted, horribly corrupted. And then, it consume him. Then, it would consume Earth, the Nevernever, the Nine Realms, and every other realm connected to Earth that it could reach. Unless stopped, it would devour them all."

I shivered again. Compared to ordinary mortals, even to a lot of magically talented people, including ones on the Council, my nominal peers, I've got bucket loads of power. My power gives me a lot of options and makes me look like a pretty big player. Not for the first time in recent months, however, I was being very firmly reminded that compared to some beings swanning around the universe, I was nothing more than a speck of dust, if that.

"Anyway," Dumbledore said. "Grindelwald had power and, at first at least, I have no doubt that he intended to ultimately use it against its progenitors, in the guise of aiding one of his benefactors against the others, playing them each off against each other. But such power is evil, through and through, and evil is not a toy. It is to be handled carefully, if at all. It corrupted him, and what remained of his good intentions. He carved out an empire of blood and terror, bringing the likes of the Thule Society – the real one, not merely the talking shop for fools and dabblers – into his service, even commanding the loyalty of Heinrich Kemmler, a wandless necromancer of horrific power. To soften up his enemies, he allowed vampires, spirits, and demons to run wild. I even think that he dallied with Selene Gallio for a time, though she would never suffer to be anyone's second. The campaign in Russia, when the White Council and the Ministries of the East launched one of their first major counterattacks from Archangel, was particularly brutal."

He sighed. "Of course, with all the mundane and non-magical horrors spread across the Eastern front, it hardly stood out. But, slowly and surely, then faster and faster, his empire was rolled back from all sides. His armies shrank. His allies fell or fled. And his power waned. All this was largely thanks to the aid of Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme. Finally, the two faced each other in Berlin. The duel was epic, lasting for days, and it flattened most of the city that was still standing. Most in Berlin who didn't know better simply thought it was a staggered series of bombing raids, and it might as well have been. In the end, Grindelwald was crippled, with nothing more than his natural gifts and artefacts he could naturally have gained in the physical world. He was still vastly powerful, but he was mortal, no longer godlike in his might. And when I asked why Strange had not destroyed him entirely, he told me 'he is a problem that you helped create. It is only fitting that you end it.'"

"That's kind of harsh," I said, a little taken aback.

"But true," Dumbledore said. "Gellert and I were not merely familiar with each other as young men, we were dear friends. Alike in power, brilliance and ambition, we saw in each other a kindred spirit, and ultimately encouraged each other's worst impulses. Well, I like to think that I attenuated some of his, if only because he felt the need to mask some of his already considerable darkness so as not to scare me off, but feeble as it was, I think it counted for little on the balance sheet. In the end, I turned away from the dark paths that Gellert had already begun to set out on. He did not. I could have stopped him, at least confronted him, in the years before his ascension to power. But I did not. In truth, I was afraid to do so. He represented a period in my life that was one of deepest shame, that still is. I aided his growth, both by encouragement and support, then by refusing to step in when I had the chance, when I was one of the few people alive who could have hoped to do so in a straight fight. He was a weed that I had allowed to grow out of control, which now strangled everything around it and shrouded everything else in darkness. Strange was right: Grindelwald was my responsibility. And while he had been stripped of his unnatural power, he was far from helpless – every bit my match for raw strength, and a true Dark Lord, learned in the dark arts from teachers demonic and mortal, the latter so vile that the two were practically interchangeable. To defeat him, I needed to familiarise myself with powers of similarly dark hues, to learn how to face them, match them, and wield them without being changed the way that Gellert had." He closed his eyes. "And I did. God forgive me, but I did. I mastered magics so vile that they did not have names, so unnatural that their use made the world scream, and so terrible that the mere sight of them could strike the unprepared dead from horror. To my own horror, but not surprise, I had an aptitude for such sorceries. I had already learned a degree of familiarity with them by facing the horrors that Grindelwald and his allies had produced throughout the war. This was just like colouring in a picture, the outline of which I already knew. Finally, I confronted Grindelwald and, after a duel that has become rather famous over the years, and I defeated him." He looked me in the eyes for a half-instant less than the precise length of time needed to initiate a Soulgaze. "And I used darkness to do it."

I was silent for a long moment. "Are you saying that I should have just grown a pair and called my shadier contacts and had done with it?" I asked eventually. "Because as morals go, that's kind of a shitty one."

"No," Dumbledore said. "Part of the point was that I, among others, have many more shady contacts than even you have managed to accrue in your short yet highly eventful life. Wanda and Loki certainly do. Of course, we may not have some of the contacts that you do, but nevertheless, we are hardly lacking – and I understand your logic. You feel that your darker contacts would hear things that your lighter ones would not. The Fallen pay close attention to the sins of mankind, after all. Another part, that I did not get to, was that wielding such powers is not something to be done lightly; unless done with great care, caution and preparation, it can transform even the best of intentions into something horrific. After all, the Red Room was formed, in large part, to confront the likes of Grindelwald and HYDRA when they threatened Russia. Now, they are spoken of in the same breath, as things alike in their evil. In trying to do good, you might have only made matters that much worse."

I grimaced at that. What Dumbledore was saying tallied closely with everything I'd ever heard about black magic, which was an especial threat to wandless practitioners – my old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy, was part of the Senior Council, the oldest and strongest wizards on the White Council. He was also the Blackstaff, the White Council's black ops guy, and he had to use a special staff to ride the backlash of the black magic, to prevent it from driving him nuts.

"And yet another part, Mister Dresden," Dumbledore continued, his expression far too knowing. "Is that even if you manage to prevent it from changing you, it will always exact a price."

I eyed him for a moment. "What price to did it exact from you?"

Dumbledore smiled a sad smile. "Now that, I am afraid, would be telling," he said.

"I'd pay it, you know," I said, after a moment. "To get the kid out of there."

"I am sure you would," Dumbledore said. "As would anyone else in this building. As Harry himself is paying the price for trying to save someone else who has lived a life shrouded in darkness through no fault of their own."

I grunted. "Looks like she wasn't all that grateful," I said.

"Oh, I would not be so sure about that," Dumbledore remarked.

I gave him a sharp look. "What do you mean?"

"One of the things that the Avengers, and Professor Xavier, have discovered on capturing the Red Son is that there is no trace of Harry's mind within him," Dumbledore said. "Which suggests that it is elsewhere. Now, logic dictates that if Harry's mind, powerful as it is, terrified, confused and in pain as it would be, had fled to the physical or spirit realms, it would have been noticed."

"I suppose so," I admitted. I've been around some awfully powerful people, and I'd been around the kid when he was really flexing his psychic muscles. The kind of raw power that he generated both made my hair stand on end and made me think that he wouldn't be out of place among their number. Sure, he might not be on a par with the Mabs and Titanias of this world (not yet, anyway), or even the strongest members of the Senior Council (I wasn't sure about that one, but Ebenezar had set off Krakatoa back in the day. For all I knew, though, that could merely be a matter of knowing how to apply power). But the fact was that he was extremely strong.

Hell, when he'd got into a fight with someone even stronger than he was, when according to Wanda he was trying to avoid an outright contest of power, he'd rearranged the reality of a reasonably sized chunk of the Nevernever and laid me out flat from 7,000 kilometres away, along with most of the other practitioners on the planet, as a freaking _side-effect_.

While I wasn't exactly an expert on the spiritual and ghostly side of things, by Wizardly standards at least, that kind of power running wild would be very, very hard to miss. Especially to some of the most powerful practitioners and gods in the world, who had contacts everywhere you looked.

"Logic also suggests that such power would be hard to contain without express cooperation," Dumbledore said. "And the process of forcing it into containment would also, most probably, have been noticed."

I winced. I'd been laid out with a migraine when the kid was playing matador, trying to make enough noise to be heard, but quick enough on his feet to avoid being pinned down. If he had his back up against the wall and was forced into a straight fight, then the results wouldn't be as long lasting, but they would be that much harder to miss.

"And while the Red Room might not care, I also do not believe that the creature behind much of this, the one that calls itself Essex, would allow such a wild card factor," Dumbledore said. "At the very least, Harry's mind at liberty could find or attract the attention the Avengers or any of the many parties that would wish to curry favour with his family by aiding him, and aid in the retrieval of his body. So. Logic dictates…"

"That he had help," I finished slowly. "Someone hid him. Someone powerful enough and good enough to pull a fast one right under the nose of a powerful telepath. Someone who wouldn't want to reveal themselves. Someone who's either still hiding him, or trying to get his mind back to where it belongs."

"Which is an excellent note on which to begin negotiations," a cool, melodious woman's voice said from behind me.

A normal man might be intrigued, curious, if perhaps a little wary to hear such a proclamation, wondering where this lead would, heh, lead. Maybe, he might even be quietly pleased to hear a voice like that, which, to be frank, was kind of easy on the ears.

But I knew that voice. I knew who it belonged to.

So instead, my spine fused as all of it crawled up into a hunched little ball of terror up near my skull, while the rest of my organs attempted to a below stairs evacuation.

I turned around slowly, and bowed carefully. Once, I might have considered insouciance – and normally, I still would, if only to cover my anxiety – but Wanda had drummed into me that a little of at least the forms of respect could go a long way with beings like this one. Considering that she'd once made me stab a letter opener through the flesh between two of my fingers out of sheer spite, I could see the advantages of this. Plus, if there was one being that I'd met that I did _not_ want angry with me, it was this one.

The woman before was tall, as tall as I was, and objectively perfect. Every curve and plane seemed to have been calculated to meet some kind of Da Vincian concept of mathematical perfection and symmetry, one only emphasised by her clothes, of the finest cut and of materials that had never been sullied by the mortal world. Her hair was the white of cornsilk in the moonlight, her skin paler than milk and twice as smooth. Hers was a beauty that made artists and sculptors weep, for they knew that mortal artistry could never truly capture such beauty. Even the finest photography would lack a certain something. Hers was a beauty that had men made with desire, with desperate, worshipful fervour, worshipping her as a goddess.

It terrified me. In part, it was because of her beauty, which seemed almost too perfect, too flawless, and therefore made ancient human instincts, sharpened by tens of millennia surviving such creatures, stand up and scream. And in part, it was because of her eyes. A wise man once said that the eyes were always what gave it away, and they did here. The rest of her could, just about, be the body of an improbably gorgeous woman. But it was the eyes that revealed her inhuman nature. They were slitted, like those of a cat and carried the associated malevolent amusement. Oh, and they changed colour in time with her jewellery – though it was probably the other way around.

"Queen Mab," I said carefully. "This is an… unexpected pleasure."

"Queen Mab," Dumbledore echoed, voice resonant, calm and authoritative, though tinged with respect. He bowed, to an inch-perfect degree – showing respect, but not subservience.

"Wizard Dumbledore," Mab said, inclining her head a fraction in acknowledgement, before giving me a look that could only be described as malevolent amusement. It spoke volumes of the relative respect she had for us – that is, she accorded Dumbledore respect. Me, she regarded the way a cat does a favourite mouse.

"So, uh," I said. "Why are you here?"

Her smile widened. I saw teeth. My spine continued its attempts to exit through the skin of my back. "To offer you the chance to be conducted into the presence of the spirit of the stolen Prince, Wizard mine," she murmured.

"Wizard _mine_ , I think you'll find, Queen Mab," another cool feminine voice said. This one, by contrast, was a relief to hear. I half turned to see Wanda striding in, expression calm but hard, followed by a couple of others.

First, Pepper Potts, whose expression of wary curiosity was laid over a number of new worry lines and visible exhaustion, and froze with her baby daughter in her arms. While I severely doubted that she was familiar with who Mab was, her instincts were clearly working just fine.

Second, Jane Foster, whose eyes had widened with recognition – she clearly did recognise Mab, perhaps from some Asgardian court function – and had half stepped between her, Pepper, and the baby. I'd already had a fairly high general opinion of her, having heard what she'd come up with the New Bifrost project, but now my personal estimation of her rocketed upwards. She had no superpowers whatsoever and was physically fragile even by the standards of mortalkind, yet, knowing exactly who Mab was, she instinctively stepped between a mother and baby and the Wicked Queen to end all Wicked Queens. That took serious courage, the sort I admired the hell out of.

Mab turned her gaze on Wanda, and her expression changed to cool appraisal of a near peer – which, as the Sorceress Supreme-In-Waiting, Wanda was. "Lady Maximoff," she said. "Greetings."

Wanda inclined her head. "Greetings," she echoed, as Mab responded with a shallower inclination of her own. There was… well, I definitely wouldn't say liking between them, but there was a certain familiarity and mutual professional respect. They knew each other, though where and when from exactly, I had no idea.

This formality completed, Mab's smile returned, thin and sharp. "I had heard you had taken him as an apprentice." It sharpened further. "And in other fashions. Yet he owes me two favours still outstanding. He is mine until then."

"His obligation is one of two individual favours," Wanda said calmly, arms folded beneath her breasts. "Not one of continuous service. Additionally, according to the account he gave me of your bargain, the favours in which he repays you are of his own choice. He is not obligated to do as you ask." Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Therefore, the description of him as 'yours', with the implication of vassalage, strikes me as inaccurate. If I understand the situation correctly."

Mab's eyes flashed, sharp as icicles and as ominous as the crack of packed snow preceding an avalanche, and no wonder: Wanda had just contradicted her, in public. That took either epic courage or epic stupidity. In this case, though, I suspected that it was calculated. Wanda was playing a power game, over the disposition of yours truly, letting Mab know that while she accepted that I owed Mab a debt, I was her apprentice and she would not allow that to be used to contest her claim over me or accept Mab playing games with me.

And yes, I did feel a bit like a piece of meat.

Technically speaking, both of them were right: Mab's hold on me was restricted to two favours. However, while I owed her those favours, I was in her power to a significant degree – normally, the Queens of Faerie can't do things like compel a mortal to stab themselves with a letter opener, or even kill a mortal directly, but if that mortal is a sucker who owes them a debt, then all bets are off. Additionally, she clearly intended for the hold to become more permanent, going by her offer of the position of Winter Knight to me and the fact that she'd bought my debt off the Leanansidhe, my faerie godmother (yes, I have one, and the reality is not in the slightest bit as fun or family friendly as Disney make it look), in the first place, something she did to balance the scales after Lea's personal power had taken a considerable hike.

"However," Wanda added. "I can see how the definition might be considered applicable." She inclined her head in a bow. "We are grateful for your presence, Queen Mab. As you well know, we are embroiled in a most difficult matter– our task, the retrieval of my godson, is not one that we can complete alone, not even with all the knowledge and power of Asgard. Your aid would be invaluable, and we would be most grateful to hear your offer."

Mab's eyes had narrowed slightly, but some of the tension left the room. Wanda had done the sensible thing and followed up the power games with a hefty concession to Mab's pride. I'm not sure if it would be enough in the long run – in my experience, the Sidhe held grudges like nobody's business – but it certainly took the edge off things. Still, though, I was worried. Wanda was incredibly powerful, and as Sorceress Supreme-in-Waiting, she had a certain authority in supernatural politics, particularly where any apprentices of hers (like yours truly) were considered.

Additionally, what she'd done could be construed as simply a case of protecting what was hers from a poacher – though Mab's claim technically preceded hers – and making the boundaries clear in a relatively non-threatening fashion; the sort of thing that the Winter Sidhe respected, if not liked. No predator likes coming off second best, after all.

Wanda's powers were vast and still growing, her knowledge likewise. She had a formidable support structure in the form of the Sorcerer Supreme, who was quite possibly the most dangerous man I'd ever met, her utterly terrifying father, Magneto, whose powers meant that he was basically the worst nightmares of the Fae incarnate (and actually, seeing him in that light made me like him a whole lot more), and a bond to a Prince of Asgard in direct line to the throne, as well as a close friendship with the Prince's father, Asgard's current Crown Prince.

But Mab was freaking _Mab_. I'd Seen her once, her and Titania. They'd been gathering their power, getting ready to throw down, and the sight had been both beautiful and utterly terrifying. Hell, it had nearly driven me insane. And it had given me a very clear appreciation of just how terrifyingly powerful Mab was. At a guess, I'd say that she wasn't as strong as Odin, but she was stronger than Thor and Loki, which put her a good way above Wanda in the power stakes. And her power wasn't even the beginning of what made her dangerous.

"When the mortal interlopers of the Red Room and the Pale Doctor entered Wyldfae territory, they were careful not to threaten either my borders or those of Titania," Mab said. "And since the territory was under dispute, neither of us wished to intervene." Her eyes flashed again, with a mixture of anger at such insolence and admiration at such cunning. And it was cunning – I'd been involved the last time Summer and Winter had gone to war, and I knew that it was most definitely not something that, for all their perennial rivalry and shadow-boxing, they did lightly. Last time, it had taken the mantle of the Summer Knight going missing via the machinations of the insane Summer Lady to spark it. "However, they then kidnapped the young Prince and their actions triggered a grave disruption through Faerie, causing a destabilisation political, physical, and metaphysical to both Summer and Winter."

In short: it's one thing to turn a blind eye to a few mortals squatting on disputed territory while they limit their actions to other mortals, but it's another thing entirely when they start trashing your back garden and make you look like you're aiding and abetting the kidnap of a Prince of Asgard. Then, I realised that I'd said this aloud, to approving looks from Wanda and Dumbledore, one of comprehension from Pepper, one of thoughtfulness from Jane, and one of worrying appraisal from Mab.

"Quite," she agreed. "They have retreated to the far edge of our combined realms, just beyond our borders, to an isle in the Shifting Lands."

Wanda and Dumbledore's eyes both widened.

"I'm guessing that it's not a simple case of opening a Way into the Nevernever and following the signs," I said.

"Going through Faerie would be taking the long way around," Wanda said, expression grim. "And finding something specific there…" She shook her head. "They are so named for good reason. The Red Room must be on the very edge, or they'd have been lost to linear time already."

"Indeed," Mab murmured. "Fortunately, there is one with a map, and one who has procured a guide, one whose realm they border. Morpheus."

"I'm guessing not like the Matrix," Pepper remarked, tone nervous but dry.

"Morpheus in this context refers to Dream of the Endless," Wanda said, though not without a touch of amusement.

"Who is being guided, if I may ask?" Dumbledore asked politely.

"He did not see fit to say," Mab said. "He additionally offered, as a courtesy, the opportunity for myself and Titania to send a representative to escort those being guided to the Red Room's stronghold, whereupon they would retrieve the essence of the stolen Prince and allow the opportunity for such vengeance on hubristic mortals as has not been seen in a millennium."

I shivered slightly. While I had no love for the Red Room and felt that everyone involved in the sort of things that they were deserved to die, divine vengeance often took forms that could be hard to stomach, even if the Norse myths weren't totally accurate.

Then, I shivered again as it sunk in. "And you want me to be your representative," I said.

Mab smiled at me. "Titania has sent her Knight. I can hardly do less," she said.

"Oh hell no," I said, on reflex.

She arched an eyebrow. "You refuse so quickly? Even if it means that you forfeit the chance to ensure the retrieval of the son of your lover's heart? Even if it means that you allow the continued suffering of Lloyd Slate?"

And just like that, she was behind me, speaking into my ear. "And believe me, Wizard, he suffers for your refusal," she said. "Suffers as no mortal has in many, many years." I heard the smile that followed. "I believe that he will be some of my finest work."

I hesitated. On the one hand, I was not immune to the temptations of the power that came with being the Winter Knight. I could say that I had a crappy childhood, etcetera, and I did. But facts are, I'm no more immune, and probably quite a lot less, to temptation than the next guy, even though I damn well should be. Unlike most, I knew very well where it could lead.

And then there was Lloyd Slate, who Mab was doubtless having fun testing out every torture method and implement she could come up with, as she had for the last couple of years. He'd killed someone who could have become a very good friend of mine. He'd also been a violent, drug addicted rapist and murderer – though I was unsure whether that was the mantle at work, or just who he'd been. I'd have lost no sleep killing the man in a fight. But what Mab was almost certainly doing to him turned my stomach.

Plus, more importantly than any simple temptation of power or riches, both of which the Winter Knight would have in abundance, or putting some poor bastard out of his well-deserved misery, there was something more fundamental at work. I don't like seeing innocent people, especially not kids, get hurt. And if there's any conceivable way I can, I make sure that it doesn't happen. Not on my watch. And Harry, for all his power, was a kid. A kid who, as it happened, I saw a lot of myself in.

With that in mind, did I have the _right_ to refuse the mantle?

There was silence in the room. Then, it was broken.

"Queen Mab," Pepper said carefully, cradling her sleeping daughter. "I beg your pardon for interrupting, but you said that this Morpheus required a representative from you. Does he explicitly require your Knight?"

"As one court moves, the other must perforce move with it," Mab said.

I narrowed my eyes as my brain clicked back into gear at that non-answer. "So, no, he doesn't," I said. I gave her an accusing look, while noting that I owed Pepper a beer. A lot of beers, actually. "You were using the situation to try to goose me into becoming your Knight."

"Were you my Knight, your ability to complete the quest would be greatly enhanced," Mab said, calm and not in the least bit repentant.

"No thanks," I said. "I'll serve as your Emissary in this matter, repaying another favour I owe you."

"And why should I not consider this another favour that you owe me?" Mab asked, eyebrow arched.

I folded my arms. "Because either you need me to do it, or you want me to do it," I said. "Because you didn't go elsewhere as soon as we cottoned on to your game, and I severely doubt that I'm the only mortal who owes you and who you could lean on." I smiled suddenly and added, realising that I was about to antagonise her in exactly the way I'd worried about Wanda doing and not caring one bit, "And if Odin were to hear that you were wasting time using information on his grandson's location for your own ends rather than acting in good faith, I don't think he'd be too pleased. His son definitely wouldn't be, being that he's the kid's dad. And he's the next King of Asgard, likely to have the job for a few thousand years. How long do you think he'll hold a grudge for? Because I've met the guy, and from what I can tell, it could be a while."

Mab's eyes flashed with rage, and the room went cold, very cold, for a moment. Then, after a very long moment, she smiled. It was deeply unsettling. "You learn swiftly, my Emissary," she murmured. "Very well. Another favour shall be discharged."

I nodded, trying to conceal the fact that my spine was once again trying to make a bid for freedom, and turned to Wanda. "I'm gonna bring him back," I said. "I promise."

She looked me in the eye and I saw nothing but trust there. "I believe you," she said. "If you need help on the way out, call me."

"Will do," I said, then nodded at the others, and turned back to Mab. "Okay. Let's go."

OoOoO

 _Now_

"You actually threatened Mab?"

"I prefer to think of it as reminding her that she's not the only one who can twist words. I mean, it probably wasn't smart, but if I let her push me around, then…"

"Understood." A rustle of papers. "That was a little longer than expected."

"You asked for detail."

"I did."

"You're regretting it now."

"No."

"Not even a little?"

"It and Natasha's upcoming testimony have provided/will provide a long break for Miss Grey, which considering what is coming next, I think that she may well need."

"That's not a real answer."

"It's the one you're getting. Can you send in Natasha now, please?"

"Sure, Agent C."

"Don't call me that."

"I'll stop calling you that when you prove that you don't have a neuraliser."

"You can't prove a negative. Also, if I had a neuraliser, I'd have used it."

"Uh-huh. Sure. I believe you."

" _Dresden."_

"Fine, fine, I'm going."

The door opened, closed, then opened and closed again.

"Coulson."

"Natasha."

"You know what I want to discuss now."

"Yes."

OoOoO

 _Then_

Magneto watched as the Red Son's neck suddenly snapped up, his body seemingly dragging itself up from the neck down. Before he could do anything, however, metal objects soared through the air, towards the Red Son, slamming into him and swiftly encasing him in a smooth, seamless cocoon of titanium, aluminium, copper, tungsten and steel, carrying a dull, silvery copper tinged sheen.

"What on Earth…" Magneto murmured, then tested the cocoon with his powers. Non-responsive – no, responsive, but in a fashion that suggested that we were responding against his powers, as if specifically calibrated to his powers. That would only be possible if…

"Clever humans," he said quietly. "So that is why I could sense all that metal in his veins: nanotechnology. Passive, dormant, until now."

The cocoon suddenly flexed inwards, seeming to mould itself like latex to the form within, before condensing further inwards, seeming to flow into the Red Son's pores, vanishing. Except on his left side. There, the dead, burnt flesh had been sloughed away, replaced with pink, new skin. And where entire limbs had been rendered non-functional, they were replaced: where a burnt, ruined left arm had been, now there was a gleaming metallic one, almost like that of the Winter Soldier, but more… organic. While the Winter Soldier's current arm was a superb facsimile of a real, human arm, and his previous one had been a similarly remarkable copy, to the right eye, that is exactly what they were: copies. This arm, by contrast, looked more natural. It was no mere copy. It was as if the technology had taken on a life of its own.

Even though he couldn't directly exert his powers on it, Magneto could feel its presence throughout the Red Son's body. He could feel it in the tendrils that branched throughout his left side, anchoring the arm. He could feel it in more tendrils that reached up through his neck to the space that had previously held the boiled ruin of his left eye, now replaced by a cybernetic counterpart of breathtaking sophistication. And he could feel it in the millions upon millions of nanobots that set to work throughout the rest of the Red Son's body, repairing it, reinforcing it, and… remaking it.

More than that, though. While robotics were not his primary field, Magneto was familiar enough with the principles to recognise this for what it was. And even if he had not, the cold, calculating intelligence in the cybernetic eye gave it away.

These nanobots wasn't merely some latent enhancement, even if they had been intended as such – and had the Red Room, had Sinister, Nosferatu as those in the camps had once called him, unleashed something that even they could not control? Or did it simply do their bidding? Either way, they were something more than just robots.

They were _alive_.

They were alive. They were a parasite. And like all parasites, they were eating their host alive.

And with that realisation, the tiredness that had been settling on him like a leaded blanket, the pain from his broken bones, bruised flesh and torn muscles was swept away by a rising tide of his oldest ally, his gift and his curse. His rage. And he embraced it, for with it came something that he would need in abundance.

Power.

"I know you for what you are, _parasite_ ," he spat, as every piece of metal in the scrapyard, the remains of hundreds of cars and motorbikes, of thousands of appliances and machines, of countless tens of thousands of tons of discarded metal, began to drift into the air, as lightning danced in the skies above, darting between clouds illuminated by the vast auroras of a geomagnetic storm, and the foundations of the city, the very earth itself, began to shudder. "Incubating within something greater than yourself, preparing, waiting for your moment. You think yourself clever, that you have made yourself safe from me, hiding beyond your little magnetic field, the inverse of my own."

He smiled grimly.

"You are very much mistaken."

The Red Son's metal arm rotated once, then its hand clenched into a fist as power charged up within it.

Then, in a blurred instant, battle was joined.

OoOoO

Wanda stood in the Avengers Mansion, staring at the empty piece of air where a gate to the Nevernever had been only a moment before.

"He will be fine, Wanda," Dumbledore said. "They both will be."

"I wish I could be as sure as you are, Albus," Wanda said with a sigh. "Mab is a dangerous being to deal with, especially in such a situation. But that is not what bothers me."

"You're annoyed at being left out and feeling helpless," Pepper said, rearranging Ada in her arms. "Believe me," she continued, with a wry expression. "I may not have superpowers, but I know the feeling."

"Makes three of us," Jane said. "Why aren't you on one of the away teams, anyway?"

"Albus and I are the ace card," Wanda said. "If something unexpected happens, the Red Room put someone new into the field, send out a diversionary attack, or change their tactics, we're the counter."

"And you're here to protect us in case the Red Room try to attack the house," Pepper said.

Wanda inclined her head, then it snapped up again as an aurora formed in the darkening skies out the window. "Something's gone wrong," she said, her blood running cold.

Jane followed her gaze, frowned, then her eyes widened as she put it together. "Your dad," she said. "His powers…"

"Cause auroras," Wanda said. "But only when he's really stretching himself. And he wouldn't need to do that, not against –" Her expression grew pained.

"Against the Red Son," Dumbledore said quietly. "Another factor has entered the equation." He looked her in the eye. "Go. If anything else arises, I will deal with it."

Wanda nodded tightly, then left the room at a run, which soon became a sprint, preparing the spell to take off as soon as she got outside.

She was going to save her godson, whatever it took. And if she had to go through her father to do it, then by god, she'd do that too.

OoOoO

Magneto paused for breath, and grimaced as his broken ribs registered their displeasure. This had been by far the most gruelling part of the fight so far, not so much because of the Red Son's increased armaments and nanotechnology based protection from direct interference with his body – they weren't that much increased, just presented a different kind of problem – but because only one of them cared about collateral damage. And the other, if anything, exploited that care ruthlessly.

No one had died, yet.

But it was only a matter of time.

"Then I must end this," he said quietly. "May god forgive me. Because if this fails, Wanda most certainly will not. And for that matter, neither will I."

His hands blazed with crackling electromagnetic power as he raised them, spreading them out wide. The metal of the scrap froze in mid-air, hanging in perfect silence, disrupted only by the occasional spark of a static charge. Then, slowly, it began to spin around the Red Son, faster and faster, until it seemed like a solid metal column, reaching up like a vast spear, aimed at heavens.

The whirling column flexed suddenly, first in a wave part way up, then in a sudden, concerted blast of power that sent a long dead Volkswagen Bug flying out of the column. But any hole made was covered over in an instant, and the column of whirling metal began to rise into the air, faster and faster. As it did, it began to tumble over and over Within a minute, it was a hundred feet in the air. Within two, it was a mile up. Within three, it was ten miles up and counting.

Finally, it reached its chosen location, and abruptly sealed itself.

"Steel and copper," Magneto murmured to himself, in the small field of trapped oxygen around him. The power within him burned like fire, sparked and twisting like electricity, like a living thing desperate to be let loose. "Now, all we need is electricity…"

And with that, he unleashed some of the power he'd bottled up, letting it flow out in the atmosphere, a vast electromagnetic charge.

He was no Thor. He could not make the weather bow to him as the Thunder God did, making it obey his every whim with perfect precision, to shape and guide it like an artist, a sculptor.

But he knew what he could do, and what actions obtained which results.

And very quickly, a vast storm, a geomagnetic supercell, if such a thing were possible, taller than mountains, wider than lakes, and a roiling pit of potential power.

That power nearly swamped him, drowning him in its vastness and majesty, seeking like the power within him to be set free and to run wild. For a moment, he struggled to control the sheer power he had stirred up. For a moment, it seemed like it would slip away, all while the Red Son and its infection of living metal probed at his hold on the metal it was trapped in, both a tube designed to be a vast electromagnet and a kind of crude inverse Cerebro, reflecting and dispersing psychic powers. There were ways to escape such a thing, of course – it was hardly a sophisticated prison, riddled with weakpoints and held together by Magneto's will – but they took more energy and far more imagination than the robotic mind (or minds) of the Red Room's chief enforcer could muster.

Still, given a chance, well… who knew what its nanotechnology could do? Perhaps infect metal and reshape it as it did flesh? If it could do that, if it did do that, he'd be in trouble. He was acutely aware that while he still had power to spare, his body was tiring.

But he was Magneto. His will would not bend, and he would never relent.

And soon, the power had built sufficiently.

With a deep breath, he released some of his control.

And lightning poured down on him in a torrent, in a flood, a blazing white cascade of power that swirled around him, drawn by the electromagnetic field that he was generating for that very purpose. Drawn and absorbed.

Then, it was ended. And for a moment, he was lost in the power, lost in the screaming song, the crackle and roar, the purity of the power that burned within him. But it was only a moment. Then, with power he knew that he could not contain for more than a few seconds, he turned on the tube. Which was gone. In his moment of lost control, the Red Son had broken free.

A pity. But no matter. With a thought, a spear of copper wrapped steel slammed through the left arm of shifting metal, which instantly began trying to shift around it, to shake it loose.

"No," Magneto said, in a voice raw with power and anger. "No, you shall not escape that easily." He gathered the power within him, power that had he but known it made him glow like an avenging angel. "You picked the wrong target, and the wrong enemy." He stretched out an arm like a sword. "Pay the price."

Power lashed out across the space between them in a solid white bar. Any mortal eyes would have been burnt to blindness on seeing it. One cybernetic eye barely had time to widen.

Thunder so vast that it shattered windows for miles around cracked and rolled.

And then there was silence, as two figures fell from heaven, one burning with dimming white light, and the other with fading red-gold.

And one shimmering a deep crimson red soaring up to meet them.

OoOoO

 _Now_

"So, that's why a large chunk of New York and New Jersey lost their unshielded electronics."

"Looks like it."

"Cables actually melted and fused."

"So I hear."

"Auroras were seen in Kansas."

"As you would expect from a geomagnetic storm of that scale."

"Magneto never does anything by halves, does he?"

"According to him, it was the only way he could be sure of simultaneously at least stunning, if not destroying the artificial lifeform and neutralising the Red Son."

"How could he be sure that he wouldn't roast Harry's body in the process?"

"He said that he couldn't. However, since the alternative was risking the continued consumption and conversion of his body by the Transmode Virus, possibly to the point of no return, he had to take drastic action. And considering his knowledge of Harry's future time travelling, as well as Harry's track record of surviving things that should kill him, his natural ability to channel and manipulate vast amounts of energy, and when that failed, resurrection, he deemed it to be the lesser evil and estimated the odds of Harry's body surviving it the fall to be good."

"How did Thor and Wanda take that?"

"Not very well, though the extent of Magneto's injuries from the previous battle and the fact that he nearly killed himself in the process, plus how virulent the surviving sample of the Transmode Virus turned out to be, rather blunted any real anger." A pause. "Also, they were mostly busy being angry at other people."

"Understood. How did it end?"

OoOoO

 _Then_

Wanda slowly came into land on the Institute's lawn, noting the state of the Winter Guard, then dismissing them when she saw that they bore no threat, and could either wait for help or were far beyond it. Once that was ascertained, she gently lowered her father and her godson's body to the ground with a faint squelch. For the first time, she looked at them closely, casting absent minded spells to bring light and shelter them from the rain.

Even to a woman who had been largely inured to horrific sights by the age of twenty and who was now more than twice that, they did not make pleasant viewing. Her father was burned, badly burned, all his hair scoured off, and burnt blood marked his cheeks, while more, fresh blood dribbled from nose, ears, eyes and mouth. Harry's hair – the Red Son's hair, rather – was similarly missing in action and… she shook her head, slowly, then faster and faster, in denial and anger. His left arm was gone, replaced with a metallic copy, currently inert. And that was not all that was gone, no, that was not all. His eye, oh gods, his left eye, that was gone too, replaced with another currently inert cybernetic replacement.

A quick scan down his body proved that almost a quarter of his body had been turned to metal, almost like Piotr, one of Charles old friends, the one who went by Colossus – and if she remembered correctly, he too had once been enslaved by the Red Room. Here, they seemed to have applied that power and transmuted Harry's skin, his flesh and bone, to metal. But unlike with Piotr, she saw no sign that it would change back.

She fell to her knees by the exhausted, burned and beaten version of her usually indomitable father, and the mangled, tormented and transformed version of her godson, whose external remodelling now matched the internal.

"Oh Lily, oh Harry… forgive me," she whispered. "I've failed you so badly, at every turn. It's all my fault."

"No. If anything, the fault is mine."

She whipped around to see the tired and strained looking face of her old master, mentor and surrogate father, Doctor Strange.

"So, now you choose to show yourself," she spat. "You –"

"Not now, Wanda," Strange said. "Feel free to castigate me as much as you like later on; I will deserve it. But right now, your godson's body is still in danger." He waved a hand, and just like that, the four of them were in the Xavier Institute's infirmary, her father and Harry on two of the beds. "And I will need your help to save it."

Wanda frowned, but ruthlessly quashed the rising tide of howling fury within her, and said, voice clipped, "What must I do?"

"Your godson is infected with something called the Transmode Virus, a creation of Essex's from an Atlantean design," Strange said, tone grim. "Foolishness compounding foolishness. There are no words that can adequately describe how dangerous it is capable of being. In far too many futures, it has devoured the world whole, or infected the stars and spread from there. It is adaptable, resilient, and cleverer than it seems. Your father recognised it for what it was, and successfully stunned it with a truly monstrous electromagnetic pulse. However, there are still countless millions of nanites within Harry's body, and it only takes one survivor to start the process over again. I can find them, but only you can destroy them."

"Then what are we waiting for?" Wanda asked, briskly pulling her wet hair back and tying it up in a pony tail, out of the way. "Walk me through it."

Strange nodded, then began to murmur an incantation, overlaying one basic spell with several others. "The trouble with this virus is that once it has a foothold," he murmured in a distant voice. "The body doesn't recognise it as an intruder. Meaning that it is very hard to pick out. But if you know how it operates, if you triangulate and happen to be very, very clever… you can do this." He flicked his hands upwards, and suddenly, a three dimensional translucent holographic image of Harry appeared, the blood visible in his veins. And, doubted around his body were little metallic specks.

"They're concentrated away from his arm," Wanda murmured.

"That's already done, they don't need to worry about that," Strange said. "Now," he added. "You need to hit them all, at once, with as strong a disruptive charge as you can."

"Magic or probability manipulation?"

"Both," Strange said. "With this, there is no sense in half measures."

Wanda hesitated. She knew that this was only Harry's empty body, a vessel vacated by Harry's essence, filled first by a cold, murderous personality that did its masters bidding and little else, then these machines, but…

"Wanda," Strange said in a voice of steel. "I taught you early not to trust to appearances. Have you forgotten that lesson?"

Wanda turned to snap at him, but as she did, suddenly, Harry's body seemed to start coughing and hacking. Instinctively, she leaned forward – then just as instinctively reared back as _something_ dark and metallic shot up out his mouth towards her. Strange caught it with a blast of magic, but a small blob landed on Wanda and then…

Wanda had been possessed before. She'd fought invaders both spiritual and physical that had sought to claim her body for their own. She had lived much of her life in fear that Chthon would succeed in doing so, having prepared her as his vessel.

But she had never felt anything like this. The metal immediately sank into her flesh and began to replicate, attacking flesh and bone with ferocious hunger, seeking to gain access to her nerves and thereby travel along them to her brain, and then take control of it.

A normal person would have panicked, and fallen prey to the Transmode Virus.

Wanda was not by any definition normal.

Instead of panicking, she let out a snarl of pain and summoned up chaotic magical energy and directed it into the afflicted arm. Her body, familiar with chaos energy from near birth, was comfortable with it – in truth, sometimes to comfortable for Wanda's ease of mind. The Virus, however, was not, and Wanda almost fancied that she could hear a tinny scream of agony inside her mind as the part within was torn apart on sub-molecular level by the chaotic energies. With a pained twist of her hand and a grunt, she released the remaining energy in a flare of scarlet energy, purging the dust that was all that remained of the Virus.

Strange, meanwhile, was watching with unblinking focus as a spell shredded the ball of metallic virus on a sub-atomic scale, watching while it was reduced to apparent nothingness. He was pale, sweating, and blood ran from his nose. He didn't seem to notice it as he finally turned to Wanda.

"Now you see what we face," he said flatly. "Now, perhaps, you understand?"

Wanda didn't reply until she'd gone to Harry's side, summoning up more chaos magic, and channelled it into him, watching as the nanites within vanished under the onrushing tide of chaos magic. When the very last was gone, something confirmed by a minute nod from Strange, she turned to him.

"You're a fine one to talk," she said bitterly. "Normally, you wouldn't let anything like this anywhere near the wild – you'd have found it, destroyed it, and obliterated its creators and would-be users, erasing all trace of it, before it was even close to release, if you hadn't already diverted one small factor in the past to prevent it from ever coming to be. Normally, this giant cluster-fuck is the sort of thing you'd nip in the bud."

"I couldn't," Strange said.

"Because it was part of your plan?" Wanda demanded furiously, gearing up for another rant. Then, she stopped as her rational mind cut in. "No," she said slowly. "This isn't your plan at all. You've been making mistakes. You've been missing your timing, when normally you _never_ miss. Why?"

Strange sighed. "A full explanation must wait," he said. "Suffice it to say that this, this giant cluster-fuck of horror and chaos, with things like _that_." He waved at the Red Son's metal arm. "Things like that getting loose, it's what happens when, at a particularly sensitive spot in time, I'm left flying blind."

"You've lost your Foresight?" Wanda asked, residual anger cut away by shock and no little horror.

"No," Strange said. "It's still there. Nathaniel Essex, also known as Nathan Milbury and Sinister, the last being particularly apt, and the one behind so much of this, is the problem. He's immune to it. Not through any cleverness of his own, I might say, though he has cleverness to spare." He closed his eyes. "I have involved myself where I could, but it has been guesswork at best. Some guesses have turned out better than others."

"Like what?"

"Young Mister LeBeau did not find Essex by chance," Strange said. "In doing so, he found a cure for his condition and wound up in a position to influence Madelyn Grey for the better. I cannot overstate how vital that is."

"Why?" Wanda asked, frowning.

"Because if it was not done, she would have continued down dark paths under Essex's control, developing her own personality, but being influenced by the darkness of the Red Room and the monsters within it," Strange said. "When she inevitably found out about the truth of her origins, well. In the best case scenario, the death toll cracked seven figures before she was destroyed, though in most it cracked at least nine. In the worst case… everything burned. Everything burned and when Thanos came to Earth to claim the remaining Infinity Stones, he found them floating in a vast expanse of cosmic nothingness and the ashes of the World Tree, with only one realm surviving: Muspelheim, with the Dark Phoenix for a Queen. And after that? Well. It's a straight race between those creatures like Chthon which are locked up by bindings on this Earth and its associated realms, and Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet, as to which would end the universe first."

There was a long silence, in which Strange took the opportunity to see to Magneto. Wanda let him, absorbing the implications.

"The world always ended, then?" Wanda asked, eventually. "If you had not intervened, in all of those timelines, it would have fallen apart?"

"Or been wracked by horror," Strange said. "And almost all. Some timelines turned out fine. I could have guided the timeline down one of those paths, I suppose. It would have been a great deal easier, requiring minimal adjustment. But rarely did it end well for Miss Grey. And…" He paused. "It would have been cowardly. Her fate is my fault, a product of my failure, or at least, the intervention of one of my enemies. She is just a pawn, a pawn of a pawn, when she deserves so much better than the miserable fate the vast majority of realities would dole out to her." He was silent for a moment. "And she deserves better than what my mistakes and failures have condemned her to. She deserves the chance to make her own fate, and if it costs me a little sleep and peace of mind – what little I have left – to give it to her, then so be it."

"So," Wanda said eventually. "That's why you've been missing for so long, and why you look so…"

"Awful?" Strange asked lightly. "Partly. The fact that there's two of me active at one point in the time stream, without shielding, doesn't help." He snorted. "And I'm getting old, I suppose. Old and tired." He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them, and when he did, they were bright and full of manic energy. "But I'm on the home stretch now," he said. "And something is coming up that I am very much looking forward to… though admittedly with some tricky bits."

"I was going to say stressed," Wanda said.

"That too," Strange said. "I'll be off; back a couple of hours, and sideways. Oh, and before I go…" He pulled a rock out of his pocket. "A portkey. Activated by certain energy events rather than time, since my predictive senses have not quite been up to spec."

Wanda took it. "To where?" she asked.

"To where you will be needed," Strange said.

Wanda rolled her eyes. "Your proclivity for enigmatic pronouncements is undiminished, I see," she said.

Strange grinned the wicked little smile that usually was never shifted from his face. "Yes, well… I've been reliably informed that I have a reputation to keep up," he said. "And I would hate to start disappointing people." Then, he vanished.

"He always has to have the last word," Wanda muttered, then bounced the rock in her hand, wincing as the still healing wounds within her hand protested. "And where do you lead, I wonder? And when?"

OoOoO

 _Now_

"That was illuminating. I take it that you have this directly from Wanda."

"Yes."

"Who won't be pried from her godson's side for anything short of an apocalypse."

"Even then, it'd be fifty fifty."

"Quite." A rustle of papers. "The Transmode Virus. How much of a threat does it pose?"

"Potentially? Omega Level. Practically? The data on it has been destroyed. Unless there's a copy somewhere, I'd say that it's off the board, for the time being."

"Okay, I'll pass that on. Can you send Miss Grey in, please?"

"Of course."

The door opened and closed twice.

"Agent Coulson."

"Maddie. I hope you got some rest."

"I did, thank you."

A pause.

"I realise that what comes next could be quite difficult for you to talk about. If you want to delay it further…"

"No, thank you, Agent Coulson. I will finish this today."

"Good. Start whenever you're ready."

A deep breath.

"Very well."

OoOoO

 _Then_

Soon, Maddie and the rest reached the core of the base, the heart of the lion's den. Personally, Maddie considered this to be an insufficient metaphor: Essex's laboratories, around which the facility was built, were far more dangerous than the den of any lion. Consequently, she was on edge, every nerve thrumming, every hair raised, every sense straining for the first warning of danger.

And yet, despite her nerves, they proceeded into the depths of the base, following Strange's directions, without being stopped or challenged, or even scared by a close call. In a matter of minutes, they reached the laboratory in which the feather was contained.

 _Allow me_ , Strange murmured, and Maddie felt a tingling of subtle power. The door opened, as smoothly and easily as if Doctor Essex had opened it himself.

Dresden vocalised all of their thoughts when he remarked grimly, _This is too easy._

 _Where's your sense of positivity, Harry?_ Sir Fix asked, tone outwardly amused, but underscored by caution. He was no fool, Maddie had known that from the moment she'd seen him. _Sometimes things just go right._

 _In your world, maybe. Not when I'm around,_ Dresden retorted.

Maddie ignored them and, cautiously, reached out to the feather, calling it to her. It zoomed into her hand, like a part of her returning to the whole. She examined it carefully, physically and mentally, and let out a breath she didn't know that she'd been holding to find that Harry's mind was still in there, still semi-dormant. At her touch and investigation, it stirred sleepily.

There was another flicker of resonant power, one that flickered as Harry's mind stirred, and on impulse, Maddie reached out to it. A stick, a wooden stick – no, a wand – zoomed into her hand. She slipped it into a pocket, and then paid it little to no mind.

"You are right. It was too easy," a cold, calm voice said from behind them.

All of them whirled, to see Doctor Essex standing in the doorway, in his true form. And though only Maddie and Jono were visible to the naked eye, it did not take a brilliant mind to realise that he had detected Dresden and Sir Fix too.

He was not alone, either – standing on one side of him was a tall figure with dark hair, one that looked almost familiar, save for having sickly pale skin that was criss-crossed with scars, which Maddie recognised instantly as the signs of a flawed clone. Flawed, but most likely still powerful, considering his confidence.

He turned to Maddie. "So," he said, without emotion. "Your programming has broken down again. There would appear to be some critical flaw in your make-up."

"It's called free will, jackass," Dresden growled, the runes on his staff igniting with furious silvery power. The veils hiding him and Sir Fix had vanished. Strange, however, was still invisible – and going by the fact that Maddie could not sense him unless he wished to be sensed, he might not be present at all. His eyes narrowed. "And I thought Wanda dissolved you."

"Rumours of my death are doubtless greatly exaggerated," Essex said coolly.

"Doctor Nathaniel Essex," Sir Fix said, in tones of authority, drawing his sword. "I am Sir Fix, Knight and Champion of the Summer Court. You stand accused of trespass on lands under the rule of the Summer Queen, and many other crimes committed thereupon. Surrender now and face trial for your crimes, or your life shall be forfeit."

"'Thereupon'. Good word. Well placed," Dresden remarked.

"Thank you," Sir Fix said primly. "What is your answer, Doctor Essex?"

Essex ignored him, and focused on Maddie. "'Theirs not to make reply, theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die'," he said.

Nothing happened.

"Uh… has this just turned into an impromptu poetry slam?" Dresden asked. "Because I'm a few beers short where I should be if it is."

And Maddie smiled as her heart suddenly soared as she realised what it had been. It had been a trigger phrase, a command, designed to make her revert to past programming.

But that programming was gone, the Lady Lily had removed it.

And that meant… she was free.

Tears pricked at her eyes as an irresistible smile spread across her face.

"Madelyn," Essex said. "You will subdue these interlopers and return the feather to me."

"No."

It was one word. One, small, brief word, but it echoed like a thunderclap.

And Essex went even paler than ever, were it even possible, now being the pale of a cadaver. "This is not possible," he whispered. "You are mine, my servant and my weapon."

Unbidden to Maddie's lips came a phrase, one from a poem that Remy had quietly shared with her.

"'If I'm design'd yon lordling's slave, By Nature's law design'd, Why was an independent wish, E'er planted in my mind?'" she retorted.

Dresden barked out a laugh. "Robbie Burns, right?" he said.

"I believe so," Maddie said, a little startled.

"How do _you_ know it?" Sir Fix asked, surprised.

"He's Scottish, so was my mentor. The two were drinking buddies back in the day."

Maddie felt a hand on her shoulder, and turned to Jono, who smiled at her. "Nicely done, luv," he said. "Now, what say you show this creepy old bastard what you really think of him? You know, before he snaps out of shock."

Maddie turned back to Essex, and hesitated. Then, she noticed that he was staring at her, red eyes wide in utter disbelief. And… there was something else there too. Fear.

He was afraid.

 _He_ was afraid of _her_.

She hadn't known that was possible, and what hesitation she had left was swept away. "I am no longer your experiment, your weapon, or your slave," she said. "I and I alone am the Mistress of my fate, the Captain of my soul. You have no power over me, Doctor Essex. Not any more."

Essex's eyes widened, then narrowed. "We shall see," he said, voice quiet, low, and thrumming with rage. It was the first time she had heard him speak like that in a very long time, and an involuntary spasm of fear ran through her. "Subject Zero," he said. "Take them."

The tall man beside him blurred into motion, faster than the eye could follow. Indeed, Maddie only knew that he'd moved by piecing it together afterwards. First, came a powerful blast of wind, and deafening boom, the sort which she later realised was caused by someone or something breaking the sound barrier, which flung her to the floor, making her land painfully on her rear. Second, the man, Subject Zero, re-appeared halfway between her and Essex, frozen in mid-step, the air seeming to congeal around him.

"What the hell…" Dresden began, getting to his feet again, helping Jono up.

"Anyone seen anything like this before?" Jono asked, voice subdued.

"I haven't," Sir Fix said.

"I have," Dresden said, after a moment of examining it and glancing around, before darting a meaningful look at the feather in Maddie's hand. She shook her head, catching his train of thought.

"It's not him," she said, inwardly wondering how Harry was capable of stopping time.

"This is time magic," Essex murmured, then, if possible, went whiter than ever as the implications sunk in. As he did, a tall figure with glowing white eyes and awide, almost inhuman smile of gleeful, triumphant malice glided out from the shadows behind him, shadows which swelled up like a cloak or dark wings, looming over Essex like a tidal wave.

"Hello, Nathaniel,"Doctor Strange purred."Long time no see."

OoOoO

 _Now_

"Sounds like Strange was having fun."

"It did seem like he was enjoying it."

"That was very brave of you, by the way. I can't say that I know it from personal experience, but it isn't easy to stand up to someone like that. Those with personal experience were impressed – Dresden in particular was in a very similar place at roughly the same age as you are now. He thought you handled it very well."

Maddie went pink. "So he said."

"And Subject Zero… that was what Essex called the clone?"

"Yes, it was."

A rustle of paper, and the scratch of a pen.

"Is it relevant?"

"For classification purposes, yes."

"I see. Shall I continue?"

"Please do."

OoOoO

 _Then_

Essex backed away from Strange, who stalked forward, tall, lean, paleness and skeletal grin contrasting against the dark shadows that he was swathed in, like a classical representation of the Grim Reaper.

"I think that we are due a little _chat_ , Nathaniel," he said, with a kind of dark glee. "Doctor to Doctor."

"Impossible," Essex whispered, in tones that bordered madness. "Impossible. Impossible."

"And yet it is happening," Strange said, his own tones treading a thin line of sanity, as a feverish light animated exhausted eyes. "You've been hidden from me for centuries, Nathaniel. Your technology has blunted my finest spells, while a protection on you prevented me from finding you, by spell or by foresight, allowing you to slip through my fingers time and time again. You credited your own cleverness, but that was a mistake, a mistake born of arrogance, for you were only ever a piece; a senior piece, but a piece nevertheless, in a war far greater than you could ever imagine. No matter. I am not sure whether I detect the hand of The First One in this, or that of The Conqueror, but it is no matter: they cannot protect you. Your part in this is over." His hands flexed, and power gathered within them."Nathaniel Essex… _you are mine now_."

"No," Maddie said. "He can wait. There are more important things to be getting on with."

She arched an eyebrow as Strange slowly rotated to look at her, shoving down an upsurge of fear. She could feel Strange's power radiating off him, more magical power than she'd felt from any besides the Endless and from Mjolnir. And she could feel a desperation that bordered on madness, too, bubbling on top of his mind, a desperation to set things right. And for some reason, it spiked whenever he looked at her.

As it was, he looked at her for a long moment, then closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. Then, with absolutely no warning, he lashed out, slicing off the top of Essex's skull, tearing off the bone to get at the brain. A small flash of power sliced it free of the brainstem, as long, clever fingers pried the red gem loose from his forehead, before both were dropped into a waiting glass jar that hovered in mid-air, before dropping it in a pocket that was much larger than it would appear as the corpse slumped to one side. It hadn't even had the time to look surprised.

"I think," Jono said faintly. "That, energy being or not, I'm going to be sick."

"Right there with you," Dresden said.

"There's going to be quite a long list of people wanting to know why you killed him before they could, Strange," Sir Fix said grimly. "My Queen among them."

"Titania is not even close to the top of the list of those with a claim on Essex's hide," Strange said flatly. "If she wants an explanation, she can make an appointment. Besides, he'll be up and about in a few minutes. He transfers copies of his mind between clone bodies. He's more of a hive mind than an individual, these days. It's how he can appear in multiple places at once, and that gem is how he does it. I took his brain and the gem to ensure that, if all else fails, I will have access to the psychic network and the means to hunt his various copies down." His gaze settled on Maddie, that unsettling gleam in her eyes. "And true vengeance, my dear, shall be yours."

Maddie stared at Essex's bloody corpse. On one level, she hated him, for enslaving her for so long, for making her believe that she was nothing more than a weapon. On the other hand… it's what he had created her for. Hadn't he?

She shook her head, dismissing the query. It could wait. She had something to take care of.

"There is something else that I need to retrieve," she said, clipping the chain of the golden feather around her neck. "Doctor Strange, if you could convey us to the courtyard?" She looked around at the others. "And be prepared. What I plan to do will attract attention. A lot of it." She hesitated. "You do not have join me. I am sure that Doctor Strange could convey you out separately."

"I'm seeing this one through, luv," Jono said. "Besides. My body's basically dead already and I'm made out of energy. What are they going to do to me?"

"Disperse your essence and sunder it to the far reaches of this dimension? Capture it once more and lock you up for decades?"

"I was being rhetorical, luv."

"Ah."

"I told Wanda that I was going to see that her kid was brought back," Dresden said. "I'm not ducking out now."

"I am sure that it would be entirely improper of me not to ensure that this quest is completed," Sir Fix said, tone and expression light, but eyes firm and steadfast.

"He means yes," Dresden said, then paused and eyed Subject Zero. The amount of congealed air around it seemed noticeably diminished. "Did that thing just twitch?"

"The courtyard it is," Strange said mildly, snapping his fingers. And just like that, they were in the courtyard. And surrounded.

Dresden once again encapsulated all of their feelings.

"Oh crap."

OoOoO

 _Now_

"You didn't know the truth, at the time."

"No, I didn't."

"You were still less angry than I'd have thought."

"It hadn't sunk in yet. And I had other things to worry about. Essex taught me to control my emotions, to make practical, detached decisions. While he was evil, those lessons were helpful, under such circumstances."

"Until they weren't."

"Until they weren't, yes."

OoOoO

 _Then_

"Well, well, well," Lukin's voice, cold and arrogant said, projecting around the courtyard, as if from a hundred speakers. With the multitude of suits of armour, all as heavily armed as the War Machine armour and twice as large, ringed around the courtyard, on the ground and in the sky, it was entirely possible that they were. "Look at what the bitch dragged in: a fool with a sword, the lapdog of a Romani whore, and a glorified ghost."

Dresden growled, taking a half-step forward. While Lukin was speaking in Russian, his contemptuous tone was impossible to mistake.

"Do not try to fight me, Lukin," Maddie said flatly. "I give you this warning and this one alone. Leave us be, and we will leave in peace."

"So you believe," Lukin said, voice more normal, as he strode forward, clad in some sort of strange armour with a red sheen, with a white star in the centre of the chest. It looked like the Dynamo armours, but sleeker, more powerful. Even allowing for the armour, he looked taller, stronger, and younger, something shown best in his face, visible thanks to a retracted face-plate. Beside him was the looming presence of the Beast, piggy eyes cruel and itching for the excuse to do violence. There was a strange headband around his skull, and Maddie knew instantly that it was designed to protect his mind. Each and every one of the armours had similar protection. "Your power is vast, bitch. But even with your new talent for teleportation, you cannot win this fight."

It was at this point that Maddie noticed that Strange had disappeared.

Lukin snorted. "I am not a fool. I knew that Essex would turn on me eventually, as soon as I was no longer desired me as an ally, and that he would use you against me, perhaps even the Red Son too. I just did not imagine that you would turn on him." He waved a hand. "Whatever. I prepared for that day. We are all protected against your telepathy. As for your telekinesis…" He smiled cruelly. "For all your power, I think that even you will grow tired before we run out weapons. You are trapped."

"He's monologuing, isn't he?" Dresden said.

"I think it's a villainous requirement," Sir Fix remarked.

"Among the B-Listers, sure. The A-Listers, no. They're smart enough to save the monologuing for the post-victory bash."

Sir Fix bobbed his head in agreement.

"What's he saying, anyway?" Dresden asked.

"Don't look at me, mate," Jono said. "I don't speak Russian, and their minds are shielded."

"He is proclaiming our doom, his own cleverness, and using a lot of unoriginal insults," Maddie said dismissively, then switched back to Russian. "And when I asked you to leave us be, it was not a plea, or a bluff. It was a warning. I do not have time to waste."

"Brave words, little girl," Lukin said. "They will be your last. Fire!"

Maddie had defences ready, but even so, the sudden roar of fire, of energy blasts, bullets, missiles, made her buckle for a moment, raging away like a tide of fire and metal against a bubble that was about fifteen feet wide and ten high.

"That… is impressive," Sir Fix said, wide-eyed.

"Too bloody right it is," Jono said. "How long can you keep this up for, luv?"

"Long enough for me to open a Way," Dresden said, then jumped into a battle stance as a deep bellow cut through the roar of weapons fire. The Beast had needed no further encouragement, and, shedding stray bullets, missiles and blasts, and was now slamming clenched fists against the energy bubble, concentric rings of blue light flaring at each blow. Each blow made Maddie wince.

Dresden glanced at her, then pointed his staff and swept it downwards sharply, snapping, _"Aparturum!"_

A glowing hole in reality opened… to reveal large sea-scape, dotted with icebergs.

"Uh… crap."

"Okay, so stepping back through isn't an option, and the teleporting Doctor Frankenstein has fucked off," Jono said. "Now what?"

Maddie was not usually one to dwell on things like straight lines, but she had to admit – if she had, that would have been a good one. She reached up and touched the feather. "Wish me luck," she whispered, then reached down. Her hand wrapped around a leather wrapped handle.

Two minds met.

A decision was made.

And the world vanished in a flash of lightning like the burning of a star and a crash of thunder like the breaking of worlds.

OoOoO

A dimension and several thousand miles away, Thor looked up sharply from the vigil he had taken up by the bedside of what had once been his son, the steady flow of tears, self-recrimination and despair.

Slowly, he stood, as if listening for a sound that no one else could hear, ignoring the puzzled questions of others. And for some reason beyond reason, hope stirred in his breast.

OoOoO

The first crack of thunder had drowned out all other sounds, knocking even the most heavily armoured on their backsides.

The first flash of lightning had blinded even the finest optics.

And the ensuing electromagnetic pulse had fried every non-hardened piece of electronics within half a mile.

If the universe had a soundtrack, this was the point where it would have shifted to a rousing rendition of 'Thunderstruck' by AC/DC. Alas, it didn't.

As the dust cleared, everyone with still functional eyes stared at the epicentre of the disturbance: Maddie.

Who stared in utter astonishment at the hammer in her hands, a hammer which sang with power and triumph, blue-white lightning crackling around its head. Her clothes had been transformed, from black trousers, grey shirt, and black coat, to armour similar to Thor's: a closefitting breastplate of metal coloured the green of an aurora, with six rondules of gleaming gold, gold mail down her arms, and vambraces that same shade of green. The trousers were black, ending in boots of a deep red that were edged in gold, while the same cape of rich red billowed out behind her.

There was a stunned silence, which was inevitably broken.

"… _bloo-dee_ _ **Hell**_ _."_

Jono had made sure to draw out all the syllables, in a sort of awed drawl.

It was followed by a gleeful cackle from Dresden. "That's right, suckers," he gloated. "It's Hammer Time!"

Sir Fix groaned. "Really, Harry?"

Maddie ignored them, staring at the hammer. Then, her expression firmed – just as the Beast got to its feet and drew back a fist, before freezing. The point of a sword aimed at one eye and a smouldering blasting rod, the tip glowing like at an acetylene torch, aimed at the other would have that effect.

"I'd not make a move, if I were you," Sir Fix said in the perfectly pleasant tone of a man willing to visit gratuitous violence on someone else's person if it became necessary, and, moreover, of a man very well informed on how to do it.

"That goes for all of you," Dresden said, projecting his voice from the diaphragm. Since he was the best part of seven feet tall, that meant a lot of projection and a lot of voice. "I don't know how many of you bozos speak English, but this young lady just picked up the hammer of the God of Thunder. Which, for the time being, makes her the Goddess of Thunder. She, and the rest of us, just want to go. Anyone object to that?"

There was silence, then an incoherent growl from Lukin, who was struggling to his feet. "You think that you can just leave?" he spat, in perfectly fluent English, tearing off the helmet of his currently non-functional armour. It had been hardened against EMP's… just not ones of such scale, at such close range.

"Sure," Dresden said, levelling the blasting rod at him, cracking it like a whip and barking, _"Laqueus!"_

A rope of silver power as thick as two fingers snapped out from the tip, sending a snapping crack across the courtyard, before reaching out and whipping itself three times around Lukin's exposed throat. _"Forzare,"_ Dresden growled, beckoning with one hand as Lukin's hands went in a panic to the rope, and yanking with the other. A wave of force like a speeding car slammed into Lukin's back, which, combined with the tug, sent him tumbling along the ground towards the group. And when he looked up, it was into a group of very unsympathetic faces.

The armoured soldiers, still trying to manoeuvre in their slowly rebooting suits, stirred.

"No one move," Dresden barked. "Or he gets it." He tightened the energy whip for emphasis.

At that moment, sensing an opportunity, the Beast moved suddenly, taking a long cut across his cheek, then going for what he deemed to be the weakest member of the group: Jono.

"Hello Beastie," Jono said, as several hundred pounds of snarling mutant lashed out at him with a blow that would have turned concrete to dust. And smirked as the fist passed straight through him, smirk widening as the Beast's fist suddenly went slack. "Yeah, I'm not stuck in my body any more. I'm a being of pure psychic energy. Which, I've got to say, mate, has benefits, as a couple of weeks with the lovely lady with the hammer has demonstrated. Like the fact that if I left something pass through me, or pass through something, ghost style, psychic shielding or no psychic shielding, it gets a bit messed up. Like your right hand."

"Still got another hand," the Beast growled.

"Yeah, yeah," Jono said. "Lights out, big man." Then, he struck out, jabbing with his right hand, which promptly passed straight through the Beast's lower jaw, going up into his brain. The Beast's eyes rolled up into the back of his head and he went down like a falling tree. "Well," Jono remarked, after a moment. "That was more anticlimactic than I expected."

"These things often are," Dresden said wisely.

"Says the bloke strangling a psychotic Russian general in battle armour, with a magic energy whip," Jono retorted. "Get the right hat and you're like _Indiana Jones_ meets _the Matrix_."

Any further response was cut off as Maddie seemed to snap out of a trance and began to swing Mjolnir round and round in circles, until very quickly, it was a grey blur surrounded by crackling lightning.

"Uh, what are you doing, luv?"

"Making a gateway."

"I tried that," Dresden said. "All that's on the other side of where we're standing is ice and icy water."

Maddie shrugged. "The hammer has different opinions," she said, then suddenly swung the spinning hammer in front of her. Lightning shot out in a furious crackling ring, burning a hole in reality, opening a gateway to what looked like a hospital, one with several people in it.

"… Well, far be it from me to argue with a magic hammer," Dresden said, as the other two stared, jaws hanging loose. "Fix? Come on, you see gates like this all the time."

"Not like this," Sir Fix said. "Point to point gates, specifically made? That's… that's serious power, Harry. It's the sort of thing I'd expect from Titania."

"And I think that the hammer of the god of thunder, whose people built the freaking Bifrost, probably has that kind of power," Dresden said. "Somehow. Now get your ass through that gate before the laws of physics start paying attention to us again."

Both Sir Fix and Jono stepped through.

"You go," Maddie said to Dresden, who hesitated. "I will follow."

Dresden met her gaze for a moment, then, as soon as she felt a tug between them – the phenomenon known as a 'Soulgaze' presumably – he nodded, clapped her on the shoulder and said, "See you on the flip side, kid." Then, he dropped the whip, causing Lukin to let out a desperate gasp of breath, and kicked him away with a single stomping blow, sending him sprawling. "He's all yours, boys," he said, as he did so, before turning away and stalking through the hole in reality.

It would have been much more impressive, Maddie thought, if he hadn't winced immediately afterwards, and favoured his right foot as he stepped through. She watched him go, then turned to Lukin, expression hard. This man had done unspeakable things to countless numbers of people, second only to Doctor Essex in that regard. And one of them had been Harry, her cousin of sorts, she supposed – she wouldn't know exactly what relation applied until she knew what DNA Essex had created her from. Nevertheless, he was family, and it was tempting to exercise her displeasure right here and now. The hammer, belonging to Harry's father, was certainly tempted. She could feel its mind humming with eagerness to strike.

But no. Not now. She had other things to take care of.

"Here me, Lukin," she said, in cold, flawless Russian. "As I told Doctor Essex; I am not his servant, weapon or slave. I do not belong to him. And Harry does not belong to you. I never erased his mind – I hid it. And now, I am going to restore it. I am going to take him from you. He will never before your weapon, or your slave, ever again. Your power is broken, old man. And if no one else does, I will ensure that it stays that way." She raised the hammer once, calling to the skies. And the skies answered, with a vast column of lightning that smashed into Essex's core laboratory. Specifically, the part that contained the machines that moved the labs, and at least part of the base, through the Nevernever. "For now, you have nowhere to run."

She turned away.

"You think yourself so _clever_ ," Lukin spat. "So _righteous_. So _noble_. But you are none of those things! You are just a thing! A hunting hound, a prize bitch, bred from nothingness by your master, trained to perform and do as you were made to do! And that is all that you will ever be. You think this is some great defiance, some assertion of your freedom? You are deluded. You are not a person, you have no freedom! All this is, all that you think you have gained, it is just an error in your programming! You are nothing! Do you hear me?! Nothing! While I, I am so much more! I am more than human, I am Russia! I am the Motherland incarnate! I am more than you will ever be, and your tricks and powers mean _nothing_!"

Maddie turned back to him. He was almost frothing with rage and madness, his eyes wild, his face still red from ligature marks from the spell. Slowly, she strode over to him, knocking him over with a thought and a clatter as he hit the ground. She knelt down beside him. Then, she calmly placed Mjolnir on his chest. The armour cracked beneath its weight.

"Perhaps," she said, releasing her grip on the hammer. "But I am Worthy. And you are not."

Then, she stood, picking up the hammer and stepping through the gate without a backward glance.

 **Which, I think, is a rather good note to end the chapter on. Certainly, I felt that it was appropriate, and rather cool – Maddie proving Worthy, erasing any remaining doubts, and underlining, well…**

 **Oh, if anyone else has noticed the intentional parallels to the finale of Book I, you get an internet cookie (he says, somewhat loopy from lack of sleep).**


	15. Chapter 15: Forever Red - Finis

**Right, now onto the final part of what has basically been a three part chapter – or, in terms of pure scale, a decent sized novel in three parts. This is the bit where, to put it crudely yet ever so accurately, the shit hits the fan in the most spectacular fashion possible.**

 **I'm not sure how all of this turned out, because I wrote a lot in the early hours, but hey.**

 _Now_

"An impressive display."

"Thank you."

"What was it like, to wield Mjolnir?"

"I… I don't know. I don't think I have the words to describe it."

"Try."

"It was… transcendent, I suppose. I just felt so alive, so not merely more powerful within and without, but... connected, I suppose. I could feel, really feel, the skies, and I just knew that they would respond to my wishes. And I could feel the thunder, flowing in my veins, the energy like lightning, I…" A pause. "I'm sorry, Agent Coulson. It's really very hard to describe."

"Well, I'd imagine that a brief bout of godhood would be."

"Quite."

"I hear it made a rather good impression."

"Indeed it did."

A pause.

"Okay, Maddie, we'll break there for the moment. Could you send Harry Dresden in again, please?"

"Of course."

The door opened and closed twice.

"Hey Coulson. Where are you up to?"

"The Institute. Specifically, after you stepped through the gate provided by Maddie and Mjolnir."

"Just before things got messy."

"Yes."

"Okay. Here we go…"

OoOoO

 _Then_

I stepped into the Xavier Institute, noting the instant change in air quality, from cold, brisk sea-breeze full of static charged dust and a mixture of cordite and burnt air, to the clear, disinfectant tinged sterility of hospitals everywhere. As soon as I did, I raised my hands and tried to look non-threatening. So would you if all the Avengers, Bucky Barnes (a.k.a. the fucking Winter Soldier), Wanda, Professor Xavier, and an admittedly groggy and exhausted looking Magneto were staring at you, keyed up and ready for a fight.

"It's me," I said. "Harry Dresden."

Wanda met my gaze for a long moment, then nodded. "It's him," she said. We'd shared a Soulgaze. It's the sort of thing that only happens once, and you can't repeat. If you look someone that you've Gazed in the eyes and a Soulgaze starts up, it means that someone else is piloting their body.

Fix followed my example, freezing, then slowly and carefully sheathed his sword, before bowing neatly to Thor and Loki. "Milords," he said politely.

Jono was a bit less formal. "Um. Hello, ladies and gents?"

Thor grunted, and relaxed slightly, while Loki inclined his head. "Sir Fix," he said quietly. "Wanda explained your and Master Dresden's mission. You have my nephew's essence?"

I shared a glance with Fix, then was saved from having to answer by Jono's arrival. He too froze.

"Am I seeing things, or is that the kid we've got in the Infirmary back at the Mansion?" Tony asked, after a moment.

"If you are, I'm seeing them too," Natasha remarked.

"That's not particularly reassuring."

"He's not human, I can say that," Clint said, and everyone tensed up again.

"No," Xavier said, rolling forward. "I believe that this is Mister Starsmore's astral form incarnate."

"Say what?"

"His mind has taken physical form, independent of the rest of his body," Loki explained.

"You've got my carcass on ice, then?" Jono said, a little uneasily. "Good to know."

"My son's mind," Thor said flatly. His eyes were red. He'd been crying. And he wasn't the only one, either – I could see tears drying on Wanda's cheeks too. I'm not the most sensitive of Wizards, both in terms of super senses and interpersonal skills, but I could almost _feel_ a steady sense of grief being transmuted into anger, like the sort of storm front that starts small, then turns into a hurricane that tears up half the Caribbean. "Where is it? In the hands of Mjolnir's new wielder?"

"Well… yes," I said. "She'll be coming through right about…"

Maddie stepped through, the lightning gate sealing itself behind her.

"Now," I finished, with no small relief.

There was a silence as everyone stared at her. She made for a startling sight – she was identical to Jean Grey, but for a shorter haircut, a set of facial tattoos that lent her a somewhat savage look, underscored by the fact that she was a bit thinner than her twin. More to the point, though, to the knowledge of everyone who wasn't part of our little trip through Dream's realm and the Nevernever (and presumably Harry), she'd been an unrepentant bad guy for most of her life – or at least, she'd been corrupted so early that she hadn't ever known that it was wrong, and by a powerful telepath, no less. In other words, the idea that Harry might turn her, even with a prophecy, a letter from the future, the testimony of Remy LeBeau – the Black Widow's mole inside the Red Room and Maddie's boyfriend of sorts, both of which told me that he had balls of solid vibranium – and Harry's knack for getting under people's skin, had been treated with a certain understandable scepticism.

Yet here she was, holding Mjolnir, a weapon enchanted by Allfather Odin himself, which only permitted itself to be wielded by the Worthy, having very clearly used its power with its consent. Short of her striding in with freaking Excalibur in hand (unlikely, since if what Wanda said was true, I knew the guy who owned it), I couldn't think of a much more convincing way for Maddie to demonstrate her bona fides as a good guy.

The Avengers weren't an easily shocked group, and after all they'd seen, that was hardly surprising. Wanda, Barnes, Magneto and Xavier, likewise. But here they were, all staring at a rather nervous looking teenage girl who now no longer looked powerful and authoritative but, truth be told, a bit nervous and uncomfortable with the scrutiny. I actually took this to be an encouraging sign, a demonstration that even that Essex creep hadn't managed to erase her ability to feel the kind of acute, toe-curling embarrassment that is part and parcel of being a teenager.

She paused, hesitated, then opened her free hand. In it was the feather.

"Loki?" Captain America asked. I still got a slight thrill out of being in a room with him. Blame it on too many comics as a kid.

Loki slipped over, with the kind of smooth grace that reminded me that for all he looked it, he was very much not human. I got a slight thrill out of being in a room with him, too, but not of the good kind. I knew that he was a good guy these days, that he really regretted what he'd done, to the point of (according to Wanda) ensuring that a big section of the new 'Unnatural History Museum' covered what he'd done, that it wasn't all whitewashed over, and he'd put his life on the line for the world several times. Besides, I was hardly a stellar person myself. But it was hard to forget that he had killed a _lot_ of people. Up close, it was also very hard to ignore the fact that his aura of magical energy was stronger than pretty much any I'd ever come across, brief encounters with Odin and nigh-omnipotent cosmic entities like the Endless notwithstanding, and the fact that if he felt like it, he could put a hand through my chest the way I would put mine through wet cardboard.

So maybe it wasn't fair, but it was instinctive – I was afraid of him.

He took the feather and examined it for a few moments, raising an eyebrow at the way it had begun to glow. "Professor," he said. "I would like your opinion."

Xavier rolled his chair over and lightly touched the feather, pulling his fingers back as they got burned slightly, before giving it a long look, probing it with his powers. "It's him," he said, after a moment. "All of him." He turned to Maddie, a kind and genuinely impressed smile spreading across his face. "I must confess, I am not sure how you did it, but what you have done is absolutely remarkable."

Maddie went pink. It did a lot to make her look like the kid she really was.

A kid who didn't know the truth about herself, a nasty part of me interjected. A truth that could destroy her.

Then, she started, and turned to Thor, holding out Mjolnir. "I believe that this is yours," she said. "Thank you for allowing me to borrow it."

Thor had been giving her a measuring look, weeks of anger, pain and grief swept away in favour of a mixture of desperate hope and cautious calculation. Now, he outright stared at her for a moment, before slowly taking the hammer by the handle. As he did, the armour melted away from Maddie, as if it had never been.

"You are welcome," he said, in a low rumble. "I am glad that it was in good hands."

Maddie's eyes widened, and her mouth opened slightly. Tears pricked at the corner of her eyes. Wordlessly, she bobbed her head.

I'm not an expert on interpersonal sensitivity. But I have my moments. And it might just be a guess, but I figured that it was one thing to have a magic hammer say that you were a good person, and quite another to have the hammer's owner, a superhero who just so happened to be the dad of the kid you'd been trying to save, confirm it. Especially for Maddie, who'd been told all her life that she was nothing but a living weapon, nothing but a hunting dog, something less than human that was only fit to come when called and do as it was told, to whom doing the right thing had – until very recently – been a very abstract concept.

Then, as soon as she'd got her tongue working again, she reached into her pocket and pulled out a wand just short of a foot long, the one she'd swiped in the lab. I assumed that it was Harry's. "I think that this belongs to your son," she said, handing it to Thor.

Thor blinked, then took it. "I had thought it lost with him," he said, examining it. "You have my thanks, Madelyn."

"I will call Hank," Xavier said. "I think that before we restore Harry's mind, we should do our best to repair his body."

"That will not be necessary," Thor said shortly. "He will be taken to Asgard. We can care for him there."

"Though we thank you for the offer, and for everything else you have done," Loki added smoothly.

Thor grunted in acknowledgment, and apparent apology, his mind clearly elsewhere as his eyes stayed rooted to his son's body.

And after I finally got a good look at the kid, I couldn't blame him in the slightest for being distracted, angry, and generally a bit short with those around him. Hell, he wasn't even my kid and I could feel all those emotions welling up in me like a raging forest fire as I looked down at him. It was not a pretty sight.

He'd been stripped down to a set of practical looking boxers, revealing a physique of lean, hard muscle. There wasn't an ounce of unnecessary fat on him, and if anything, he was missing more than a few ounces of necessary fat too. His skin, white to begin with, was the pale of the kind of fish that spent most of their lives in the cold and dark of an ocean trench. His hair had been scoured away; that, along with naturally pronounced cheekbones, and the somewhat rangy, scrawny look common to all young things that hadn't finished growing yet, lent him a raw, gaunt look, like a young falcon.

While I knew intellectually that it technically wasn't Harry, just a bunch of Red Room programmed directives with a code name, it was damn hard to remember it when looking at the kid. He looked exhausted, and not just from what had no doubt been a battle royale with Magneto, but from who knew how many missions, how much training, and programming. Huge bags were visible under his eyes, even through a spectacular black eye, and his face was one that looked horribly strained, even in unconsciousness. Speaking of the most terrifying man I'd ever met, he was now sitting up, watching proceedings with clear, sharp eyes, despite his own injuries and exhaustion.

But the exhaustion, the obvious fact that the Red Room had run their weapon into the ground, even the sheer horror of a sweet, kind kid who only wanted to help being twisted into something like that, was not the worst of it. The worst of it ran all down his left side.

His left arm was gone. Just… gone. It had been replaced by one that was an outwardly perfect, and I mean _perfect_ , replica, but for three small differences. It was made of metal. The fingers were tipped with razor sharp claws, perfect for opening up throats, veins and arteries. And it had a large hole punched through the bicep, driven through where the bone should have been. The edges were burnt black.

And that was not all that had been replaced. Tendrils of metal ran deep into the left hand side of his chest cavity, on the front, and from what little I could glimpse, the back. A large chunk of the left shoulder was gone too, and through the papery thinness of his skin, I could see metallic tendrils reaching up through his neck, up the side of his face, connecting to an area of slowly paling pink flesh, around the eye socket. His left eye was gone. Completely. It was like the eyeball had been scooped out of its socket to make room for something out of the _Terminator._

And that was still not it. Further tendrils reached down his left side, disappearing under his boxers, before replacing it with plating it in that same metal,

Actually, scratch that, the whole thing looked like _Terminator_ meets _The Thing._

Wanda had come over to my side as I stared and wordlessly, I slipped an arm around her as she settled into my side.

"What the hell," I whispered.

"Nanotech," Stark said, in short, clipped tones. He was quite literally shaking with suppressed anger. "Some kind of fucked up nanotech virus that uses organic material as raw material to replicate. It's designed to eat the host alive from the inside out."

I shuddered. I'd come across some horrible things in my time, things too awful for words… but this was bad.

"And it's both incredibly resilient and phenomenally aggressive," Wanda said quietly. "My father hit it with a massive electromagnetic pulse – you can see the hole – and there were still enough active nanites that within fifteen minutes, a group briefly succeeded in infecting me." She raised a bandaged right wrist. "I destroyed them, and the ones in Harry's body. But…" She shook her head. "It's my fault," she whispered, in a raw, hoarse voice. "I should have held on tighter."

"He wouldn't have thanked you for it," I said.

I then realised that everyone's eyes were on me.

"You think he would want this?" Thor asked, voice low and biting, like a sudden icy breeze before a hailstorm. "To be captured. To be tortured. To be forced from his own body as it was transformed into the vessel of a monster's will."

That kind of tone would be dangerous from an ordinary guy built like Thor – about six foot three, with broad shoulders and muscles built for power, with the stance of someone who could handle themselves, knows how to handle the bulky mallet in their hands, and, moreover, is really, really pissed off. While I had a few inches in height on him and I'm no shrinking violet, even if he'd been an ordinary mortal I wouldn't have picked that fight. And he wasn't an ordinary mortal. He was the Crown Prince of Asgard, the Norse God of Thunder, who could pound moons to dust and drown continents in Biblical scale rainstorms.

So, for once, I thought very carefully before I said anything.

"No," I said. "But I think that if it were any of us in his position, and we wanted to go into somewhere like the Red Room to try and talk someone we cared about out of it, and someone stopped us from doing it… then I don't think that any of us would thank the person who stopped us."

There was a dangerous silence, as Thor's eyes bored into me like diamond drills, Wanda took a protective half-step in front of me, and I began calculating the odds of my surviving the next five minutes.

"He's right," Captain America said, breaking the silence. "I've been in a similar position, when I was first at the front, back in the War. I was told that Bucky and most of his regiment were out of reach, behind enemy lines, in HYDRA's hands. HYDRA would have killed to get their hands on me – or at least, the Serum in my veins. In fact, they did. They'd most probably have locked me up and done much the same as what the Red Room did to Harry. What they were doing to Bucky."

"And what the Red Room did to me," Barnes said quietly.

Captain America – Steve. He'd said that I should call him Steve – grimaced and nodded. "I know that I wouldn't have thanked anyone who stopped me," he said. "Even if, logically, I should have been stopped. In the end, I got lucky; very, very lucky. For one thing, the HYDRA facility was far enough behind enemy lines that they weren't expecting an attack, or ready for a fight. The Red Room were." He met Thor's gaze, and, remarkably, held it without flinching. "Of course he wouldn't want what's happened to him. We both know that isn't what Dresden meant. What he meant, and what he was right about, was that Harry wouldn't have thanked us for stopping him, if we'd managed to."

Thor glowered at him for a long moment, then glanced at his brother. A moment of silent communication passed between them, and he sighed, suddenly looking every bit as exhausted as his son. Even with front row seats to a lot of it, I couldn't imagine what he'd been going through these last couple of weeks.

"I am sorry, Wizard Dresden," he said. "I had no right to snap at you like that, especially not after you have risked life and limb to retrieve my son's mind."

"S'okay," I said. "You had reason."

Thor nodded gratefully. "I know my son well enough to know that he would consider the end result a happy one," he said, after a long moment, looking at Maddie, who had looked incredibly uncomfortable, and no wonder. He stood. "You were the one who saved his mind from corruption, even… destruction. You will ever have the thanks and welcome of Asgard for that."

"I… it was my pleasure?" Maddie said, a little uncertain. It wasn't exactly surprising. Interesting fact about Thor: he might not be the most polished socialiser in the various pantheons of Earth, but he's very good at turning on the charm. It's the kind of thing that makes guys like me consider changing the way we do things.

"Though as Harry's blood kin, you would have that welcome anyway," Loki added dryly. "Would you like to accompany us to Asgard? There are one or two matters that I would like to discuss. I presume that Essex detected something amiss, which is why he sent you away, and you had to return to the base the hard way."

At Maddie's astonished look and Jono's impressed whistle, he smiled thinly. "It was simple enough to deduce: Essex is a capable telepath and the feather radiates psychic power. Even not knowing what it was, he would consider it an intriguing curiosity. Additionally, I think that he would want to ensure that Madelyn was far away from anything that might make her start thinking beyond his programming, especially if she did something to at least partially arouse his suspicion. Also, Harry's body has aged around six months. Yours, Miss Grey, has not. That states very clearly that the two of you were not in the same rate of temporal flow."

Fun fact about Loki: the guy's not just absurdly powerful, he's terrifyingly smart.

"I…" Maddie began. "Yes. I would like that very much."

Loki nodded, then turned to Fix. "Sir Fix, you and your Queen have the thanks of Asgard for what you have done today. This will not be forgotten," he said. "If you wish, I can return you to the Summer Court, or to your home. This offer is made freely and without obligation."

Fix bowed his head. "The thanks of Asgard are welcomed," he said formally. "And I would beg leave to report to my Queen, if it does not inconvenience you."

Loki nodded, then swiftly sketched the arch of a door in mid-air, his hand trailing green-gold light. The sides of the arch extended downwards, forming a doorway which opened onto what looked like a pleasant summer's day in the English countryside, with crickets chirping and birds singing. It was a formidable demonstration of casual power: as Fix had noted, specific point to point gates through the Nevernever were a real rarity, the province of the likes of Mab and Titania (which, incidentally, spoke volumes of how terrifyingly powerful Jean Grey was, since according to the Avengers, she'd turned around and ripped a hole in reality to the Red Room base when Harry and Maddie had got into it, and still had plenty left in the tank). I was still wary. The Summer Court tends to look all sweetness and light at first glance, and they do tend to be the nicer court – I get on very well with Fix, and with Lily, the Summer Lady. However, they can also be really freaking scary. After all, this is the group that can square off against Winter, full of all manner of horrifying creatures and ruled by one of the most terrifying beings in the universe, on even footing.

Fix gave him one last bow as the Knight of Summer, then clapped me on the shoulder, a gesture I mirrored. "Good to see you, Harry," he said.

"And you, man," I said. "Hopefully it'll be under better circumstances next time."

Fix's gaze travelled back to the bed, and he sobered, likely also remembering the first time we'd met. "Yeah," he said quietly. "I hope so."

Then, giving me a last nod, Maddie and Jono as well, he stepped through and the gate shut behind him.

Loki then gave me a speculative look. "Now, Wizard Dresden," he said. "I think we would all like to know something very important."

"And that would be?" I asked.

"You and Sir Fix escorted Miss Grey and Mister Starsmore," Loki said. "Along the roads of the Dream King. But neither of you knows those roads. Few beings of any kind do, and even fewer of those still live. Who was your guide, Master Dresden, and where are they now?"

I grimaced. "It was Doctor Strange," I said. "We only found out it was him when we arrived at the base and Maddie gave us the option to turn back."

That darkened the mood.

Wanda grimaced. "It makes sense," she said. "If anyone knows those roads, it's Stephen. And he did say that he had something he was looking forward to coming up…" She gave me a serious, worried look. "What did he do?"

"He…" I paused. "He guided us through the base. Maddie pretended that Jono was her prisoner and no one bothered her. Strange hid me and Fix under a world class veil, and no one noticed us either. Then, we got the feather, and the kid's wand, and Essex found us. And then…"

I shuddered, remembering what Strange had done. I'm no stranger to bloodshed and violence. I've seen some absolutely horrendous things in my time. But the sight of Strange, eyes alight with something very much like madness, advancing on Essex... I didn't feel sorry for Essex, especially since Strange had said that he'd be up and about in a new body sometime soon. But the sight of Strange like that had scared the crap out of me.

"Strange killed him. Or at least, he killed that body, then ripped out his brain and that weird red gem on his forehead to use it to track his other bodies." I shook my head. "He did not look sane. If you want my professional opinion, I'd say that he'd cracked. He was fixated on getting Essex and making him suffer."

"He wanted to make it right," Maddie said quietly, drawing the attention of the entire room. "He had made a mistake of some kind and he was desperate to make it right. He said that 'true vengeance' would be mine, on Doctor Essex, as if he knew something about me that I didn't."

"With Strange, that's a safe assumption," Clint said darkly.

"And I believe that we know what he was referring to," Xavier said quietly. "Miss Grey. You have probably been wondering why we have been calling you that."

"I have," Maddie said frowning. "The name I was assigned by Doctor Essex was Madelyn Pryor."

"And the name you were given at birth was different," Xavier said gently. "It was –"

At that point, however, he was cut off. Because that was when everything went sideways.

Loki swore suddenly, dropping the feather, which was now burning in earnest, the golden chain connected to it melting away like ice under a flamethrower. Instead of falling to the floor, however, it was now floating in mid-air, glowing brighter and brighter.

"Brother?" Thor said, worried.

"The feather, it… oh no," Loki said, eyes widening.

The plan, it seemed, had been to take Harry to Asgard, and either restore his arm and eye, or replace them with prosthetics/an eye patch that wasn't made out of some insane nanotech virus. After that, his memories of his time as the Red Son would be removed, since no one needed that kind of horror floating around in their brain, especially when it had all happened when their body was freaking hijacked.

It didn't last, because Harry's mind, or the thing it was in, had different ideas. It hovered in mid-air for a few moments, then suddenly shot towards Harry's body, slamming into it with explosive force. Not two seconds later, his human eye shot open and he catapulted upright, flailing and sucking in a deep, desperate gasp of air, like a drowning man reaching the surface. His gaze darted around, expression confused, even panicked, and he began to frantically pat himself down, as if to make sure that he was all there. In the process, the claws on his left hand scored light gashes on his torso and snapped it away with a cry of pain and surprise, one that grew louder as Thor caught it and him.

"It is all right, Harry," he said, his tone the one that Ebenezar had used to soothe startled horses on the farm and, though we never talked about it, me when I'd had nightmares in the early part of my apprenticeship.

Harry stared at him for a moment, as if assuring himself that he was there, then let out a heart-rending wail of confusion and pain and flung himself into his father's arms, clinging onto him with a ferocity that would have made a limpet envious. His fingers, claws and all, dug into Thor's back. But if it hurt him, he gave no sign of it, holding his son as close and as tight as he dared, tears flowing down his cheeks in earnest.

My first mentor, Justin Du Morne, had been my foster-father. He had also been the source of most of my nightmares up until my early twenties – those that hadn't featured me being executed by the White Council, anyway. This was because he'd been a horrifyingly manipulative, murderous and utterly psychotic Warlock who brainwashed Elaine, my foster-sister/girlfriend (and tell me that that dynamic isn't messed up), my first love and first everything, into being his enforcer. He'd tried to do the same to me, before siccing an assassin demon on me. I ended up facing him in a duel to the death, one that I won. My favoured weapon, then as now, was fire, and fire does not kill cleanly. I burned Du Morne alive – and believed that I'd killed Elaine too – while the only home I'd ever known burned with him. The roar of the flames had been drowned out by his screams. In other words, it's the sort of thing that would give you trouble sleeping at night.

I knew that my namesake had already seen far more than his fair share of horror, more than I had at his age. He'd also been an orphan for a lot of his young life, an experience I'd shared, and while I had had the fortune not to be raised by verbally and psychologically abusive relatives who kept me in a freaking cupboard (and somehow, it did not surprise me in the least that parents that awful had their own son turn into a Grade-A psychopath), I knew well enough that that left its own psychological scars and nightmare fodder behind.

I couldn't even begin to imagine what kind of wounds had been gouged into his psyche now. I couldn't even begin to comprehend what kind of horrors he now had parading in front of his mind's eye, memories of the Red Room using him as a weapon to carve out a neo-Soviet empire, memories of who knew how much death and destruction, of madness and murder.

But he could. I could see it in his expression, which slowly changed from one of mixed confusion, pain, and desperate need to one of comprehension and absolute horror, one barely attenuated by Wanda slipping onto the bed next to him and slipping her arms around him. It was almost like he didn't know she was there, like he didn't even know his father was there, going by the way his eye just stared into the middle distance, fixed on things that only he could see. I didn't know exactly what those memories were doing to him. But if I wanted to, I could find out. I could open my Sight and watch as each memory sliced open a new wound on his spiritual self. A part of me cringed, my imagination painting a clear picture of what it might look like – he wouldn't be the first person I'd seen spiritually mutilated. The method was different to most spiritual attacks I'd encountered, in that it was sort of accidental. Then again, going by Maddie's account of events, the Red Room had tortured him, physically, psychically and psychologically, for at least two days straight before she'd stepped in, so there wouldn't be any shortage of wounds to begin.

But… maybe if I looked, I could get some insight, something that might help. Recovery from a heavy grade psychic mauling can take years, and that for people with decades of life experience under their belts. For a fourteen year old kid, one already especially sensitive to psychic assaults by dint of being what he was and having been victim to several over his young life, it could take longer. A human lifetime, maybe.

And then there was the feather. Right now, it had acted completely on its own, restoring Harry's mind to his body – which I had imagined would be a fairly delicate operation. It could have been Harry's mind waking up within it and deciding to take matters into his own hands, but something told me that it wasn't. More to the point, I'd been wondering about how his mind had fitted in a feather, even of a powerfully magical creature like a phoenix. Namely, I had no idea how it was even freaking possible.

I mean, my assistant, Bob, is a spirit of intellect – basically, a mind without a body. He lives in a skull, sure, but it's an incredibly well enchanted vessel, specifically designed to hold a spirit of his power. And while Bob was incredibly knowledgeable, something that probably translated to considerable power – certainly, the demented little perv had absolutely no trouble causing mayhem whenever he managed to haggle me into giving him free rein out on the town – I'm not sure how he stacked up against a demigod psychic.

At the very least, the kid's mind would take something similar to store it in, and as far as I could tell, a phoenix feather wouldn't cut it. Which meant that what Strange had said about it being something else entirely was a) true, b) possibly very relevant. After all, it had been in Essex's hands for six months, in one of his labs. He was a psychic himself, and a strong one, if not quite in the same weight class as Xavier, much less Maddie, and scarily clever. Who knew what he might have done to it. Hell, who knew what he might have done to _Harry_.

I owed it to the kid to find out.

So I took a few steps to one side in order to get a clear line of sight, took a deep breath and opened my Sight.

In retrospect, that was a mistake.

When I looked at the kid through my Sight, I saw a small figure, lean to the point of looking cadaverous, with bone, strained, ropy muscle, and deep wounds, some of which were already festering, others of which were being sliced open right before my eyes, standing out like beacons. His skin was pulled tight over his body, giving his fingers the appearance of claws; his eyes were sunken, darting and wary, the bones of his face standing out in sharp relief, leaving him with the general aura of a feral cat: twitchy, malnourished, and wary of the next blow.

His skin was as pale as pack ice, except for where the metal intruded. Any doubts I might have had about how pervasive it was and the malice behind it were dispelled: his left arm, hell, the bulk of his left side, from top to toe, were swathed in a metallic blackness that, even having been nuked by both Magneto and Wanda, exuded sullen malice. The only exception was the eye, which gleamed like frozen steel, and part of the shoulder, on which was inscribed a blood-red five pointed star. It had devoured and replaced his left arm entirely, and before it was stopped, it had extended thick, dark tendrils into his chest cavity, spreading outwards, upwards and downwards, with thinner tendrils branching off, probing and investigating the rest of his body.

And that wasn't it. I could see magic running through him in veins, intertwined with strands of a pale golden energy that could only be psychic power. Both ran close to the metallic corruption of the nanotech infection, both being twisted when they got near, almost shying away from it.

And then, there were two other things. One, I couldn't see very clearly; whenever I tried to get a look at it, all I saw was a flickering gleam of light, then it vanished. The other, by contrast, gave me no such problems.

At first glance, I thought it was a confluence of the magical and psychic energy that ran through him, like an unusually located chakra point – everyone has them, those with supernatural power in particular, in much the same way that the Earth has ley line confluences and water pools in lakes. Then, I realised that the kid had the full complement. This was something else, something that looked like a flame. One clear giveaway that it was something odd was the fact that it was pulsing, like a little heartbeat. A little heartbeat that wasn't so little any more, because it was growing, and growing fast, in time with a significant change in Harry's aura, from miserable, hurting, and simply wanting to hide from the pain somewhere safe, to something much more dangerous: rage.

Those feral cat eyes sharpened, hardening, as I felt a growing swell of power, like something huge slowly unfurling, something that set the whole world around it trembling.

I couldn't look away, even knowing that it might burn my eyes out, that it might drive me insane, and believe me, I tried. It was like witnessing the fires of creation igniting once more. And while the Sight is described as being the Second Sight, the True Sight, or the Third Eye – generally things that relate only to seeing, it embraces the other senses as well, which was why I could hear the sound of a furnace lighting, and smell wood smoke radiating off the kid.

Then, the kid looked up at me and, like under Paris, I found myself forcibly slammed back into my body and, as it happened, off my feet. If it weren't for Loki, I'd have fallen flat on my ass.

"Harry!" Wanda said, concerned – for both Harrys in the room, it would seem, which saved time.

Loki dropped down beside me, taking my chin in a firm, but not harsh grasp, examining me for a few moments.

"He was using the Sight," he said. "It backfired."

"That much I had grasped," Wanda said, a touch frostily.

"Was trying to help," I managed, with a grimace, words slurring. Being forced back into normal perception was not fun. "See if Essex had done anything to him not obvious. Non-invasive."

"Clearly, he disagreed," Loki remarked, eyeing his nephew with the careful gaze of someone who thinks that they've just stumbled on a nuclear bomb.

Everyone turned to look at Harry.

"Harry," Wanda said quietly. "What did you see?"

I screwed up my face, trying to focus and remember. "Life," I said eventually. "Fire." I paused. "Familiar."

There was a moment of silence.

Then, the kid wriggled out of his father and Wanda's grasp. They both made abortive motions towards him. He stopped them with a glare.

"They made me into a monster," he said, in a voice that was quiet in the same way that the first winds before a tornado are quiet. My spine turned to ice.

"No, Harry," Thor said anxiously. "You are not –"

"They did."

It was a single statement, delivered flat and without emphasis, but nevertheless cut Thor off in mid-word.

Harry looked up. His eyes were dead, dead but for something that smouldered inside them, smething dark that was growing by the second. His gaze swept the room, before settling on Maddie. "What happened?" he asked, voice flat and chillingly cold.

Maddie flinched, then drew herself up. "Doctor Essex noticed the significance of the feather pendant," she said. "He desired to study it and sent me away, to a laboratory in the real world, while time passed at a greatly increased rate where you were. Circumstances being what they were, I could not confront him without being struck down and revealing that you were hidden – Doctor Essex taught me all I know. While he did not discern your presence within the pendant, I am confident that if he knew that you were there, he could have harmed you." She looked away in shame. "I had hoped to restore you the instant that we had a free moment. I overestimated Doctor Essex's trust in me and you suffered for it. The fault is mine."

Harry mulled this over for a moment. "No," he said. "I don't blame you. You tried. You were the one who retrieved me. Eventually."

He stood up, expression terrifying, and even though my Sight was no longer open and I've never been accused of being a particularly sensitive practitioner, I could _feel_ the waves of rage and power rolling off him. Something was going to have to give, and soon.

And it did. Harry's voice shifted, becoming something resonant with the crackling of flames as he examined his metal arm.

 **"The Red Room wanted to make a monster,"** he said distantly, every syllable ominous and screaming of danger. **"I'd like to congratulate them.** _ **They succeeded.**_ **"** As that chilling pronouncement echoed around the room.

"Harry," Thor said. "Please, calm yourself. We will deal with this. We will ensure the Red Room receive what they deserve."

" **You will?"** Harry said, tone contemptuous and sceptical in equal measure. _**"You?"**_ He sneered. **"You had** _ **six months**_ **, or however much time passed in the real world."** He looked around at them. **"I'm guessing weeks, at least. You had time, you even had Mjolnir on the other end, you had the Red Room** _ **using**_ **me as a** _ **weapon**_ **, and what did you manage?** _ **Nothing.**_ **"** He waved an angry hand. **"How long did it take you to come up with the** _ **inspired**_ **plan to lure us, me and the Winter Guard, out? If Lukin wasn't a fucking moron and Belova wasn't insane, it would never have worked."** His expression twisted into a bitter snarl. **"The Avengers. Earth's Mightiest Heroes. Wanda Maximoff, the Sorceress Supreme in Waiting. Charles Xavier, the most skilled telepath in the world. Magneto, the man who makes everyone with half a brain wet themselves. The Winter Soldier, who makes even people without brains wet themselves. And all of the above have the All-Seeing Heimdall to call on. No problem's too big for them, right? Don't make me fucking** _ **laugh!**_ **"**

I looked around the room, rather grateful at having been overlooked. The expressions were near uniformly stricken, ashamed, and angry at themselves. The only exceptions were Loki and Magneto, who both looked at Harry with a kind of sad recognition, as if they knew the dark, furious rage bubbling away inside him intimately, if not quite the power behind it.

" **No,"** Harry snapped. **"If there's one thing I've learned, whenever I get into trouble, family or no family, it's up to me to get myself out again. If you want something done properly, do it yourself."**

There was a moment while everyone processed this.

"Harry," Steve said quietly. "I get the urge to charge in. I do, I really do. And if you don't believe me, take a look in my mind."

That cut off Harry's disdainful snort just as he'd been about to make it, replacing it with a frown, but a grudgingly attentive one. **"So what if you do?"** he asked sourly. **"Then you should know better than to get in my way."**

"The last time you charged into a Red Room base, it ended badly," Steve said bluntly. "Ditto the time you charged into a fight before that: you let your anger do the thinking and it got you killed."

That got him looks that could have killed from both Thor and Wanda, but he ignored them in favour of looking Harry right in the eye.

"One of those times, you were on top of your game. The other, like now, you were exhausted and you'd just been in a serious fight," Steve said. "And the Red Room wound up trussing you up like a chicken. If you want to beat them, you have to fight smarter."

"He's right," Natasha said. "The Red Room know how to handle rage."

"And they know how to handle people who have slipped their leashes," Bucky said quietly.

Harry… smiled coldly. Or to be more accurate, he bared his teeth. **"You're wrong about that, Steve,"** he said. **"As usual, you're ignoring what's right in front of you."**

I didn't know precisely what that was referring to, but I knew a low blow when I heard it. The kid was hurting, and lashing out with spiteful barbs that were landing with the kind of precision that only someone who knew their targets very well could manage.

Steve, though, didn't even blink. "Enlighten us, then," he said. "Why do you think that, the way you are, exhausted and with a hostile piece of machinery grafted to your body to an unknown extent after your body went twelve rounds first with Xavier, then with Magneto, that you can take on the massed forces of the Red Room? Who, it should be remembered, have had months and months to study your current capabilities and, through Doctor Essex, have pretty much your entire lifetime to draw upon in terms of knowledge. We haven't even had time to purge any triggers, any psychic time bombs, they may have implanted, much less understand how exactly your mind interacts with the programming and memories of the Red Son."

Harry bared more of his teeth, and a shimmering field of heat began to surround him, burning away everything it touched, growing stronger, turning from simple heat into flames.

" **Because all that time, Steve, all the time they were holding me, I was afraid. I was holding back, because I was afraid of what I could do. But that's not me any more. I'm not the person, the** _ **boy**_ **that you knew,"** he said, voice rising as the flames turned golden, brightening with every second. **"Because I've seen where mercy and holding back get me, and that's not happening ever again."**

"Then who are you?" Loki asked.

There was a sudden flash of light, followed moments later by a rolling thump of air, a powerful concussion made all the more so by being contained in the infirmary as Harry threw his head back, flung his arms out wide and exploded into a fountain of golden-white flame roaring upwards and outwards, which vaporised the bed he'd been placed on with an almighty scream of mingled agony and ecstasy, rising into one of triumph.

Then, before the displaced and burnt air had had a chance to even begin settling, the fountains faded, falling away and revealing a humanoid figure. Harry, or what had until recently been Harry, looked like a Greek statue carved from unbearably hot dark golden-red flames, with only one arm, and one eye that burnt white hot like the sun.

Then, something burnt, molten and metallic was spat out from the flames. It was hard to tell what it was at first, but closer inspection suggested it might just once have been a cybernetic infection spreading down the left hand side of a tall teenage boy's body, with a cyborg eye to go with it that now closely resembled a roast chestnut that had been left in the fire for too long. As I looked up from the ruins of the infection, the statuesque burning figure developed another eye, one that burned just as brightly as the other, and after a moment, another arm, one that grew slowly at first, but quicker and quicker, until it mirrored the other one.

" _ **Who am I?"**_ that voice said, sounding mocking and even less human than before. _**"You're a clever man, uncle. Why don't you figure that out for yourself?"**_

With that, he shot straight up through the Mansion like a rocket, effortlessly smashing his way out, before soaring up into the night sky, trailing a defiant, bone-rattling and utterly inhuman scream of triumph as he did.

And that was when everything went wrong.

OoOoO

 _Now_

"Everything went wrong?"

"More or less, yeah. The kid went nova on us – and to be fair, he had good reason. He was freaking fourteen, and he'd had his mind violated in one the most horrific ways possible. If it wasn't for that cousin of his, Maddie, it would have been one hell of a lot worse."

"I don't think that anyone would deny any of those things. I also don't think that anyone would deny that, good reason or not, the discharge of that kind of power can have horrific consequences."

A grunt of acknowledgement. "If you want the rest of the story, you're going to have to ask someone else. That's as far as I saw."

"I imagined as much. Thank you for your time." Papers were shuffled. "Please send in Miss Grey."

"Sure."

The door opened and closed twice.

"Good evening, Maddie."

"Agent Coulson. You wish me to discuss…"

"Yes. If you feel up to it."

"I…"

A long moment of silence.

"I won't push. If you need more time…"

"No. I'll discuss it now."

"Thank you."

OoOoO

 _Then_

There was a long moment of silence. Then, Loki said two words in a very calm, distant and clear tone.

"Oh fuck."

Steve looked grim. "Thor, can Mjolnir reopen a portal it made?"

Thor paused, about to take off and follow Harry. "Surely, Steve –"

"It's Harry. He might be being powered by his Phoenix fragment, but it's still him," Steve said. "I recognise the sound of someone lashing out. It's too personal for it to be anything else. And he made it very clear where he was going. If the Phoenix fragment within him is even half as powerful as I think it is, your odds of catching him are not good, your odds of stopping him even worse. If we get to the Red Room first, we can deal with them and maybe cut him off before he loses it completely."

"Steve is right, brother," Loki said quietly.

"That he is," Magneto said, then added at Wanda's glower. "I cannot claim to know the boy well, but I know the tone well enough. He is on the brink of madness, and with good reason. Knowing the Red Room, the kinds of things they made him do, the kinds of things haunting his mind, are utterly unimaginable."

Bucky and Natasha shared a look. "I think we could imagine them," Natasha said flatly, gaining a tip of the head in acknowledgement from Magneto.

"Which is why the two of you will be with me," Steve said. "Thor? Yes or no?"

Thor grimaced. "Very well," he said. "I will try."

"I believe I can assist," Wanda said.

"I might be able to help," Dresden added, poling himself to his feet.

"No, I'll need you this side," Wanda said. "In case anything tries to come through the portal."

"Magneto, you can stay here for much the same reason – at the very least, you're vulnerable and Harry'll identify you as a threat," Steve said. He turned to the rest of the room. "Clint, Loki, go to SHIELD and get a clear view of the situation. Once that's done, Loki, prepare whatever protocols you've come up with for this kind of situation, and Clint, keep us informed of what you see, I don't want any surprises. Bruce, you stay here. We need your scientific and medical expertise more than we need the risk of Essex getting desperate and hijacking the Hulk."

"It would be his most likely tactic," Maddie contributed. "Serving as a distraction while he made his escape and/or moved valuable data."

"Great," Bruce muttered. "Okay."

"Tony, get your armour on and follow us in," Steve continued.

Tony went over to a cupboard and pulled out what looked like a slimmer, more compact version of his original briefcase armour. Instead of being a folded up and necessarily thinner version of his armour, however, this version was made out of boots, gauntlets, and helmet, while the rest was a collection of hexagonal pieces that aligned over an underarmour that was worn at all times, forming the armour in approximately fifteen seconds.

"Way ahead of you, Cap," he said, in Iron Man's modulated voice.

"Great," Steve said. "As soon as you're in, don't pick fights. Head for the computers and get us as much information on what we're likely to be dealing with, and what's been done to Harry, as you can."

"I can help with some of that," Maddie said, and all the Avengers jumped as the knowledge suddenly appeared in their brains.

"Hey!" Clint snapped. "Ask, next time!"

Maddie flinched. "Sorry, I, I didn't…" She trailed off, looking downcast.

"It is polite, luv," Jono said, then gave Clint a reproachful look. "She did just want to help."

"And that is most commendable," Xavier said gently. "Though a sudden impulse to help can do as much damage as an impulse to harm, especially if those you wish to telepathically assist have had bad experiences in the past."

"We're grateful for the assistance, Miss," Steve said. "But as has been said, you should ask next time." He turned to Loki and Clint and nodded. The two vanished.

Maddie nodded, still downcast.

Xavier rolled forward. "And I think that I should have a little chat with Madelyn," he said.

Maddie frowned. "I can be of use," she said. "I know the layout of the base, the forms of opponent you will face."

"All of which you downloaded into our brains, red," Tony pointed out.

"And I am the only one among you to best both Harry and Doctor Essex in psychic combat," Maddie retorted, folding her arms, as Thor and Wanda began opening the portal.

"That was under very different circumstances, Madelyn," Xavier said, as he began rolling away. Maddie, reluctantly, began to follow him, Jono trailing behind her. "Which I will explain to you. It is one of many things that you must understand, and, I fear, you have very little time in which to do it. As for Harry as he is now, it is not simply defeat through force of arms that we must seek. He has seen far too much violence in recent weeks – months, from his perspective – to be overly fazed by that, even if it were possible without horrendous collateral damage."

Maddie cast a glance over her shoulder at the Avengers, many of whom were piling through the newly opened lightning portal. A small part of her felt a pang, but she squashed it firmly. Mjolnir had never been hers. She had wielded it because, for that moment, she had been Worthy and in need. Still, she felt that she could help.

"The Avengers will be more than fine," Xavier said, and Maddie barely supressed a jump. She knew that the man was a powerful telepath: the most powerful that she'd ever encountered, save for herself, her mirror image, and Harry. And in the latter case, on raw power alone, Xavier wasn't that far behind. Moreover, from what sense she could get of his power, his experience, finesse and skill more than made up for it – he'd ghosted straight through her defences without her even realising it. Appearances and kindly mien aside, this was an incredibly dangerous man.

Xavier chuckled slightly. "I did not read your mind," he said. "I did not need to. A lifetime or so of teaching young people has given me a certain insight into their minds." He looked up at Maddie, expression saddening. "Even into those who have suffered at the hands of the Red Room. You are not the first I have known, even aside from Natasha and Sergeant Barnes, who has been through horrors at their hands. For that, I am so very sorry."

Maddie frowned for a moment, then light dawned. "Oh," she said. "You were expressing sympathy." She hesitated. "Thank you?"

"Right you are, luv," Jono said kindly.

Xavier nodded. "That is considered the socially appropriate response," he said. "Though I was also expressing sorrow that I had not managed to intervene, to track you down and free you from Doctor Essex's grasp, when of all people, I should have had the means to do so."

"Doctor Essex disguised my psychic presence," Maddie said. "And taught me how to do so myself."

Xavier nodded. "Even still," he sighed. "Anyway. Madelyn –"

"Maddie, please, Professor Xavier," Maddie said.

"Maddie, then. You were wondering about why I and others called you 'Miss Grey'," Xavier said.

"I was," Maddie said, frowning. "You said something about it being my birth name."

"I did," Xavier said, rolling his chair into a computer room, and typing away at the keyboard. "Tell me, what did Essex tell you of how you came to be?"

"He told me that I was a creation of his, disparate strands of DNA from multiple subjects melded into one, and I was gestated in an artificial womb," Maddie said, frowning. "He told me that I was engineered for set of specific purposes: to be a case study in the development of psychic powers, to track mutants and other beings for him, and to protect him, demonstrating his displeasure to those who opposed him."

Xavier sighed sadly. "I had suspected as much," he said bitterly. "Dehumanisation is a common tactic among such groups, primarily because it is so very effective, even when it is not reinforced by telepathic conditioning. That you have managed to break free of it speaks great volumes of your strength of character."

"Remy helped," Maddie said. "As did Harry." She frowned. "Where is Remy, anyway?"

"Even still, they could only show you the way," Xavier said. "You had the exceptionally difficult task of following through. As for Mister LeBeau, he is currently working with some of SHIELD's best debriefing teams and their Russia experts to unearth every little bit of useful information that he managed to acquire. He accepted it, very grudgingly, in return for a promise from Director Fury that he would be allowed on the strike team to attack the Red Room and be given a chance to try and get through to you." He smiled faintly. "I think he will be both very pleased at your freedom and somewhat annoyed that Fury will now no longer have to follow through on his part of the agreement, meaning that he has spent much of the last two weeks cooped up with analysts of all varieties for – from his point of view, nothing."

"Surely such information would be vital in crippling the Red Room," Maddie said. "And at least inconveniencing Doctor Essex."

"I am sure that that will give him some satisfaction," Xavier agreed. "But the impression I got from young Remy was that his chief priority was freeing you from Essex's grasp. Any other achievement without that would, to him, be hollow at best." He glanced at her. "Perhaps it is just the intuition of an old man, but I think that he is very fond of you. Certainly, it was your predicament that inspired him to become SHIELD's informant within the Red Room and Essex's organisation. All with the goal of freeing you."

"Oh," Maddie said, a little surprised. She had known that Remy was fond of her, but even so, this was… startling.

Xavier gave her a knowing smile, then sighed. "And now on to less pleasant matters," he said. "Maddie, as may be apparent to you now, Essex lied about your origins. Every bit of what he told you was a lie." He turned back to the computer, bringing up a series of files. Including two birth certificates, and a death certificate. "Your birth name was Rachel Anne Grey," he said. "Daughter of John and Elaine Grey, twin sister of Jean Elaine Grey, younger sister of Sara, Julia, Roger and Liam Grey. You were stolen from your crib in hospital the night you were born by the man you know as Doctor Nathaniel Essex. He has earned a number of grimmer aliases over the last century or more. My friend Erik, Magneto as you may know him, could tell you stories of 'Nosferatu', an unnaturally pale man who haunted death camps like Auschwitz, who was obsessed with taking blood, particularly from children. Others call him 'the Pale Man'."

"We called him 'Sinister'," Jono remarked.

"An apt name," Xavier said quietly. "In any case, Maddie, he stole you and replaced you with the corpse of a recently dead newborn girl. He would have taken your twin sister, Jean, as well, were it not for the intervention of Doctor Strange. Despite Strange's best efforts, however, Essex escaped with you and for some unknown reason, not even Loki can track him. Jean was unscathed, and was raised in a loving family, as you both should have been, her life untroubled until the death of a friend when she was six years old traumatised her into activating them, nearly killing her in the process."

He gave Maddie a very sad, compassionate look. "I am sorry, Maddie. I am so, so sorry. Because of the failures of men like myself and Doctor Strange, Doctor Essex has been able to make your life one of darkness and horror when it should only ever have been one of light and joy. I was able to teach Jean, to guide her in mastering her powers. You, by contrast, had a much harsher teacher, one who had free rein to experiment on you as he wished, as he managed to arrange with Harry, studying and tormenting him in much the same way."

Maddie just stared at him. Then, mutely, she shook her head, first slowly, then faster and faster in frantic denial. This could not be. This was not possible. Her entire life, dark as it may have been in contrast to the likes of Jean, who she recognised as kin of sorts (sister? What did that even mean to ordinary girls, let alone to one like her, two like them?), but it had not been… it had not been a lie. Had it?

But when she looked in Xavier's eyes, she saw only the truth, and when she reached out to his mind, which he allowed her to enter freely, she saw the truth again, underlined by memories of watching a security video that corroborated his story.

It was true.

Her legs folded underneath her like a house of cards, and only Jono's quick reflexes prevented from collapsing entirely.

"A bit much to hit her with all at once, Prof," she heard Jono say, anger in his voice, as if from far away.

"She had to know, Mister Starsmore," Xavier said quietly. "She deserved to know."

"Yeah, but having it thrown at her like, 'oh, sorry I couldn't help you out as a kid. Why did you need help? Because you were kidnapped as a baby by a mind-raping psychopath and everything you've ever known is a fucking lie, that's why,'" Jono snapped. "Doesn't that strike you as a bit much? Why does she need to know it all right now, anyway?"

"You are not wrong, Mister Starsmore," Xavier said. "And she needs to know it because there is a psychic connection between her, Harry and Jean, a very old one. In truth, I have no idea how old. For all I know, it could have come into existence before Jean and Maddie were born, and have extended to include Harry when his mind showed the first stirrings of consciousness in the womb. All I know for certain is this: it runs deep."

"So?"

"So, Mister Starsmore, Harry is currently out of his mind with rage and pain, wielding a fragment of what is quite possibly the most volatile form of power in the universe, one that magnifies feelings and is magnified by them in turn, one intended for _that very reason_ only ever to be wielded by one of pure intent and discipline, and that fragment is _growing_. Which means that sooner rather than later, it will spill over into Maddie and Jean's minds, flowing through their connection, a tidal wave of power and emotion, the kind of power that comes with knowledge," Xavier said, voice hard and intense. "At the very least, Harry's first stop will be to rip Essex's mind apart, and rest assured that the knowledge of Maddie's origins will be near the tiop of his priority list. Hard as it may be, it is better for her to find it out now, in relatively controlled circumstances, rather than in the midst of a tsunami of astonishingly volatile power and emotion, neatly erasing any chances of her controlling either that power or that emotion, with unimaginable consequences to the rest of the world!"

There was a moment of silence as Jono considered this.

"Okay, fine, I get your point," he said grudgingly.

"And you don't like it. I know, I do not like it either," Xavier said heavily. "Miss Grey, Maddie. Or would you prefer Rachel? I am sorry, sorry to put all this on you now. And I am even more sorry for what I must ask you to do now."

There was a long silence.

"Rachel… doesn't feel like me," Maddie said eventually, pulling herself back to the present. She could mull over this later – or, as Remy had once put it 'freak out'. It felt an apt term to describe her feelings at the moment, as well as being utterly insufficient. "Not yet. Maddie is a name I chose. Or the diminutive I chose, at least. I will use it for the time being." She focused on Xavier. "What must I do?"

OoOoO

 _Now_

"You adjusted… remarkably quickly."

"I think that it would be more accurate to say that I postponed my emotional collapse."

"Still: it was impressive."

"Doctor Essex had little tolerance for allowing emotions to cloud one's judgement. I learnt early on how to sideline them where necessary."

"Duly noted. Still, Mister Starsmore had a point. It was a lot to ask anyone to compartmentalise."

"I managed it."

"So you did. What was Xavier's plan?"

"In brief: I knew how to control my emotions. Harry was completely out of control. The two of us – the three of us, rather, including Jean – had a deep psychic connection. Xavier hoped that by engaging with Harry, we could share out the power of the Phoenix fragment before it burned completely out of control. Then, he hoped that between my rational logic and Jean's compassion, we would be able to calm Harry down."

"Not force him down?"

"I wondered that as well. However, as Xavier explained, and was aptly demonstrated, all being attacked did was make Harry angrier and the fragment burn brighter. It is like trying to blow out a fire with copious amounts of fuel: all that would achieve is to feed the fire."

"A counterproductive strategy."

"Quite."

" _Omnia vincit amor_ , then."

"I'm sorry?"

"It's Latin. 'Love conquers all.'"

"Ah. Yes, more or less."

"And Doctor Strange was thinking along the same lines."

"… Yes. I believe that he was."

"Yes. Thank you for your account, Maddie. I'll need to speak to you one more time, but first, could you send in Loki, please?"

"Of course, Agent Coulson."

The door opened, closed, then opened and closed again a few moments later.

"Hello, Philip."

"Loki. How is he?"

"As well as can be expected."

"Which means, if I may ask?"

A sigh. "I honestly don't know. He has not been broken, but… it was close. He will carry the scars of this for a long time."

"I'm sorry. Please pass on my best wishes."

"I will. Now, what did you want to discuss?"

"A number of things, but in the main, your part after Harry left the Institute."

"Ah. I see why. Very well. It went something like this…"

OoOoO

 _Now_

SHIELD satellites followed the golden-red comet as it streaked up through the clouds, into the upper atmosphere, then into space, going from below ground to the edge of space in less than ten seconds. They continued to follow it as it twisted, flight path curving as it skimmed along the edge of the atmosphere, sling-shotting around the planet, before bending into a shallow trajectory and re-entering the atmosphere at Mach 30 and accelerating, leaving a vast white-hot plasma trail behind him, aiming at central Russia.

"Jesus," Fury breathed.

"And this is just the beginning," Loki said grimly, before his gaze snapped up. "Camera thirteen, magnify full-spectrum, front and centre," he snapped.

"Do it," Fury growled, and the techs obligingly expanded the feed from camera thirteen to the entirety of the Triskelion's main screen, scanning through the entire EM spectrum.

"Sir, we have the President on the phone. He's demanding to know what's going on. Actually, sir, so is about half the Western hemisphere."

"They can wait," Fury snapped. "Loki, what the hell am I supposed to be looking at?"

"Wait for it… _now_ ," Loki said, and right on cue, a giant rip the size of a skyscraper appeared in lurid colours on the screen – that part which wasn't blotted out by the vast power rolling off Harry, who'd torn it open in the first place.

"And that is what exactly?" Fury asked.

"Think of it as the largest Way to the Nevernever that you are ever likely to see," Loki said grimly.

"The Red Room base," Fury breathed, then turned to the room. "Mark that portal, where it is and where it goes, now!"

The room, which had been stunned into silence, exploded into motion.

Then, something almost as bright as Harry shot out of the portal and slammed into him.

"What the _hell_ was that?" Fury demanded, as the live feed vanished.

"Impossible," Loki breathed.

"Loki?"

"Run the footage backwards, slowly," Loki snapped. The SHIELD techs, a number of whom remembered Loki's insanity days very vividly, and all of whom had seen what he was capable of since, hastened to obey. Loki watched with eagle eyes as the footage was slowly rewound. "Stop. Take us back into normal view."

The footage stopped on a blurred glimpse of an indistinct figure. It had long, shaggy dark hair and deathly pale skin, criss-crossed by old, hideous scars. And its eyes gleamed blue as they unleashed a stream of energy so bright it was almost white. It looked disturbing. Unnatural. Somehow... bizarre.

Loki's eyes narrowed.

"What the fuck..." Fury said, though he was not stunned enough to miss the way that Loki seemed to relax a little, relieved. "Loki, care to explain?"

"Unless I am very much mistaken," Loki said, anger clearly mounting behind his iron control. "It is a clone, a twisted clone, an abomination!"

"Of who?" Fury asked.

"Of someone long dead," Loki said, eyes dancing with rage. "Who deserves far better than to have his flesh and blood perverted into a puppet."

"What is it a clone of, and what can it do?" Fury asked.

"A Kryptonian."

Fury twitched. Loki did not miss the twitch and smiled thinly. "You're familiar with the species, I take it?" he asked.

"I've read some of the Mar-Vell Files," Fury said. This was both true and not even close to the full answer, something Loki knew very well, but he didn't push the point. "Which answers the second question well enough." He brought up the comms. "This is Fury. Power up Damocles One."

"Yes," Loki said. "A high blood Kryptonian under a 'yellow' sun... such a being is a wonder or a nightmare. Gods alone only know what a clone created by something of Sinister's ilk could do."

"Damocles can bring it down," Fury said. He looked at Loki. "You don't seem all that worried for your nephew, under the circumstances. Mar-Vell's not one for exaggeration, yet according to those files of his, a full grown Kryptonian was an Omega Level threat that could trade punches with Thor. Harry's strong, especially right now, but he is still no Thor."

"A full grown high blood Kryptonian, yes," Loki agreed. "Not all were so powerful. Most were, under a 'yellow' sun close to an average citizen of Asgard."

"You still don't seem that worried," Fury said.

"Oh, I am very worried. But not for Harry; at least, not for his physical well-being. His mental well-being is another matter entirely; you see, Harry is not simply Harry any more," Loki said. "Normally, if he kept his head and used his telepathy effectively, he would be able to stop this creature easily enough - I doubt that it really has much of a mind. Even so, I would fear for him. A high blood Kryptonian at the height of their powers, even a twisted copy, is a foe that even I would not be eager to face. I would worry that with a single blow, Harry's bones would be pounded to dust, that with a single glance, he would be turned to ash, that with a single puff of breath he would be turned to a frozen statue. Now, my worries are different."

"Oh yeah? What's that?"

Loki gave him a long look. "He has embraced the Phoenix within him, Nicholas, a fragment of Life and Fire incarnate, one necessarily defined by volatility and passion, whose powers are specifically only ever granted to those who can control them, to wield them with wisdom and compassion. Harry has embraced it with rage, pain, and a desire for revenge in his heart. That darkness feeds the fragment, and the fragment feeds the darkness, and in doing so, both grow. When you saw Lily this summer, Nicholas, you saw the benevolent, controlled Phoenix, the light Phoenix. Now? The fragment is a small one, as compared to a true host, let alone the Phoenix incarnate. Harry is a mere fledgling."

"A 'mere fledgling' that just took a punch from something that launched him face-first into the damn Moon and got right back up again," Fury said, jerking his head at the screens.

"Yes, Nicholas," Loki said. "That is my point."

Fury went to grab him by the shoulder and shake something other than cryptic bullshit out of him, and found that his hand passed straight it.

"I'm not with you, Nicholas, not physically," Loki said. "I have other things to attend to, a possibility to prepare myself for." His expression was haunted. "I had hoped I would never had to do this. I still have some hope I will not have to. But I will do it if I must... and if I do, I will never forgive myself for it."

Fury froze. "You know how to take that power away," he said quietly. "The Phoenix."

Loki laughed a short, bitter laugh. "Were it that simple," he said. "But for want of a better way to put: yes. There are ways. Ways only attainable by someone of my power or greater still. Which makes it doubly my responsibility to use them if I must." He looked away. "You see, Nicholas, what left Earth was a mere fledgling. It was still Harry. I fear that what returns will be something very different. Something powerful. And something much, much..."

Suddenly, the screens lit up as all the satellites that could be co-opted and focused on the Moon to track the fight were blinded by something colossal, as a firebird the size of a mountain composed of dark orange-red fire spread its wings and screamed a soundless challenge into the void.

Then, it reared back, focusing on a barely visible pale speck that floated before it, stunned and limp. The firebird struck, collapsing around the speck and consuming it entirely. Then, from the resultant ball of impossible flame condensed into something small, a creature of blood-red and burning gold that streaked towards Earth at speeds that made what had passed before look like nothing, and quickly went beyond what the satellites could track.

"... Darker."

OoOoO

 _Now_

"So, the Red Room were aware of the danger."

"The main base was, yes. Harry was only targeting that one, and had not been to anywhere near all of them as either himself or the Red Son, so did not know of many of the others."

"But you do."

"I have been doing my research, yes."

"Very diligently, I hear."

"I do what I must."

"So I understand. That wasn't the only counter-measure they launched, though, was it?"

"No. They had not quite understood that they were dealing with a being of fire incarnate, and even the fires of enhanced nuclear warheads were barely even going to register as irritations. They only had time to launch a dozen, four of which impacted, and the rest of which my brother had to deal with."

"In rather impressive fashion, I hear. At least three were thrown into the sun, and another three destroyed outright."

"He had a lot of anger to work out."

"That is very true." Papers are shuffled. "Okay, Loki, that's enough for now. My best to Harry. Can you send in Jean, please?"

"Of course, Philip. I will pass on your good wishes."

The door opened and closed twice.

"Agent Coulson."

"Miss Grey."

"What do you want to know? Beyond that which you've been interrogating my sister about for the last several hours and more, I mean."

"I haven't been interrogating your sister so much as giving her the chance to give her account, with occasional prompting from myself. For the most part, however, she hasn't needed it and her account has been very helpful. I can promise you that I have not kept her in here for a moment longer than she seemed comfortable with, nor pushed her for more than she wished to share."

"Hmm."

"That is a very sceptical 'hmm', Miss Grey."

"And there's plenty of reason for it to be, Agent Coulson. The Avengers trust you, and I respect that. However, I don't know you, and I'm not in the habit of raiding minds to find out what someone is like. Equally, both the twin sister I did not know I had until a few weeks ago, and the younger cousin – who I should make clear is like a little brother to me – I was made to forget until a few months ago, have suffered horribly at the hands of a person allied with a group that I believe is SHIELD's approximate opposite number, and in Harry's case, at the hands of that group themselves."

"That would be a fair description. What is your point, Miss Grey?"

"My point is that SHIELD was infected by HYDRA for over half a century and no one noticed. Even if HYDRA have been kicked out, the fact that HYDRA Agents, working to HYDRA's agenda, _right in plain sight_ , could fit right in at SHIELD does not fill me with confidence. And like I said, I don't know you. I didn't really know the SHIELD that was, and I don't know SHIELD as it is now. I'm sure that there are plenty of good people at SHIELD, and from what I hear, you're one of them – my attitude to SHIELD is not about you or any single SHIELD Agent."

"But?"

"But at the moment, I'm not sure what you, as in SHIELD, being opposite numbers to the Red Room means. Is it 'total opposites', like night and day, or black and white? Or is it 'mirror images', when you can only tell the difference if you look really closely? I don't know. I don't know you or the organisation that you represent, which means that even if it weren't for what's been done to my family, I can't really trust you. So let me just make this clear, Agent Coulson. If SHIELD turns out to be the mirror image kind of opposite number, if they try to hurt my family, then I can and will bring SHIELD and whoever's behind them down around your ears. You hear me?"

"Loud and clear, Miss Grey." The recording device clicks, turning off. "And off the record, Miss Grey… if I thought that SHIELD had become no different to the Red Room or HYDRA and you were gearing up to destroy it, I would help you do it."

A double-take. "You really mean that?"

"I have quite literally given my life to SHIELD, Miss Grey. I am loyal without question to what it represents: a shield, protecting the weak from the strong. If it becomes like the Red Room or HYDRA, then it becomes a hammer, beating the weak down. In which case, Miss Grey, it isn't SHIELD any more and it is instead the sort of thing that I've worked my entire life to destroy. Under which circumstance, I would act accordingly."

A pause.

"So yes, I really mean that."

Another click. The recording device is back on.

"Now, as for what I want to know, your sister's account had covered up to Harry regaining his mind and transforming. Loki's account covered the immediate post transformation period. Which, I believe, is where you come back into the narrative."

"Yes. I sensed it from Asgard. And then…"

"Then, Doctor Strange appeared."

"Yes. He did."

OoOoO

 _Then_

"Okay," Carol said, as she stared at Jean, who had floated into the air, eyes glowing amber-red. "Something's up with Harry."

"The question," Uhtred finished. "Is what."

"And in the vein of other exceptionally obvious observations, there is little or nothing that we can do about it," Jean-Paul sighed.

"This is different," Diana said, frowning. "I can feel… oh. Oh dear."

There was a moment of silence.

"Okay, what does that mean?" Carol asked.

"I can feel another power, of sorts, around Jean," Diana said slowly. "One that I last felt several months ago. Around Harry's mother."

There was another moment of silence.

"Oh fuck," Carol said flatly.

Jean-Paul was muttering a stream of French swear-words, while Uhtred looked confused.

"Is it not a good thing that Harry's mother is getting involved?"

"It would be if it was his mother," another voice said. "Who knows the Power she wields intimately, understanding its nature as the near literal definition of volatility, affecting and being affected by strong emotions, and therefore understands the importance of keeping a cool head – as all would-be wielders of that power must, because of its unstable nature. Unfortunately, it is not. Instead, it is a fragment of that Power that is growing by the second, fuelled by the emotions of its wielder. That wielder, Harry, is an adolescent who is unprepared physically, mentally and emotionally to contain such devastating Power. A Power, if corrupted, that could consume him utterly, as well as all around him. Considering the trauma he has just undergone, being hit in the face by six months worth of memories of Red Room programming, training, and being forced to abuse his powers in the most horrific of ways, I think that that corruption is well underway."

All four of those who could whirled to the speaker. He was tall, with dark hair that was feathered white at the temples, a neat goatee beard, and he had the gaunt look of a man who exhaustion, stress and lack of rest or food had turned from slim to cadaverous. He was Doctor Stephen Strange, Earth's Sorcerer Supreme, and to say that he looked like a man clinging on to sanity by the tips of his fingers would be generous indeed. Compared to his usual expression of calm and absolute control, tinged with the smile of someone who is In On The Joke (Because He Wrote It), it was utterly jarring.

Carol recovered first, folding her arms and glaring, opening her mouth to unleash a tirade.

"We don't have time," Strange said, cutting her off. "All I will say is that I had no part in what happened to Harry. I suspected that something was going to happen, but due to a number of factors that I have no time to explain, the best I could do was try and mitigate the disaster, whilst flying absolutely blind." He sighed. "This has been less than successful."

"And you expect us to believe that you now know exactly how to navigate through what is happening to Harry?" Diana asked, eyebrow arched.

"Or that you have his best interests at heart," Uhtred growled. "Can we even trust your word?"

In the blink of an eye, Strange was nose to nose with the young Asgardian, bearing down on him with eyes that were solid white with power and expression contorted with near madness as the shadows deepened around them, twisting and taking on strange shapes independent of whatever cast them.

"Child," he said softly. "Knowing that you spoke out of frustration, not unreasonable suspicion and the impetuosity of youth I will forgive you say this once. But mark my words: the road of my life is scattered across eras and ages, with tomorrows coming before yesterdays, could-bes and never-weres being regular stops on my route, and my days being arranged like crazy-paving. I have sacrificed much to walk that road, things that you could not even imagine. What I have given up to see what I have seen, and know what I know, I could not describe, suffice to say that I have reached the point where I hardly recognise the man I see in the mirror. One of the very, _very_ few constants in my life, one of the few things that I have allowed myself to cling onto, is my word. It is all I have left. Once given, it is _never_ broken. _Is that understood?"_

Uhtred went white and nodded fast.

"Good," Strange said, head snapping back, apparently sane and business-like once more. "Now, Harry is well on the way to being on par with a fully fledged host of the Phoenix. He is still but a fledgling, but his power is growing. Unless we stop it, he will ultimately become the Dark Phoenix."

"And that would be bad?" Carol ventured. "But, you know, manageable, since it's only a fragment of Harry's mom's power –"

"One of the last times the Dark Phoenix appeared was approximately a million years ago," Strange said flatly, striding over to Jean, grabbing her by the ankle and yanking sharply. Jean let out a brief gasp, her eyes snapping back to normal and landed with a thump. "Whereupon the host destroyed a galaxy. The host in question is still imprisoned, because destroying him was impossible." He met Carol's gaze, expression frighteningly cold. "It is by no stretch of the imagination 'manageable'."

Carol gulped. "Okay," she said carefully. "Message received."

"But Harry is not this Dark Phoenix yet," Jean-Paul said. "And I presume that we have time, since you are talking."

"I have stopped time around us," Strange said. "But no, he is not the Dark Phoenix yet. He is not even a pale shadow of a fully fledged host; the fragment given to him was small indeed, intended as a defence mechanism of last resort. Enough to level a small country, maybe, at most. As with all things Phoenix, however, it embodies life and fire, and like both those things, will grow beyond its purpose if given the chance and the fuel. And Harry has decided to say, essentially, 'fuck it, I'm done with holding back. Enough bad things had happened to me, it's time for bad things to happen to people'. A philosophy I can understand, even potentially applaud, except for the fact that his rage and pain is empowering and corrupting a fragment of the most definitively volatile cosmic power in the universe and steadily transforming him into a cosmic scale monster."

"Then what can we do?" Diana asked.

"Anything that needs be done, we will do it," Uhtred said.

"We're not hurting him, if that's what you're suggesting," Jean said, speaking up for the first time.

"Can he even be hurt?" Jean-Paul asked, in a tone of genuine enquiry.

"He's not even a shadow of the Dark Phoenix yet, so, yes, for the time being," Strange said. "There are ways, spells, even weapons, all of which can be used against one such as him."

"Well, if you want to use them against him, you'll have to go through me," Jean said, before shooting a hard look at Carol and saying, pre-emptively. "And no, I don't accept that it might be necessary. Harry's suffered enough in his life, faced enough violence, that more isn't going to help. In fact, if he faces it from us, it'll drive him into darkness faster than just about anything I can imagine."

"Mmm," Carol said. "I agree with you, actually."

"You do?"

"Yeah. And so does he," Carol said, eyeing Strange. "Creepy and nuts he might be, but he's not stupid. If he was looking for heavyweights to take down some kind of dark Harry, he wouldn't be here – you'd never hurt Harry, not without major persuasion by which point it would probably be too late, and the rest of us don't qualify. He's not here to round up the A-Team. He's here for something else."

"You are both entirely correct," Strange said. "Harry has been consumed by hate. And there is only one force in the universe that can destroy hate: love. It was love that brought the Phoenix to Lily Potter's side all those years ago, love that made the Phoenix merge with her and choose to protect her son, and it is only love that can save him now." He looked around at them. "Friends and family, by blood and by bond. It is down to you, and those others I am bringing, to remind him that there is more to the world than hate, pain, and despair. Simply put, you need to remind him that he is loved."

OoOoO

 _Now_

"I take it that this wasn't as easy as it sounded."

"Not even close, no."

"But your instincts were right."

"I'm not looking for a medal, Agent Coulson."

"I'm not looking to give you one, Miss Grey. I'm just noting that based on this and other evidence, you have good instincts. Don't knock it and don't be tempted to ignore them – instinct like that is something that you can't teach."

"I'll bear that in mind."

"Please do. Now, what happened next?"

OoOoO

 _Then_

The Agents of the Red Room milled around in panic, and few were more panicked than Lukin. First, the Red Son had fought a losing battle against Magneto, even after being enhanced by one of Essex's cybernetics projects. Then, something had wiped out all communications with him and therefore, all Lukin's control. All attempts to restore the connection had come to nothing.

Then, Essex's bitch had returned, this time with a mind of her own and friends, including Doctor Strange, the Meddler Supreme, and had revealed that she was a traitor all along, that she had never erased the Red Son's original mind, but stored it. Stored it in some artefact that Essex had kept, in fact, and which she had stolen, then, to add insult to unbelievable injury, she had claimed Mjolnir, used it to escape, but not before first Dresden, then she – she, who was nothing more than a bitch fit hunt and whimper and the feet of her master and nothing more – had _humiliated_ him.

After that, Essex had vanished to make preparations for an assault, and Lukin had followed his example. So when something had shot up from North America, like a small cruise missile, and somehow torn a hole through to their base, which was supposed to be impossible this deep into the Nevernever (then again, the bitch had managed it the other way with Mjolnir), one of Essex's frankensteinian creations was there to stop him. For a few minutes, it had even looked as if it had worked, with only the tear in reality to worry about, and even that was not a problem, as Essex's machines set to work sewing it up. But as soon as they were almost complete, something like a meteor shot through the gap, hitting the bedrock beneath the plateau they were on hard enough to set the entire complex shaking, crumbling the weaker buildings.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, the whole thing _lurched_.

At first, Lukin thought it was just the building he was in, or the complex, but a quick look outside revealed that it was the entire plateau, which was surrounded by a vast dome of what seemed to be rolling dark golden-red flame, tinged with black and white at the edges. And it was rising. Then, when he estimated that they were several thousand feet off the ground, the ball of flame collapsed in on them. However, instead of granting them a quick but brutal death, it transported them elsewhere.

"Where," he began, then stopped as he saw a pile of earth from a construction projecting melting away into ectoplasm. "The real world," he muttered. "How," he demanded, voice rising and cracking. "How? How is this _possible?! WHO WOULD DARE?!"_

Belova, who had similarly looked confused, shot him a contemptuous look, then said, "Why don't you ask Essex? He usually knows these things."

"If he is not behind them," Lukin said, entertaining the possibility that this was just one of Essex's machines at work.

"It is not," Essex said, having appeared from nowhere and read Lukin's mind. His tone was strange – the fact that he had a tone was strange in itself, but it was more than that. There was puzzlement, irritation at the puzzlement, and… fear. "I have nothing to do with this.

 _ **I beg to differ.**_

Lukin's head snapped around as he crouched, going for his sidearm, before he recognised that the voice was telepathic. But it was not that of any telepath he'd heard before. This voice, dripping with bitter hate, sounded like the roar of a forest fire, and like it had the power to match.

 _ **You ALL have something to do with this. ALL of you are guilty. ALL of you must face judgement.**_

"I will be judged by no man," Lukin snarled. "Show yourself."

The voice laughed like the crackle of flames on a midwinter's night. _**I am no man. You thought I was, or that I was something close. You thought that I was something you could tame, that you could control. But all along, I LET you do it. I LET you mess with my mind and body, because I was afraid – not of you, but of me. I was afraid of cutting loose and being what I REALLY am. Well, guess what? I'm not afraid any more.**_

"Did you not hear me?" Lukin demanded. "SHOW YOURSELF!"

 _ **Very well.**_

The clouds around them began to rotate, flames and flickers of light and power peeling off from them, gathering into a swirling column that whirled faster and faster, burning brighter and brighter, hotter and hotter, until suddenly it vanished with a thunderclap. And in its place was the thing that had once been Harry Thorson, stood on high as if the air itself supported him. He looked like a god, or a demon; certainly, he no longer looked even remotely human.

His clothing at least, was not unfamiliar; close fitting and covering everything below the neck, it shaded from the colour of dried blood to a red so dark that it was almost black. This merged with boots and the gloves, which extended up to the knees and the elbows respectively, and both of which were coloured in the light-swallowing darkness of a black hole. On his torso, meanwhile, was emblazoned a simplified bird, one distilled to its very essence that blazed like the heart of a star, or like a crack in the world to some other, brighter and more terrible realm.

The rest, however, was changed.

His features were stretched, longer, more fey, almost hawk-like, and his skin, at first sight, appeared moon-pale, dim in comparison to the sun-bright inferno. At second, it was lit from within by the same blazing fire that could be seen in the emblem on his chest.

His eyes had been replaced by pits of that same white flame, which spilled from the corners like an unholy parody of tears. His nostrils and mouth, the latter contorted in a rage-filled snarl, were also portals onto that same seething conflagration.

The overall impression was that the physical form of Harry Thorson was merely a vessel, a thin shell akin to a Chinese Lantern. Before, it had been the vessel of the will of the Red Room, of the Red Son program. Now, it was abundantly clear that the Red Son was gone. And it had been replaced by something much, much worse.

"Red Son," Lukin said, with a rush of relief, tempered with caution. "You have – "

The voice struck out like a lash, slamming Lukin to the floor with a roar that tore at the minds of everyone present.

 _ **THAT IS NOT MY NAME!**_

This roar was mirrored by a dark golden-red inferno that erupted around the floating base, consuming clouds in an instant, condensing into the form of a bird of prey the size of a mountain carved from dark fire, with white-hot eyes just like Harry's, one that loomed behind its master like a brewing thunderstorm, its form swirling and shifting like a firestorm.

"Harry Thorson, then," Essex said, intervening and examining the being with obvious interest. "This new development in your powers is fascinating… psychic energy made solid, astral projections manifest on the physical plane, perhaps through mystically generated fire –"

 _ **You have no idea of who and what I am,**_ the being that had once been Harry Thorson said coldly. _**But I see you, Nathaniel Essex. I see ALL of you! I KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE DONE!**_

The fires around the base pulsed and flared in time with his psychic voice rising, chewing away the outermost chunks before control was reasserted.

 _ **This is not a discussion. You are considering negotiation – there will be none. No, this is a statement. You tormented me. You broke me. You USED me.**_ A dark, cruel smile stretched across his face. _**It is only fair that I return the favour.**_

Lukin, meanwhile, had scrabbled in his pockets, looking for the weapon he had prepared for such an eventuality with Essex.

Even Asgard, he fancied, would not be able to face such might, meaning that it could no longer strangle their resources. And if it proved beyond reach, then the rest of the world had what was needed. Russia could take her share, and then Asgard could decide if it wanted to destroy the world to gain vengeance.

Even the gods would tremble at such might, he was sure. Even this one, whatever he had become, would fall. The first Red Son was a prototype, after all. And prototypes are destined to be replaced. Replaced, improved, and increased.

His plan had not been like that of HYDRA, to simply have one or two weapons to strike terror into his enemies. For a petty little terrorist organisation, that would be sufficient, no doubt. But the Red Room, the Motherland, was more.

He had never just wanted a Red Son. He could have managed that, he was sure, without Essex.

No, he had needed the man, the thing, for reasons other than that. For the Red Son had just been the start.

He found the button. He pressed the button, and hissed the word.

" _Arise_."

And they did, first by the dozen, then by the hundred, from their storage tubes within the new buildings, emerging naked but strong. Many would have been instantly recognisable; some as former prisoners of the Red Room, others as members of the Winter Guard, and others still as the Red Room's enemies. Some were clones of the Winter Soldier, some of the old Black Widow, and some, even, of Captain America himself.

How? Well, it was hardly as if they'd left a shortage of blood strewn across various battlefields over the years, and even with a little blood to hand, Essex could work wonders. Work wonders and, of course, create nightmares.

But most prominent among them were clones of two of their greatest weapons: Essex's bitch and the Red Son, younger brothers and sisters of the originals. And not merely copies, but improvements: each had a body at least fit for a super soldier, if not greater by quite some way, thanks to alterations via the genetic editing of a master of the art. Each had power that was at least equal to their progenitors. And each had been programmed solely for war.

The Red Son had been mighty, and had apparently become even more so.

But even he could not defeat the Red Army.

And so Lukin felt justified in laughing a mocking, triumphant laugh as he stood up. "You should never have returned, boy," he said, his confidence driven by the very human look of shock and horror. "Not unless it was to grovel for forgiveness for your failures."

 _ **Do you have any idea what you have done?**_ His enemy demanded, voice furious and panicked, gaze sweeping the Red Army, the giant firebird growing and engulfing more and more of the base. One or two screams, high, terrified, and instantly cut off, were heard in the distance as some, slower than others, did not evade them in time. _**This much power… it could tear the Astral Plane apart!**_

"And if necessary, it will," Lukin said casually. "If you do not want it to, then I advise you surrender. If you are lucky, I may even allow you to keep your mind. Once Doctor Essex has discovered how you have done this, and what you have become."

 _ **Why?**_ The being asked. _**Why would you risk this?**_ He rounded on Lukin _ **Do you even understand what you're doing?**_ There was a pause, then a contemptuous snort like the bellows of a furnace. _**You don't know. You have no idea, do you? And you don't even care. The world could burn, but so long as you had the power you craved, you would be happy, wouldn't you? Because that is what all this has been about. You. You and your ego.**_

The flames grew darker and more intense, but this time, the wings of the firebird didn't consume parts of the base. Instead, they drew back, spreading up and back, as if the colossal firebird was preparing to dive.

And the being chuckled cruelly, as flames began to swirl around it, drawing it back into its vast creation, until the two were one, its burning voice echoing from all around.

 _ **You both wanted power. But you miscalculated. Both of you did. You were playing with fire and you never realised… I am not the boy you thought that you knew, that you could control. What am I, you ask?**_

The base began to fall, dropping towards the earth like a giant stone.

"Red Army," Lukin cried, clinging onto the ground. "Stop this!"

For a moment, they did. Several hundred sets of eyes began to glow a pale red. The base stabilised, then began to rise.

Lukin sneered, secure now – their first directive was to protect him, their leader. Each individual clone of the Red Sons alone was the equal or near-equal of the original Red Son, and their potential was far greater – their strength would only grow with exertion. He knew the extents and limits of the Red Son's powers, his strengths and weaknesses, and had an _army_ of his _brothers_ , his _betters_ , at his back.

He could not lose.

Following their programming, several hundred sets of burning eyes snapped upwards, identifying the threat. The new Red Army was throwing down the gauntlet.

And their challenge was answered, the words following them down as burning wings flared out wide enough to engulf mountains.

 _ **I AM LIFE.**_

 _ **I AM FIRE.**_

 _ **NOW, AND FOREVER…**_

 _ **I.**_

 _ **AM.**_

 **PHOENIX!**

OoOoO

Several hundred miles away, in the middle of the great Eurasian steppe, a shepherd boy looked up as something bright flashed in the far distance, the earth shaking beneath his feet a few moments after. This would have been puzzling enough, had not his sheep dog sat up on its haunches and, for no visible reason, howled in fear.

That howl carried down towards a nearby village, where many were already asleep. But their peace was not disturbed, for they had no peace to disturb, tossing and turning. For it was not only animals that noticed. As dogs howled, cats shrieked, and horses attempted to break free of their traces, everything that slept, and everything that could dream, did dream of fire. And all of them dreamed of fire: unrelenting and all-consuming.

Even if it did not know why, the whole world shivered in fear, as if something had walked over its collective grave.

For the Dark Phoenix had risen. And judgement day had come.

OoOoO

The ground was hard-packed, hissing with steam, swathed by vast clouds of mist.

"Okay, where the hell are we?" Carol asked. "Some kind of volcanic island?"

"No," Strange said. "This would be Lake Ladoga. Or rather, an island within it, that has been quite literally inverted." He gestured around without looking up. "If you look around, you should see water beginning to pour into the crater."

"Harry did this," Jean said. It wasn't a question. "I can feel him. He's close and, god, his mind… it's like it's burning."

"Yes," Strange said, voice hard. "His mind, like the rest of him, is burning from the inside out."

"This is the sort of action taken to prove a point," Uhtred said. "Meaning…"

"Meaning that he has started killing," Jean-Paul said grimly.

"Oh no," Strange said, eyes fixed on the very base of the crater where, through the mist, something could be seen burning. "He hasn't chosen to start killing. Not yet."

"What do you mean?" Carol asked.

"I mean that the Phoenix, normally, is closer to a force of nature than anything else," Strange said. "In the normal course of things, if She targeted the Red Room at all, she would burn them to nothingness and be on her way. However, her hosts function as a guiding conscience. This _de facto_ host is a victim of utterly obscene horrors perpetrated by the Red Room and its personnel." He gave them a grim smile. "Kill them? He isn't going to let them get off anywhere near that lightly."

"Then we have to stop him," Jean said, determined. "That's why you brought us here, isn't it?"

"You and others," Strange said, snapping his fingers, and suddenly, they were at the heart of the crater, where carbon had been fused to diamond and sand to glass, then both had been melted and spread into a dully glittering floor the size of a carpark. Burning, reflected and multiplied by the diamond, the glass, and the droplets of water in the mist, was the burning figure of Harry himself.

Except he no longer looked like Harry. He no longer even looked like the agent of destruction, the human vessel of an ancient and wrathful power, a deity of the ancient world. Instead, he was now a figure perfectly carved from fire and shadow, with only white hot eyes standing out from the darkness.

On their knees before him were the serried ranks of Red Room personnel, stripped of hair, of clothes, and of dignity. Essex was bound in bands of flame, off to one side, as was Belova. And Lukin himself, the only one still in uniform (a calculated insult in of itself) was right in front of Harry, bound to the ground by a white hot chain that wrapped around his throat and around his wrists. There was a faint sizzling noise emanating from him, as well as a disquieting smell of bacon. Were it not for the fact that Lukin's mouth had been melted shut, Jean was sure that he would be screaming.

The Red Army was gone. So was the base that had housed it, and the machines that had created. Both were gone as if they had never been, as was only to be expected: they were mortals. And he was the Phoenix – or near enough, anyway.

As they watched, he extended the index and middle fingers of his right hand like a gun and pressed them to Lukin's forehead.

"Harry?" Jean said carefully.

The reply licked out like a tongue of flame, enough to make one jump and flinch even when there was no malice behind it – for if nothing else, there was enough rage and malice overflowing from being directed at others to go around.

 _ **You should not be here,**_ the Dark Phoenix said, before looking up sharply, first at them, then around through the mist. Jean and the others followed his gaze, and saw other groups emerging through the mist, followed by rivulets of lake water.

Many, Jean knew on sight. Others she recognised by the feel of their minds. And there were many of them.

Thor, empathetic pain at his son's misery, and frustration at his inability to alleviate it and protect his child, etched onto his face.

Loki, torment at seeing his nephew take the first steps on the path that had led to his own ruin clear in his eyes.

Wanda, misery at the depths of what she deemed to be her failure and her beloved godson's resultant suffering showing in her expression and the grey hairs at her temples.

Maddie, horrified, unsure of what she could do to help, but desperate to do it.

And they were just some of the most obvious. Others, so many others were there: Sirius, Pepper, Jane, Remus, Steve, Tony, Bruce, Natasha, Darcy, Clint, Odin, Dumbledore, McGonagall, Frigga, Sean, Betsy, Bucky… the list went on and on and on, to include many who Jean did not recognise.

All had one thing in common.

They were people who cared for Harry. Many even loved him. And all felt compassion for him now.

The Dark Phoenix looked around, hesitating, as if confused, before focusing on Strange. _**What are you doing?**_ He demanded.

This time, Jean noticed, there was a crack in the voice, a glimpse of something human underneath the fire and burning wrath.

"I am doing what I have always tried, and often failed, to do," Strange said. "I am trying to help you, Harry."

 _ **You failed before. You'll fail again. Now take them away and fuck off.**_ He glared balefully down at the terrified Lukin. _**This man made me execute people. I'm about to return the favour.**_

"And then," Jean began.

' _ **How will I be better than him?'**_ Harry mocked. _**Is that what you were going to say? Try something more original, Jean.**_

And that confirmed it. It was Harry, Jean was sure of it now. For all the breathtaking cosmic power he was wielding, power that she somehow knew, power that resonated with her, power that she _understood_ , it was still him underneath (for one thing, she doubted that even a human contaminated fragment of a cosmic being would have such a knack for sarcasm). A half-glance at Maddie, her sister, her twin sister and mirror image, whose life had taken such a different path to her own, told her that the other girl had seen it too.

And they weren't the only ones. After all, here were the people who knew Harry best in the world, with the exception of two, who were conspicuous by their absence. Why Ron had not been brought was easy enough to discern: a hot-blooded boy who had lost his father to the Winter Soldier, a living weapon created by the Red Room, was unlikely to stop his best friend from taking revenge on a Red Room general who had turned him into something much the same. Indeed, his presence would be actively counter-productive. The Twins had likely been excluded for similar reasons. Why Hermione had not been brought, however, was a much more difficult question to answer, an answer known only by Doctor Strange. But it was not the question of the moment.

"No," Jean said steadily. "That's not what I was saying."

"What she was saying," Maddie said, taking up the speech, slowly and in the tones of someone under a dawning revelation themselves. "Is that if you executed him, like this, when he was helpless, stripped of all his weapons… you would just be doing what he made you do. You would be following his pattern. His path."

 _ **No,**_ Harry said. _**I won't.**_ He'd lowered his finger-gun before, but now raised it again, sighting down it. _**And you know what? Even if doing this was following his path… I don't really care.**_

"That's how it starts," Loki said. "That is how it always starts. Not caring. When you stop caring, things that you would once have deemed unacceptable, unthinkable, become plausible. Indeed, they become attractive – they are so much easier, after all. You stop treating people as if they are people, and start treating them as if they are things, to be used and discarded as needed, or as desired. And a dark part of you, one that feeds off your rage, your pain, and your darkness, one that _enjoys_ the suffering you deal out… it grows larger and larger, until it eclipses whatever is left of your better nature. And then, nephew, what is left is a version of you that you hardly recognise, that you would once have reviled: a monster." He let that sink in. "That is what I once was. Is that what you want to be, nephew?"

"He is right," Thor said. "Harry… our blood runs hot. The rage of the Warrior's Madness is the curse of our family."

 _ **And you think that I have gone**_ _mad?_ Harry demanded, voice cracking at the end, the flames vanishing from it for a moment and, just for a quarter instant, his eyes turned from unearthly blank white to agonised emerald green. Then, his face contorted with rage and flames returned in full force, flaring out like a beacon, burning a hundred yards of mist to nothingness, shaking the ground for miles around, fires reaching out with the echoing scream of the Phoenix. _**You judge me? YOU?! YOU were the one who went mad after you and mum were killed and nearly destroyed the planet! YOU went so mad that you had to have your memory wiped for over a decade! And even just now, YOU went into 'the Warrior's Madness' when fighting the Juggernaut, just because you were frustrated!**_ **HOW DARE YOU JUDGE ME!**

Each word struck deep, like arrows made of molten metal, aimed with pinpoint precision where they would hurt the most.

Thor, however, had grown up with Loki for a brother and knew such barbs for what they were.

"Yes," he said simply. "I did. Everything you say is true. I could make excuses for it – the Warrior's Madness may well run stronger in me than in others of our bloodline. But I will not. For even if it does run stronger in me than in others, then I should be more aware of its perils, and more in control of myself." He strode over to his son, unflinching even as he stepped right up to him, where the heat scorched even the skin of a god who had walked on stars, took him by the shoulder, and looked him in the eye. "I do not think that you have gone mad, for all that you have all the reason in the Nine Realms to do so: your first memory is of a madman attempting to murder you, after striking down your parents, and lodging a piece of darkness not your own within you. Since those who would have raised you and loved you could not, because of interfering laws or fear for your life, childhood was one of misery and servitude, with one of the creatures you have bound snuffing out any hope of a more joyful life. Your first taste of freedom from that misery was marred by the servants of that madman, and the madman himself, attempting to slay you and almost succeeding. Then, you had to contend with demons that attacked your very mind, a mind already wounded and naturally far more sensitive to such darkness than others, as well as far less able to defend itself. You found a father who should have found you years before, one who has failed time and time again in the first obligation of a father: to protect and to guide. Yet for all the darkness you have been forced to suffer through, you have remained a shining light. Though in age you are still a boy, in deeds you are a grown man, and a great one. I understand a man's desire for vengeance, vengeance deserved for the great wrongs you have suffered, and you more than have the right. But if I can offer one piece of advice, from someone who has been consumed by madness, who once courted madness in battle, it is this: do not act on your pain and your rage. If vengeance is what you desire when your cooler head prevails, then so be it."

 _ **Why are you telling me this?**_ Harry asked quietly, and if his voice crackled with fire, it was now a banked fire. He paused, then added, _Dad._

Thor smiled sadly. "Because I love you, my son," he said. "More than I can possibly say." He pressed his forehead against Harry's. "Look. Do not simply take my word for it. Look."

And Harry did. Jean could feel it, and she could see it as he staggered away, visibly reeling.

"Look in my mind too," Wanda said, stepping forward.

Harry's expression hardened, closing off again. _**Why?**_ He sniped. _**I know what I'll see: regret that you didn't hold me tighter.**_

"Harry!" Thor snapped.

"No, Thor," Wanda said steadily, cutting the scolding off. "He's right. That's exactly what he'd see. But that's only the start." She met Harry's gaze. "I know madness. I have seen someone I love, my father, succumb to it. I have walked the edge of succumbing to it myself. I haven't been a very good godmother, partly thanks to circumstance, and mostly thanks to my own failures and cowardice. This is fact. But if there's one thing I can offer you, it's perspective on this; on having power, intoxicating power, power that's running wild, and just wanting to unleash it on everyone and everything that's hurting you. If you want to know how that ends up making you feel, where that winds up taking you, then take a look inside my head. I've got plenty for you to see." She closed her eyes. "And you're right, by the way. I have regretted from the night your mother died that I did not hold you tighter, no matter what Stephen and Albus said, no matter that logically speaking, they were right and you were never have survived and that was something I already knew. I wish that I had held you in my arms and never let go, protecting you from all the world. I wished it then and I wish it now. But I can't do that. I've tried, and I can't. All I can do is offer you is my support, come what may, the benefit of my experience, so your path and choices aren't shaped by the likes of them, and… a godmother's my love, if you will have it."

"That is why I brought them, Harry," Strange said. "That is why I brought them all. To offer you an alternative to the darker feelings running through, the ones you've embraced. To help heal you."

 _ **I don't need healing,**_ Harry snapped. _**I destroyed that virus. I grew back my fucking arm and my fucking eye. Like I said. I don't need healing.**_ He folded his arms and glared. _**Or help.**_

"In body, no," Strange said calmly. "In mind, yes."

 _ **So, I'm mad then,**_ Harry said, sounding bitter. _**A danger to everyone and everything around me. Why bother trying to talk the madman down? Why not just banish me somewhere I can't hurt anybody?**_

At this point, the normal course of events would have been for someone to bring up the example of Loki – perhaps even Loki himself – or to gently say that he's not mad and they want to help him avoid becoming so. Something wise would be said, something inspirational and stirring to the soul.

This was not the normal course of events and what was said was, instead, firm and to the point.

"Oh my _god_ , you total fucking drama queen."

There was a moment of stunned silence, then everyone turned to look at Carol, who was glaring at Harry, short blonde hair mussed around her head like the halo of a particularly hacked off angel, blue eyes flashing like lightning in a sea-storm, and expression set to the kind of pissed off that one can only muster for people who are loved very dearly and are being complete fucking idiots. She put folded her arms, ignoring the others, and focusing solely on Harry, who seemed to be absolutely gobsmacked. He wasn't the only one.

"Are we seriously doing this again?" she demanded. "And no, I'm not talking about you being angry, going all fiery and bringing this bastards to their knees, because let's face it, after all they've put you through, they deserve it and more."

 _ **Which I was just about to give them before you interrupted,**_ Harry said, sounding irritated, flames building again, but also somewhat peeved.

"No, what you were doing was going on a fucking soliloquy about how of course everyone thinks that you're nuts and dangerous and you're going through this shit alone because no one understands," Carol snapped. "And as for before that, what you were doing was exactly what Maddie and Jean said it was – you were being exactly what they fucking wanted you to be. Worse, you were turning yourself – willingly, I repeat, _willingly_ – into _exactly_ what you have been trying not to become ever since I've known you."

 _ **What if this is what I am?**_

Carol gave him a long look. "Then I'd like to start speaking to Harry, please, because this isn't him," she said. "Harry is my best friend. Harry is the one person who I'd trust through anything and everythig. Harry is someone who always gets involved when there's trouble and never backs down from a fight, even when he's out of his league, because he's far too fucking stupid to give in. Harry is so many things, but above all, he's way more than a… a… _thing_ that only knows how to lash out because it's hurting and it's angry, and because it wants to make other people hurt too, like all the worst bits of the Hulk stuck in one person. Because that's what this is. You're hurting, and god, I am sorry for that. I can't even begin to know how much, even with a back door into your brain. You're angry, and hell, you have got so much reason. But you're not the only one who's reason. Not me; I got off lightly. Worst I've ever had to deal with is a near death experience or two, a load of creeps hitting on me, and a suck-ass dad. Plus, you know, being kidnapped. But I got out pretty much untouched, largely thanks to you." She shook her head. "Look around. Really look. You've locked yourself down, locked away all that rage and pain, and I get why, I really do. But you're not alone. Let everyone else show you that the love you and that they fucking understand, because off the top of my head, Clint, Bucky and Apparently Not Evil Jean – you prefer Maddie, right?"

Maddie blinked and nodded.

"Right, Clint, Bucky and Maddie, they've been in your exact fucking shoes," Carol said. "Natasha's probably been in them too. Loki's gone nuts in the past, your dad clearly knows what he's talking about, Bruce might just know something about it too, Wanda's definitely gone through some major shit, and you and I both know that Tony didn't get that fucking nightlight in his chest because he felt like it one day. And that's just the fucking start."

 _ **How?**_

"Open up, I guess," Carol said, after a moment. "I'm not gonna lie, I'm mostly running dry on speeches at this point." She eyed him. "So if you were hoping for something along the lines of 'Harry, you've got so much to live for', 'like what', 'like this', then a kiss… you're gonna to be real disappointed."

As a being seemingly carved of living flame, it shouldn't have been possible for Harry to blush.

Somehow, he managed it.

Then, he hesitated, and Jean and Maddie both saw their moment.

"I'll help," they said, in perfect unison, stepping through the intervening space to Harry's side. Any ordinary humans, or mutants, would have been burnt to ash in an instant. But instead, the heat around Harry was to them a welcoming warmth, recognising its kin.

Harry shook his head sharply. _**No,**_ he said. _**If…**_ _if._ He closed his eyes and concentrated. Green replaced white. _If I open up, all the phoenix fire… it's too much. I can't hold it. I have to go, somewhere I can_ –

"Actually," Strange said. "You have to do nothing of the sort." And with that, he withdrew the golden phoenix feather from his pocket. Maddie jumped, and patted down her pockets. Strange had swiped it. "This, as you may have guessed, is no ordinary phoenix feather, though it may as well have been for the last couple of millennia. It stored Harry's mind and soul. And it can very easily do the same with Phoenix fire." He smiled faintly as both Odin and Loki gave him very long looks. "Why do you think it found its way to you in the first place?"

Harry hesitated again and Jean reached out, taking the feather, summoning it to her and, with Maddie's help, moving in perfect synchrony, held it out to him. Harry paused, then, slowly, bowed his head, letting them slip it over his head.

There is a bright flash, a note of phoenix song, one somehow purer and less atavistic than what had gone before, and then it was over. Except, of course, for a couple of minor considerations.

Harry, restored to his normal self, hair and air, buried his head in Jean and Maddie's shoulders and wept silently.

"Are you going to tell him, or am I?" Thor asked Wanda quietly.

"Tell him what?" Steve asked, frowning.

"He's naked," Wanda said damply, wiping away tears, pulling off her coat and heading over. "I'll do it."

"Speaking of naked people," Clint said, voice hard. "We've got a lot of them."

The Red Room personnel were now no longer bound in place. However, they were unarmed, almost all naked, and surrounded by a lot of very powerful and angry people.

Loki, however, solved the problem by murmuring a few spells. "I have shunted them into a few SHIELD cells at the Triskelion for the time being," he said. "They will keep." His gaze shifted to the remaining three: Belova, Lukin, and Essex, who looked respectively like she wanted to tear out the throat of whichever fool was nearest, like he was about to descend into gibbering denial, and like he'd accepted whatever fate was his due with sublime indifference.

"As will these three," he said, waving a hand. All three vanished. "Though they will be in cells of my own design, elsewhere. SHIELD can have them when we are done." His gaze shifted to Maddie and Harry, the latter of whom had gone pink and was wearing Wanda's coat, and both of whom Jean seemed to be attempting to physically merge with she was hugging them so tightly. "For one thing, I believe that certain among us will have words to say to them, even if tonight's events have pushed them down the list of priorities for the time being."

"Frankly, they are further down my priority list too, brother," Thor said, watching his son as everyone else who had been called to Harry's side went over to show their affection, the mist settled, and the waters started to roll back in, in earnest. It did not take a father or a genius to see that Harry, though he was smiling wanly now, had been marked deeply by his experiences, in ways that would take a long time to heal. "Were it not for the worry of any lingering threat, and the need to know what exactly they did so as to help heal Harry, I would be happy to throw them to rot."

Loki arched an eyebrow. "I would have thought that you would want to slowly grind the bones of both Essex and Lukin, if not all three, into dust," he said. "Among other sundry torments."

Thunder cracked overhead and Thor gave his brother a hard look. "Do not mistake my control for calm, brother," he said. "It is nothing of the kind."

Loki inclined his head. "So I thought," he said. "Just checking."

"Yes, well, that checking can wait until we're somewhere a little drier," Steve said pointedly.

"Of course," Thor said, then paused as Odin gave him a wry look from over by Harry, and chuckled as the scenery rearranged itself into the halls of Asgard. "It is already in hand."

He paused, a sudden foreboding coming over him. "Though I do have to wonder… where is Doctor Strange?"

OoOoO

 _Now_

"Strange vanished, then?"

"For a few days, yes. I don't know him well enough to know why, though."

"I think I can hazard a guess or two. Thank you, Miss Grey. Your testimony has been very helpful."

"You're welcome, Agent Coulson. Though, not that I'm complaining, isn't there a fair bit more to cover? The aftermath, I mean. Won't SHIELD want to discuss that?"

"That, Miss Grey, can wait for another day."

 **And that rounds off an absolute monster of an arc: 62,000 words, in less than a month. Nanowrimo ain't got nothing on that.**

 **However, even I get tired. And between this and the fact that I have a regular job now, for the time being at least, you may not get an update for a little while. I know that some of you may feel that it was anti-climatic in the end, and that there was far too much talking (e.g. where was Dudley? Answer: he'd long since made himself scarce, partly because I couldn't really see any circumstance where Dark Phoenix Harry didn't kill him or worse).**

 **But that was kind of the point – not every problem can be solved by violence, no matter how briefly satisfying and effective in the short term it may be. That said, I probably could do with pruning large chunks of it, because I do like the sound of my own voice too much.**

 **Anyway, this arc and its consequences, emotional, physical, political, spiritual even geographical, will reverberate throughout the rest of this book and beyond. However, for the time being, the follow up to this arc will be quieter and calmer. There aren't any big old arcs in the immediate future.**

 **For now, thank you, and good night.**


	16. Chapter 16: Aftermath I (Shit, Meet Fan)

**Well, the recharging after that last barrage of chapters took a little while, but under the circumstances, with work, sorting out admin, and ever warping sleep patterns… anyhow. I'm back, possibly for the last time for a little while (I'll be starting my Masters in September), but I wanted to get in a chapter before the end of this month. So here it is, the first aftermath chapter, one of two. Things are still fairly serious, but as you may note, the tone is generally lightening up.**

 **Barona:** **Your PM function is blocked, so…**

 **Anyway, thanks – I should probably get a proper beta, but I don't have the patience for one.**

 **Thunder Dragon:** **You've been repeatedly posting the same review under multiple anon names. Please stop – all it achieves is to profoundly irritate me. I have my own plans for Harry and his next steps. As for Tarene, I am familiar with the character, but let me make this abundantly clear:** _ **I have no plans to involve her.**_ **Harry has no interest in the Hallows – nor, frankly, does Voldemort. Additionally, collecting the lot of them does not make you an immortal god able to control life and death. That's the mistake that most of the Hallows hunters, even Dumbledore, canonically made and one that fic writers have regularly repeated. What a true Master of Death is meant to understand, what Harry canonically understands, is that death is not an enemy to be feared, but something to be accepted at the right time.**

 **No, he doesn't have chaos magic. If anything, being possessed by Chthon actually did long term damage to him, damage that will make itself apparent over time. And the Phoenix fragment is a part of the Phoenix. If he managed to totally merge with it, best case scenario, he'd just become part of the Phoenix. Worst case… well.**

 **Harry's not seeing Buri any time soon, and while he might pick up a little Celtic magic, that would be straying close to the Avalonian pantheon, who are stirring from dormancy and very definitely Do Not Like Asgardians. His exploration of his Asgardian heritage is something he's a bit reluctant to go into, and while it will come around in time (and his Asgardian heritage will be a significant part of the underlying plot of this book), it's still fairly quiet for the time being, making itself known in small, subtle ways.**

 **Michael:** **Mmm. There is a bit of grovelling behind the scenes, but fact is, Asgard is not too eager to let the world know just what happened, and is mostly concerned with exacting revenge on the Red Room. Additionally, the position of Russian Head of State is currently very much up in the air; whoever would be apologising on Tuesday might well be replaced on Wednesday. As a result, Asgard doesn't really care. As this chapter reveals, it has other, greater priorities.**

The aftermath of the Red Son incident was prolonged to say the least.

The geopolitical ramifications were profound. With the vanishing of the Red Son, the deaths or captures of the Winter Guard, and the captures of Lukin and Essex, the Red Room had lost its key weapon, its iron fist, its ambitious leader, and its most capable scientist. Since they no longer had a psychic powerful enough to compete with Xavier, Betsy, or indeed the other psychics and psychically inclined magical practitioners who went to work to undo the damage the Red Son had done, leaders who had suddenly pivoted to Russia just as suddenly pivoted back.

And, with the sheer number of those manipulated, and the events of the last few years making people far more willing to accept the possibility of supernatural intervention, they were all more than happy to point fingers at Russia and scream that they had been enslaved, and that God's judgement had been rendered upon the Russians for their hubris. Certainly, the circumstances made it plausible (it helped that it really had been the judgement of god, if not precisely the one they were thinking of), and even aside from genuine and justified outrage, it was politically desirable too: screaming that they had been forced to Russia's agenda neatly rallied their populaces behind them (for even those who were sceptical of mind control were not nearly so sceptical of Russia being behind recent goings on), gave them the political weight to sideline pro-Russian factions - and in countries where pro-Russian factions were in power, they soon found themselves being critically undermined – and support required to do pretty much exactly as they wished for a short while.

Immediately, though, those countries that had been coerced into following Lukin's line sharply and ostentatiously reversed course and almost all the actions that they'd undertaken while under that coercion. Additionally, ethnic Russians bore the brunt of swift and vicious purges of the political, military and business worlds, deportations by the hundred, and other sanctions. Some countries even symbolically revoked the status of Russian as a national language, sending a very clear message: 'you are not welcome here'.

Latveria, meanwhile, emerged as an island of stability in an ocean of uncertainty, with its ruler having been entirely untouched by the encroaching spider-webs of the Red Room's influence. This was not to say that they hadn't tried, but their attempts had been swatted away. When they had resorted to assassins, their remains were returned in neatly labelled match boxes.

The pattern continued with their fall: any attempts by anti-Russian or pro-Russian factions, or others seeking to exploit the chaos, to export the hysteria into Latveria were, as before, met with short shrift and ruthless retribution. Victor von Doom tolerated refugees from the upheaval, welcoming those who desired to leave the entire mess behind. Those who tried to bring it with them, however, found themselves on the receiving end of Doom's wrath.

The message was clear: Doom, and Doom alone, ruled in Latveria.

Within Russia itself, meanwhile, a semblance of the truth began to emerge: a faction of the intelligence and military old guard had staged a coup with insidious superpowered support, assassinating the President and most of those close to him. The composition of that faction was something of a mystery to those outside looking in, though most of the surviving members of Russia's elite knew about the Red Room and had some idea of its membership and political backers.

The truth of the matter, however, was largely immaterial: with vast power and wealth at stake and opportunity beckoning, while the US, China, and the EU were all making distinctly angry and concerned noises about the events of the last couple of weeks, which had impinged on all of their borders, every group within Russia that was jockeying for power happily tarred the others with the brush of Red Room conspirators, or at least, collaborators.

The only silver lining, for a long suffering, understandably confused, and profoundly unnerved Russian population was that food and various forms of mineral wealth began to return to Russia. Mines that had produced only dust now produced coal and iron ore once more, pipelines that had produced only sand flowed with oil, and most importantly of all, harvests that had withered in the fields were now restored, as bountiful as they ever were – perhaps even more so.

The Red Room, meanwhile, was down, but most definitely not out. Unlike HYDRA, removing one head did not bring the entire beast crashing down (a fact that was considered deeply ironic, in light of the latter's famous boast). While it had lost the bulk of its superhuman resources, with the technology at its disposal and wide distribution through not only Russia, but its surrounding nations, it was well placed to bounce back.

After all, the name of the Red Room still commanded fear and respect, especially since the destruction of its primary base and imprisonment of its leadership had not been half so public as that of HYDRA. Even SHIELD revealing that they had Lukin in custody did not dent it too much: the Red Room had always thrived on secrecy, leaving it unclear to all but a very few who was actually in charge. It was easy enough for the senior members of the other Red Room bases to confer and choose a new leader, one who could help the Red Room vanish back into the shadows and bide its time, returning to the old ways. For all Lukin's pretensions of being a puppeteer, it was deemed, his madness had driven him to overreach abominably. In turn, that had fuelled a premature rise to power that had mirrored HYDRA's only months before, and like HYDRA's, could not possibly be sustained in the medium or long term.

Unfortunately for them, however, within days the new leader had died, in a manner that seemed perfectly natural, if unfortunate. The cause of death was a knife through the eyeball, but for a spy, this was considered a fairly natural death. It was a business that made enemies, after all, and right now, the Red Room had very, very many enemies.

A psychic examination of the corpse, however, found something very ominous: nothing. All psychic remnants that would normally be left behind, traces of knowledge, of memory that might indicate the culprit, had been destroyed. Other deaths swiftly followed, along with perfectly calculated acts of sabotage. They went down in the news as a gas leak here, a house-fire there, and where particularly egregious, a bombing or two, attributed to one dissident group or another. They did not even approach the front-page, of course, because of all the upheaval going on. Who cared about a few accidents, even some terrorism, when half the world was in uproar?

But to those who knew how to identify the patterns, a very disquieting conclusion could be drawn.

They were being hunted.

Further careful examination proved that they were being hunted by multiple people, who were working from information ripped from the minds, if not the souls, of their victims, as well as any recordings physical or digital that they might have, having started from low down in the Red Room ranks, then swiftly worked their way up. Now, having reached the apex, they were working their way down again, slaughtering every single Red Room member they could find using their stolen knowledge.

And that knowledge was considerable: one did not survive to become one of the Red Room's most senior Commanders without accruing as much knowledge about one's colleagues, rivals, juniors and seniors – it was a way of life, a method of survival. And now it was being used as a trail of bread-crumbs by some of the most accomplished spies and assassins in the Nine Realms. The irony did not escape the few survivors.

And so Midgard, churned into a fury of turmoil by storms of thought, of ideals, and ambition, was now slowly settling down again into a new equilibrium. What that equilibrium would be, and how smooth (or rough) the path to it might yet be – certainly, it wasn't going to be a smooth return to the previous status quo (itself a thoroughly uncertain thing thanks to HYDRA's reign of terror). But the worst, it seemed, was over.

Of course, it never does to trust to what seems. It can all too easily conceal what is.

OoOoO

With other things, it is uncertain what they seem to be, and it is even more uncertain what they actually are. With that in mind, it is hard to imagine where trust could possibly fit into that equation.

And yet, in the case of Doctor Stephen Strange, it could sometimes seem like there was no other choice.

"How does he?" Odin asked, looking down at Midgard's Sorcerer Supreme. It was an unusual sight – all the times he had encountered Strange, the other man had looked strong, confident, and healthy, completely in control of himself and the situation he was in.

Now, lying on a bed, surrounded by a shimmering field of restorative magic and dressed in a practical smock, he looked very different. Once lean, he was now almost skeletally thin, bones pressing tightly against his skin. His long, clever fingers now looked more like boney claws. His eyes were set deep in dark, heavily bagged sockets. Around them, wrinkles were normally hardly apparent - or if they were, like the white feathering at his temples, they were indicators of age as a sign of wisdom gained than as a burden and sign of diminishment. Now, they had deepened and grown longer than before through exhaustion and stress, like cracks on a window's glass.

He looked tired, Odin thought. Tired, and very, very old.

Very few people knew truly how old Doctor Strange was. The popular guess was around five hundred, it being assumed that since he had surfaced as the Sorcerer Supreme in the 17th century and looked to be in early middle age, he had been in his early prime as a practitioner. This was considered impressive indeed, and a great age for a mortal Wandless practitioner.

Odin himself wasn't certain, but a few incidents here and there had made him suspect that Strange's linear age was rather closer to that of his sons, that they had been born around the same time. And a part of him, deep down, thought that Strange might just be older than he was – while the man's life was hardly a linear one, the fact was that Odin's own memories of Strange stretched back to his childhood. Being a time traveller of such power and skill meant that one could hardly be sure, with the only true certainty being that he was ancient. Before, he carried that age lightly, seeming full of ageless energy and ambition. Now, though, he simply seemed… old.

"He is improving," Frigga answered. She had taken this case on personally, partly in acknowledgement of Strange's stature and his services to the crown of Asgard – which, Odin inwardly thought, were probably matched or exceeded by his manipulation of that crown. Far exceeded, if some of his suspicions were even close to correct. "As far as I can tell, he has not slept in weeks, perhaps months, not eaten save for token meals to keep himself intact, and drank only sufficient for the same and to keep his lips wet to speak words of power. He has driven himself through drugs, potions, spells that sapped his very lifeforce, and, frankly, an all-consuming mania. He almost killed himself."

"Truly?" Odin asked.

"Were he any other mortal man, even one enhanced like Captain Rogers or those of his blood, he would be dead," Frigga said bluntly. She glanced at Strange. "Of course, I think that it has been a very long time since Stephen Strange has been truly mortal."

Odin flicked an eyebrow. He knew his wife's tone. She had not said that merely to be poetic. It was well-known that the Sorcerers and Sorceresses Supreme of Midgard, and their heirs apparent, had an even further enhanced lifespan than most mortal practitioners. It was a trade-off for their usually horrifying mortality rate: many Sorcerers Supreme didn't even see a decade in the office, and many apprentices didn't see half that long. Strange and his predecessor, Yao the Ancient One, had been exceptions to that particular rule. No, there was something more here, which wasn't exactly surprising. Magical practitioners were often a little strange, mortal practitioners in particular, and they got stranger the more powerful they got.

There had always been something odd about Strange, however, odder than even the usual run of Sorcerers Supreme – and it wasn't just his attitude. It could be his far greater powers of prophecy and precognition than any Seer Odin had ever encountered. It could be his abandonment of the usual passive defence of the boundaries of Midgard in favour of a strategy of manipulation of events to suit him on a level that Odin felt he was only just beginning to recognise. Or it could be both, tied to a far deeper secret about him.

"His body is infused with temporal energy," Frigga said. "Not merely that which I would expect from a time traveller, even one like him. It is as if it flows through him; like he is a part of it, and it is a part of him."

Odin nodded slowly. He did not feel the need to confirm this: he trusted his wife's skills with sorcery implicitly. Indeed, for all his power, in many ways she was by far the more skilled practitioner of the mystic arts, especially when it came to healing. "That would explain much," he said. "Though it also raises the question of how such a connection came to be."

"That I cannot say," Frigga said. Her expression turned wry. "I would suggest you ask him when he awakes, but somehow I have no doubt that while his answer would be true, it would also not be in the least bit helpful."

"I am certain that you are right," Odin remarked. "When will he wake?"

"As soon as I am certain that he will not collapse as soon as he tries to light a candle," Frigga said. "He drove himself far beyond his natural limits, physically and mentally."

"That would explain the near unanimous reports of his changeable moods and apparent mania," Odin said. "Which leaves a question."

"If Strange is as one with time," Frigga said, picking up on his train of thought. "And that Essex creature managed to hide himself from Strange's Sight, apparently by another's art… by whose art is that?"

"A question he must answer," Odin said. "One among many."

OoOoO

Mortal affairs were in turmoil. In the meantime, it would seem to mortal eyes, perhaps cast heavenwards in hope of inspiration or salvation, or plain envy, that affairs divine were as calm and untouched by events as the very stars in the sky.

Those mortal eyes would be very much wrong about that.

To put it simply, the events of the last few months had caught a number of pantheons off-guard.

With the exception of Asgard, and a select few others, the pantheons of Earth had continued to largely abide by a millennium old command by the Celestials to stop meddling with the Earth and its inhabitants – at least, on an appreciable scale. This had not been too much of a burden, since the majority of the pantheons of Earth mostly saw Earth as a source of entertainment. Even many Asgardians, one of the more pro-human pantheons, saw Earth – Midgard – as something of a holiday home inhabited by a number of interesting magical beasts and demons, with the presence of a fragile but gutsy little species like humanity mostly being an intriguing curiosity.

Many of the others had retreated long ago to their own planes, either irate at being displaced in mortal affections by other deities, or simply disinterested in mortal affairs. The Avalonians, for instance, had thrown their hands up in disgust after their wars with Asgard and the Frost Giants and had retreated to their own realm, save for a brief resurgence when Albion came under the stewardship of Merlin and the Once and Future King. As for the ones still interested, they grumbled, like children denied a toy, but knew better than to cross the Celestials.

In any case, they soon found other amusements on other planes of existence; other monsters to fight, other divinities to squabble with, and in general, other things to do. Some occasionally visited, and the more sensible Skyfathers and Earthmothers had the sense to ensure that the names of the pantheons were still spoken on Earth in one form or another, to ensure that they could return to Earth and wield much of their power if it became necessary. In general, however, Earth slid out of sight and out of mind.

The Chitauri invasion had occasioned mild interest, but had mostly been seen as an internal Asgardian matter that had spilled over onto Earth and been swiftly dealt with. Besides, they were hardly the first aliens to visit. The older gods and goddesses remembered the visits by the Kree many thousands of years ago, leading to the creation of the variation on human mutants known as the Inhumans, and the variant on baseline humanity known as the Jaffa, as well as a more recent visit, barely half a century earlier. The latter had also involved a powerful Kryptonian, one of another species which periodically visited Earth, apparently intrigued by humankind, an interest they shared with their friends and allies, Asgard. Few of the pantheons knew exactly why, and even fewer cared. And while Asgard had broadly put an intergalactic interdict on aliens interfering with Earth – the latest Kree incursion had led to Asgard demanding, and receiving, the heads of those behind it – there had been others, too, even further back. In other words, it was not something to garner much interest.

The involvement of the Tesseract, by contrast, had jolted a number from their dormancy… but even then, it had been quickly squirrelled away in the vaults of Asgard.

One or two paid attention to the emergence of a new Avatar of Cytorrak in the form of the Juggernaut, but since said Avatar spent most of his time in stasis, that attention quickly lapsed. It wasn't like he was doing anything interesting, after all.

A few, a very few, noticed the spike in humans developing powers, powers not merely sufficient to match the lesser gods, but to equal the might of the Greater Gods themselves. This was considered interesting, but even still, interesting in the way that a biologist might regard mutations in a petri dish of previously unprepossessing bacteria.

Then, the Darkhold had been opened in full, pouring forth its horror and unleashing Chthon, the darkest and most terrible of the Elder Gods, whose emergence had barely been repulsed by Odin, Allfather of Asgard, his sons, an Asgardian army, and, perhaps, a few mortals. Intriguingly, Odin's half-mortal grandson, one of the first true demigods to be born in an age, had been at the heart of it. And most unusually, one of the Endless had involved themselves. Specifically, Destruction, better known as the Phoenix, who had apparently acted through the young Prince to banish Chthon and set all to rights.

Oh, the Asgardian balladeers and skalds would have one believe that the boy had overthrown the Elder god in a duel of wills, then he had been gifted the power of the Phoenix to set all to rights by himself, and it would certainly explain the somewhat patched up job that had been done. But still, most scoffed and considered it unlikely. The entire universe had been at stake, after all. Why put the fate of everything in the hands of a child, a child that was little more than a mortal?

In any case, Chthon had been swiftly banished (not a moment too soon, in fact), his summoner – an exiled Light Elf necromancer from the Norse Realms - either destroyed and left to drift through the darkness of space, and his mortal servants and acolytes, an organisation called HYDRA, had been destroyed. Nevertheless, combined with the actions of the mortal Dark Lord Grindelwald over half a century before, who had bargained with many of great and terrible creatures for power and received it, requiring the full might of the Sorcerer Supreme to set things to rights, there was a growing unease that humankind was starting to toy with things that it should not, in ways that for many, many millennia, it had not.

As last time, it was having Asgardian assistance, if more tempered than before. And, as the older gods and goddesses muttered darkly, it did not do to forget what had happened the last time humanity had got ideas far beyond its station or capacity. Even after nearly 20,000 years, the metaphysical scars of the fall of the Atlantean Empire were, in some respects, as fresh as ever. Even worse, one of its direct successors, the current undersea Empire of Atlantis, was getting involved in the affairs of the surface once more.

Even still, as some divinities shifted uneasily and shared glances – for a long time now, most of two millennia, the only pantheons that had really shown an overt long term interest in the Earth as a whole were the Asgardians, the White God, his Son and their Fallen Adversary, and the Vedic Trimurti. Then there were the Fae, of course, though they weren't really a pantheon. In truth, no one was sure what they were; possibly they were children of Gaia. Possibly they were strange forms of humans. Or possibly, others muttered darkly, they were another Celestial experiment. And in any case, even they had mostly retreated, after ensuring through mortal works that they would not be forgotten. Others had had interests, to be sure, but mostly of a more temporary and localised kind, and almost none had exercised such interests after the Celestials had intervened.

Now, they were reconsidering that decision. While they did not care much about what happened _on_ Earth, _per se_ , they cared very much about what happened _to_ Earth, for reasons of self-preservation if nothing else. If the Earth kept on turning, that was all well and good. If it suddenly did not, well… none of the pantheons was honestly sure what would happen to those realms tied to it, but they knew that it would not be good.

Besides, the Earth served as a convenient stopper on a number of bottles that it would really be best not to open: Chthon was by far the worst, but by no means was he alone. The Olympians had all sorts of monstrosities squirrelled away in their underworld, and as other pantheons muttered darkly, the Asgardians had _something_ locked away at the bottom of that World Tree of theirs, even if they weren't particularly forthcoming about what exactly it was. And those were just the beginning.

So when first shockwaves had been sent through the Astral Plane by a psychic brawl unlike any the world had seen in millennia without – and this was important – explicitly divine power behind it, that had roused those few, divine or demonic, that were still dormant from their torpor and fixed their gazes firmly on Earth. That would have been enough grounds to call a meeting of Council of Skyfathers, to get a grip on just what was going on.

Then came the Dark Phoenix. Whereupon, to put it in the simplest terms possible, the Gods and Goddesses (and Devils, Demons and other assorted entities of that ilk) of Earth completely and utterly lost their shit.

OoOoO

Harry was, at first, blissfully unaware of all this. Though perhaps 'blissfully' was not the best way to put it. The first weeks of his recovery had been difficult, to put it extremely mildly.

PTSD was rare in Asgard – surprisingly so, considering the lives that the gods of Asgard led. Professor Xavier had suggested, in discussion with Frigga, that it was an evolved reflex, with the hypervigilance typical of trauma victims being retained, while other potentially endangering results like flashbacks being dispensed with. While this might seem a mostly theoretical discussion only partly relevant to Harry's suffering and thus his treatment, it was actually very relevant: Harry was half human and half Asgardian, and herein lay the rub. Was he to be treated as a human would be, or as an Asgardian would be?

There were other factors complicating the situation. For one thing, Harry would not be the first kidnapping, abuse, or torture victim to send their mind elsewhere in a strategy of escapism. He would be one of the first, however, for whom that was not a metaphor, and who had had help from another in doing so. As a result, his rather sharp return to his body had led to him being swamped by memories that his mind had tried to integrate, that were from his usual physical point of view, but had also recognised as very definitely not his.

This had somewhat derailed the original plan to erase the memories the Red Son persona had accumulated, as well as removing the Transmode transformed parts of Harry's anatomy. While it was argued that erasing them would still be the best thing for Harry's state of mind, this was hit with three issues.

First, Harry had had his mind meddled with far too much recently, and was therefore unlikely to respond well to even the most well-intentioned mental contact, let alone entrance, that he did not initiate. To be precise, he would lash out and close himself off, which, in the former case would, aside from anything else, cause one _hell_ of a mess. While Odin was resigned to large portions of the royal palace being blown up from time to time, he didn't exactly seek it out. For this reason, Harry was being housed in quarters altered to deflect and disperse psychic energy. And it was entirely clear that while Harry had loosened up somewhat, he did not want to let anyone in at the moment, literally or figuratively.

Second, even if those memories were erased, Harry was exactly the sort of person who, even knowing the horrors they might contain, would determinedly seek out what was in them, simply to know. And, possibly, for emotionally masochistic reasons – while he knew perfectly well that he hadn't been the one in charge for what the Red Son had done, he still felt responsible. After all, he had willingly surrendered his body, even if it had only been intended as a temporary measure, a gambit that under other circumstances, might have worked beautifully – and after being tortured physically and mentally, starved and denied sleep, while resisting constant psychic attack and the urge to unleash the Phoenix, even a grown adult with intensive training for such a situation could reasonably be expected to slip up. As it was, though, he had surrendered his body and the results had been several dozen deaths by the Red Son's hand, most of two hundred horrific direct mental violations and a great deal more indirect ones, and the grand scale political destabilisation of half a continent.

For someone who believed firmly in responsibility and not misusing one's abilities, this had hit him hard, as soon as he had emerged from his Phoenix powered mania and stopped blaming everyone and everything else. This was not to say that it was all his fault and everyone else hastened to assure him of this: while he had chosen to put himself in the situation where it could happen, he had not made the Red Room and Essex try and enslave him, he had not made them program and use the Red Son as they had, and he had not acted to derail Maddie's plan, either.

The implication, therefore, was that he had been helpless, which was both largely true and something that Harry liked even less. If he was responsible, then that at least implied some control of the situation. This scenario, however, denied him even a thin semblance of control of any kind.

Third, though it was not openly discussed, the possibility was considered that these memories could actually be useful to Harry. While it was knowledge gained through absolutely horrific means, it was knowledge nevertheless, knowledge that could prevent a recurrence of such events – though as was also pointed out, while Harry had not intended to become a brainwashed living weapon, the Red Room had only been capable of making him one because first he had placed himself back into their hands for reasons of his own, and second because he had willingly surrendered his body, though with the intention of immediately taking it back.

In any case, the examples of Natasha, Bucky, Maddie and, surprisingly, Tony, were considered. Natasha and Maddie had been twisted from infancy into living weapons before breaking free, and while this had left them broken in ways that were blatantly obvious in Maddie's case and usually extremely well hidden in Natasha's, it had also left them as extremely dangerous people, the sort who were not easily captured, ensnared, or forced to another's will.

Bucky and Tony, meanwhile, had been similarly tormented and twisted, though to wildly varying extents (on the one hand, Bucky didn't have shrapnel constantly seeking to pierce his heart and have a large chunk of his chest removed to fit one of the greatest leaps in energy technology in human history. On the other, Tony still had all of his original limbs and had not had his mind repeatedly rewritten). In one case, it had resulted in the deadliest assassin ever to grace Midgard, and in the other, it had resulted in two of the greatest pieces of technology ever to grace it, both of which could be reasonably said to have changed the course of history, and one of the world's greatest heroes.

The strongest steel is forged in fire, after all. However, as the observant might point out, too hot a fire would make the steel melt and render it useless. The point, however, was that however they were acquired, these skills and this knowledge that Harry now had were an undoubted asset, and could play a very important part in ensuring that nothing like this ever happened again.

Of course, those skills came attached to a lot of horrific memories that weren't rightly Harry's to bear. However, his typically martyrdom prone response was that one way or another, he had made it possible for them to be made, so the burden was his to bear. He and Carol had promptly had a spectacular shouting match over the justice/pigheaded stupidity of this, after which she had refused to speak to him for several days. When they were found curled up together fully clothed, Carol playing the protective big spoon and giving Frigga of all people the most baleful glare imaginable when it seemed like Harry was about to be disturbed (Frigga, long accustomed to baleful glares from her sons, her patients, and her usually soon to be deceased enemies, paid it absolutely no mind whatsoever, beyond filing it away under 'Reasons That My Grandson Is Probably Going To Marry A Midgardian'), it was assumed that they'd reconciled.

One advantage Harry had over most was that a key part of recovering from such trauma was surrounding oneself with a support system of loved ones. And, as Doctor Strange had demonstrated, Harry was very much loved by far more people than he had ever imagined (his self-esteem was, while improving, still a work in progress). Thor, Frigga, Wanda, Sirius, Jane, Jean, Carol, Diana, Uhtred, Jean-Paul… all of them would have needed surgical intervention to be detached from his side, as would have been Ron and Hermione, if they had been present. And they were far from his only visitors.

Loki had spent many of the first days by his bedside, before vanishing to Earth, a relocation followed by the suspiciously un-suspicious deaths of a breathtaking number of Red Room Agents, senior management, and relevant associates.

Odin had likewise spent much of his time by his grandson's side in the early days, expression grim and pensive. At an immediate glance, he seemed to be mulling over the cruelty of his grandson's fate and his relative impotence to do anything about it. The thoughts of Odin Allfather, however, ran deeper than that. But that was another matter.

Albus Dumbledore was another visitor whose thoughts ran deeply, but for the most part, they were full of bitter regret. While he had to return to make ready his school for another year, one rendered especially busy by the coming of the Triwizard Tournament, he returned when he could to see how Harry was progressing. Sometimes Minerva McGonagall came with him, but since she was the Deputy Headmistress, she was required to preside at Hogwarts in his absence.

Pepper, Darcy, Clint, Natasha, Tony, Steve and Bruce spent as much time with him as they could, in between his being nigh smothered with affection by the rest of his friends and family, plotting horrifying vengeance upon the Red Room above and beyond Loki's grand scale murder spree, which was being aided and abetted by Bucky, Natasha, Clint, and Tony, the latter of whom was putting his near unsurpassed skills as a hacker to wage electronic warfare on suitable targets. He was not alone in this: SHIELD's pet hacker, Skye, had joined him in wreaking havoc, along with her hacking protégé, a mysterious and talented young hacker known only as 'Oracle'.

Betsy Braddock, Sean Cassidy and Warren all visited too, the former partly in a professional capacity – she was, after all, a highly accomplished psychic, and of all the psychics in the world, she was arguably most familiar with the functioning of Harry's mind (at least, when it was healthy). And never mind the fact that her boss, Director Wisdom, would likely want to know everything he could about just what the hell was going on.

Fury appeared too; briefly, because as someone who actually knew what the hell had gone on, he was in great demand, and even aside from that, there was a lot of work for him to do with the world being turned upside down and the incarceration and questioning of Lukin, Essex and Belova. But he appeared, to watch over Harry while he slept.

Maddie hovered somewhat awkwardly, in between counselling sessions with Professor Xavier, debriefing sessions both formal and informal with Agent Coulson and Loki, among others, not sure of her place despite the encouraging words of others. A desperate hug from a desperate Harry had confirmed it, though. But the fact was, she needed healing as much as Harry did – more, in a great many respects. Functional though she was, she was still gravely wounded psychically and psychologically. While her psychic skills were vast, her psychic ethics were still a work in progress, and needless to say, the ruthless psychological abuse that Essex had subjected her to in an attempt to prevent her will to resist from ever manifesting was in grave need of treatment.

So Harry was not alone, even if he was prone to isolating himself – a tendency which drove his insistence that Ron and Hermione not see him like this. After a great deal of discussion, it was decided that acquiescing to Harry's wishes on this occasion would be good for the cause of world peace, no matter how many misgivings might be had about it.

Another advantage he had was that he was not afflicted by nightmares, something arranged by Dream, in a display of his increasingly functional, if frequently erratic, sense of compassion, one that had developed after his own captivity by those who wished to use him for their own ends. He also had a spectacularly vindictive streak, and Loki spared more than one of those Red Room Agents he found simply because they were already trapped in their worst nightmares, cavalcades of horror arranged by the ultimate progenitor of all such things, and he could hardly imagine a more fitting punishment.

No, Harry's rest, unlike that of most trauma victims, was not disturbed. Instead, it was more peaceful than it had ever been.

However, in the waking hours, the memories tormented him, as would only be expected, and the matter of what to do with them was still up for debate. The idea of, instead of erasing them, erasing only the ones where foul deeds were performed and retaining the training ones and monster slaying ones was entertained. After all, there were plenty of those. Like all predators, the Red Room had not tolerated rivals, and had predictably sent in its shiny new weapon to make an impression. The psychic training by Essex would be replaced by training from Xavier and Betsy, the former of whom knew each and every one of the techniques that Essex had used and trained the Red Son in, explaining that they were native to a very old, very reclusive, very secretive, and frankly, downright strange clan of psychics called the Askani. He had encountered them as a young man on his travels, before he had gone forth to learn from others.

They had trained him willingly enough, even eagerly, but disagreements arose: over the Askani's inward looking dismissal of humanity, their sole focus on psychic mutations, and their disquieting obsession with acquiring his DNA to refresh their bloodlines, primarily. These had led to his departure. The idea of Essex as a rogue Askani Adept had been floated, but dismissed – for one thing, the Askani were rather mystical in their outlook, while Essex was scientifically minded to the point of it being pathological. For another, from what Harry had heard Essex say – or more accurately, what Harry had told Maddie that Essex had said, because Harry was not in the most talkative of moods – he had spent much of his youth searching for evidence of any kind of superhuman abilities, suggesting a mundane background. Instead, it was suspected that he had either hoodwinked the Askani, or kidnapped and tortured one into revealing their secrets. Either was entirely in keeping with his character.

The physical training, meanwhile, would be replaced by training from Bucky and Natasha, who were both thoroughly familiar with the kind of techniques that the Red Room taught. The same skills would be imparted, in other words, but with kinder teachers, and far happier memories to go with them.

However, this was still considered a grievous violation of Harry's mind, and to pull it off, they'd have to alter far more than just the memories of that six months, which was unconscionable.

Instead, Clint, who had also been through a similar situation and had been one of those helping Harry through it with quiet words of encouragement and experience, had been the one to suggest a middle ground. In this scenario, they would leave the memories as they were, but teach Harry to wall them off, to be accessed as and when they were necessary – the muscle memory would remain.

To reduce the circumstances under which accessing them would be necessary, Harry could then be trained in the psychic arts by either Maddie or Xavier, who were extremely familiar with the techniques involved, and in physical combat and spycraft by Bucky and/or Natasha. This would mean that as and when he had to call on those skills, he wouldn't necessarily be flung into a traumatic flashback.

This was put to Harry, who accepted it. It wasn't a perfect solution. To be frank, there was no perfect solution. But it was the best that they could manage under the circumstances.

But, of course, there were others who intended to have their say.

The Council Elite had been called. And the subject of their discussion went without saying.

OoOoO

Thor looked up as he noticed a presence in the corner of his eye. As he had every time for the last week and a half, his hand instinctively strayed to Mjolnir's hilt, before stopping when he recognised the presence as not being a threat.

"Father," he said quietly, not wanting to wake Harry – though he suspected that no matter how quietly he pitched his voice, his son would still hear it. Even with the intervention of Dream preventing nightmares from tormenting him, these days Harry tended to sleep lightly.

"Thor," his father said, then jerked his chin slightly, indicating that he wished to speak with Thor in private. Thor grimaced, glancing down at his son, then stood up carefully. Thankfully, Harry slept on. As quickly as he dared, he followed his father into the hall.

"What is it, father?" he asked.

"The Council Elite has been summoned," Odin said. "For the third time in a millennium, and the second time in a year."

Thor gaped. "I…"

"It is not unexpected," Odin said grimly. "As with the Celestials and Chthon, the Dark Phoenix is a threat to all the pantheons."

"Harry is not –"

"Harry by himself is not a threat," Odin said sharply, cutting his son off. "By himself, he is still a boy. A brave boy, an unusually powerful boy, but still a boy. As the Dark Phoenix, however, he would be a threat to Midgard and every single realm connected to it – worse, he would spell their doom. You know this as well as I."

"He will not," Thor ground out. "Father, you cannot –"

"I cannot what, my son?" Odin asked, in a dangerously mild tone. Once, it would have stopped Thor in his tracks and set him on his guard, warning him that he was on thin ice. Now, though, he squared his jaw and glared at his father.

"You know damn well what," he growled.

Their gazes locked for several long, dangerous moments, then Odin snorted. "You are the very image of your mother," he said. "Though I dare say that she would say that you were the very image of me, were she here."

Thor blinked, confused. "Father?"

"I have no intention of allowing my fellow Skyfathers from laying a finger on my grandson," Odin said. "However, I am not so foolish as to be blind to their concerns, concerns that are well grounded."

Thor frowned.

"And before you deny it, Thor, consider it rationally," Odin said. "You are his father and I know how hard that can make it to see ugly truths, but you must. Harry by himself, in combat with another who is psychically gifted as he is, even more so in fact, made the Astral Plane convulse. The mere overspill of that fight reshaped the Nevernever, and had much of Midgard on its knees at the psychic disruption. Many of my brothers and sisters have slept through much of this last millennium, but if Chthon did not awaken them, that most certainly did. His power is deeply unusual in one of his age, and that by itself would attract notice, as it already has done. He set the world on its ear as a simple side-effect of a simple plan to garner the attention of you, your brother and the others of your warrior band on Midgard."

"It needed two of them to cause such disruption," Thor said. "And that is not what is going to be under discussion: I highly doubt that many of the pantheons will care much for a psychic disruption on Midgard."

"In the normal run of things, you would be correct," Odin said. "However, when they discuss the Dark Phoenix, they will discuss its host and his potential for darkness and chaos. His track record will not speak in his favour."

"His track record… father, he rejected the _God_ of Chaos! He undid his works!"

"I know," Odin sighed. "However, gods are as vulnerable to fear as mortals are – more so, even, for it is not something which they are accustomed to. Consequently, they do not like it. Some of them have already worked themselves up into a frenzy over it."

Thor's jaw muscles bunched and he gripped Mjolnir. "If they wish to come for my son, then I will give them something to fear," he said dangerously.

"They may well do," Odin said bluntly. "Which is why I need you and your brother to remain in Asgard, with you as regent, and prepare for war." He looked grim. "You may also need to prepare to take up the Odinforce."

Thor's eyes widened. "Father?" he said, unable to believe his ears. While he knew that his father was hardly a perfect being, from his infancy he had held a steadfast belief in Odin's invincibility, weaned on tales of his incredible deeds and indomitable might. Age had only strengthened him, like matured oak, and losing an eye had only sharpened the sight of the other. Of course, intellectually he knew very well that there were beings, Powers, who were beyond his father, but the thought that his father might be defeated…

"It is true that I am the most powerful of Midgard's Skyfathers," Odin said bluntly. "Only the true Elders could overmatch me in single combat, and unless I am much mistaken, only one of those is among the active pantheons – and the White God has not sought direct combat with another pantheon for many years, since I was your age."

"He is an Elder God?" Thor asked, startled out of his confusion.

"Possibly," Odin said. "In truth, I have never been certain of what he was, and he is not one to discuss such matters." He waved this away. "My point is this: while I am the most powerful in single combat, if their fear overcomes them…"

"They may attack you en masse," Thor said, nodding. "But surely they will not kill you?"

"They may kill me or bind me," Odin said, and smiled briefly, sadly, recognising the subtext. "I am not immortal, Thor. Nor am I invincible."

"Could have fooled me," Thor muttered.

The reply came with the snap of a whip. "You are no fool, Thor, and there is no time for you to act like one," Odin said harshly.

Thor narrowed his eyes, but nodded curtly. "I am sorry, father," he said.

Odin nodded with a sigh. "If I pass, the Odinforce will come to you as the Thorforce. If I am captured, I will relinquish it and it will come to you anyway."

Thor closed his eyes briefly, and nodded. "Very well, father," he said.

Odin sighed. "There is much I have still to tell you, to teach you, about the power of the Kings of Asgard, much that it is more vital for you to know now than ever. Where that power comes from, how it came to be, why we have it… I should have told you years ago." He looked Thor in the eye. "If I do not return from the Council Elite, then speak to your mother. She has access to the records you will need to study; of Frey, the First King, of Lady Sunniva, and of Prospero Slytherin and his wand, Laevateinn."

Thor narrowed his eyes. "All of these I was told stories of as a boy," he said. "What greater significance do they have? What connects them?"

For a moment, Odin's eye flickered, revealing a bone deep weariness. "You will know when you read them," he said in the end.

Thor frowned, then nodded. "Are you going alone?"

"Not likely, gol – Thor."

"Where the boss goes, we go. Except to bed, obviously. Some things, even we don't want to see."

Thor rolled his eyes skywards as Huginn and Muninn appeared on his shoulders, apparently out of nowhere. "Of course you two are involved," he muttered. "Father, do you really wish for these two to be your companions?"

"They have served me honourably and well for years beyond counting," Odin said. "As they will serve you, if I do not return. Do not disdain them – for all their… _quirks_ , they are valuable advisers."

Thor grimaced. "Very well," he said, then glanced at the ravens perched on his shoulders. "Do not get used to this."

"Don't worry," Huginn said, before fluttering over to Odin's shoulder.

"We ain't planning to," Muninn added, before following his brother.

"Thank the heavens for small mercies," Thor said flatly.

"Yeah, right. And Thor?" Huginn said.

"Yes?"

"The kid… he's a tough one. He'll turn out fine."

"Just tell 'im we said hello, would ya?" Muninn added.

Thor eyed him, then nodded, before returning his gaze to his father. They shared a warrior's arm clasp, a nod, and then Odin turned to go, striding away down the corridor, while Thor stared after him, drinking in what might well be his last sight of his father. As he reached the end, though, Odin stopped.

"Thor?"

"Yes, father?"

"You are young for this responsibility," Odin said. "Younger than I was. Younger than I would wish you to be."

"Yes, father," Thor said, keeping the sigh out of his voice. He too felt that he was young, too young to be King – though the part of him that answered to James Potter jeered that at 1500 years old, he could hardly be called 'too young' for anything.

"But you are also wiser than I was," Odin continued. "Wiser, more thoughtful… and a better man, too." He looked over his shoulder. "You and your brother are not the men, the gods, I had hoped you would be – you are far more than I ever dared hope for. You are ready, my son."

"I don't feel ready," Thor admitted.

Odin chuckled. "Good. I would be worried if you did," he said wryly.

And then he was gone.

OoOoO

Thor soon found himself striding to the heart of the palace, and not a minute later, Loki fell in beside him. For a moment, they walked in silence.

"So, father spoke to you, then?" Loki said. "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst, that sort of thing?"

"I'm not sure how much hope was involved," Thor muttered. "He seems sure that it will come to the worst."

"Under the circumstances, I am hardly surprised," Loki said bluntly. "Father is strong, but…"

"Even the strongest warrior can fall to a surprise blow," Thor said. "I know." He stopped a servant. "Please find the Lady Sif, ask her to assemble the best commanders in the capital and its environs, then have them meet me in the War Room."

The servant bobbed a bow, replied in the respectful affirmative, and left.

"What is your plan, brother?" Loki asked. "We cannot resist even half the Council Elite, let alone all of them, even if you have the Odinforce – or Thorforce, as it would be."

"I know," Thor said. "Which is why I will instruct Sif to construct our defences to delay and divert."

"An unusual strategy," Loki remarked. "More like one of mine."

Thor smiled wryly. "Yes, well," he said. "Learn from the best and all that."

"All this flattery, brother, I'm almost blushing," Loki said, amused, before his smile faded. "You wish me to take part in constructing the illusions?"

"I wish you and mother to lead it," Thor said. "But I also wish you to disguise Harry, to conceal him and his power on Earth if it comes to it, in the care of Wanda or Professor Xavier. Preferably well before."

"Brother?" Loki asked, frowning.

"If he sees Asgard on the brink of being overrun, or even our people in battle to defend him, you know what he will feel he must do," Thor said.

"That I do," Loki sighed. "Your point is well made." He cocked an eyebrow. "I was hoping for a better plan, however. A more positive one."

"I have one," Thor said. "String Strange up by his ankles and shake him until the answers fall out."

"… Well, it has the virtue of simplicity, I'll say that."

Thor gave him a grim smile. "So glad you approve, brother," he said. "My reasoning is this: Strange has been blinded in his hunt for Essex, but only in that regard. His Sight otherwise functions as well as ever, and we are integral to his schemes, especially Harry. Even aside from that, a fight between pantheons is hardly conducive to his aims."

Loki considered this, then nodded. "I can see your point," he admitted. "You think he will have a plan."

"I don't think, I know," Thor said. "He will have a plan, one that he will doubtless have spent centuries devising, because he is Doctor Strange, and that is what Doctor Strange does." He folded his arms. "And I fully intend to take advantage of it."

Loki smiled, though there was not much humour in it. "Why brother," he said. "You really are beginning to sound like me."

OoOoO

Strange was not the only one with plans, however, as Harry was finding at that very moment.

When he opened his eyes, he knew immediately that these weren't his real eyes, as such. They were metaphorical eyes, and like real eyes, opening them signalled his becoming aware of his surroundings. What those surroundings were, though, was a bit of a puzzler. He knew that he wasn't conscious, which presumably meant that this was some sort of dream… but he remembered being told about how Morpheus, Dream (apparently an uncle of sorts, through his mother's merging with the Phoenix, though to be frank, Harry had not been in a state where he'd been inclined to care much and, in any case, had stopped trying to keep track of the minutiae of his family tree several cousins ago) was meant to be protecting that side of things. It would certainly explain why he hadn't been having any nightmares – at least, not while he was asleep.

This wasn't a flashback of any kind, though, he thought, on his guard, as he swept his 'gaze' around his surroundings. They seemed to be composed of soft, pale grey mist. But if he looked closely… then, he paused, made an impatient noise. This, whatever it was, was all in his head, and he was a telepath. So he focused, and frowned again. There was no one.

He snorted faintly. Alone. He was used to that feeling.

"Feelings can be deceptive, you know."

Harry whirled and struck without thinking, unleashing a howling column of coruscating golden-red fire on the speaker.

"Like that one," the same voice said, tone dry.

Harry whirled again to see a man standing not ten feet away from him. He was a little under average height, had the kind of dark olive-brown complexion common in the Middle East, kind brown eyes, and curly black hair. He looked to be in his mid thirties, was wearing a pair of battered workman's jeans, a non-descript t-shirt, and didn't seem to have been in the slightest bit ruffled by a blast of psychic power that would have either lobotomised a full capacity Wembley or reduced it to rubble. He raised a pair of calloused, scarred hands and smiled.

"We're never as alone as we think we are," he continued. "Also, I come in peace." His lips quirked. "I'd rather you didn't try to make me leave in pieces." The smile turned to an expression of earnest appeal. "Would you please hear me out?"

Harry's eyes narrowed, and he settled into a wary defensive stance, and nodded. If nothing else, it would give him time to think of another method of dealing with this intruder. Also, there was a sense of niggling doubt – bad guys rarely made puns.

"Thank you," the man said, in tones of warm pleasure and genuine gratitude.

"Who are you?" Harry asked warily, not letting his guard down entirely. "How are you in my mind? And why can't I sense you?"

"Call me Joshua," the man said cheerfully. "And technically, we're not in your mind. Or even in Morpheus' realm, technically. We're… Between, you might say."

Harry could hear the capital letter.

"As for the last bit, I didn't want you getting jumpy and lashing out," Joshua continued.

"… And you thought that sneaking up on me was a good idea?"

Joshua grimaced. "Okay, so maybe that wasn't my best idea," he admitted, then rubbed his jaw. "You carry quite the psychic wallop, by the way. I actually felt that." His tone, Harry noted, was more one of mild, rueful surprise than actual pain. "I cloaked my presence. It's a bit overwhelming, especially for a psychic as strong, and as young, as you. And that's not even getting started on your psychic trauma. The scars on your psyche, on your body, on your _soul_ …" He gave Harry a sad, compassionate look as he shook his head. "You've been through so much."

Harry eyed him suspiciously. "Who are you?" he repeated. "No, actually, _what_ are you? And what do you want?"

"I want to help you, as sceptical as you might be of that," Joshua said. "And with good reason, sadly. As for why, the answer to your other question might make you a little less sceptical. It's not exactly a simple answer, though. It's a bit complicated."

"Uncomplicate it," Harry said flatly. "Or fuck off and stop wasting my time."

"Time that I am sure you were spending so constructively," Joshua said dryly. "Very well. Technically, I ascended to full godhood some time ago. Originally, I was – and technically, based on at least two dictionary definitions, I still am – a being very much like you: half mortal, half god. A demigod, you might say."

Harry eyed him sceptically. "And why should I believe you?"

Joshua rolled his eyes. " _Humans_ ," he sighed. There was considerably more fond exasperation and mild frustration than Harry had thought could be expressed in one word. "Well, humans and the human raised, I suppose would be a better way of putting it," he amended. "You're all so sceptical these days." He sighed again. "Then again, I suppose that you of all people have reason to be paranoid. Though, like the last person to appeal to your trust, I _am_ family. If a little more distantly, anyway." He exhaled through his nose – or at least, through the psychic construct of his nose, since this wasn't technically real and, Harry realised, they weren't technically breathing. "Fine. Brace yourself, little cousin."

Harry didn't remember much of what happened next; just a blinding flash of light that somehow seemed to permeate every single sense in this space where senses were nominal at best, a sense of overwhelming warmth, compassion and power, and… and… and…

"Jesus fucking Christ!"

OoOoO

Elsewhere, in a place between worlds constructed for the occasion from raw firmament, matters were rather more tense.

"I will not stand aside," Odin said flatly. The dispute had been raging for some time, with many points raised and dismissed by both sides, but now it had come down to its most fundamental points.

"Be reasonable, Allfather," Mbombo said, voice rich and pleading. "You know as well as we the powers of the Phoenix, the danger it presents in the wrong hands, the hands of a half mortal child…" He trailed off as Odin's eye flashed with anger.

"In the hands of _my grandson_ , Storm-Lord, God-Father," Odin said, voice said flat, but carrying a dangerous growl around the edges. "Who has proven in the past that he can well handle vast and corrupting powers with a deftness and a wisdom that would honour any of us here."

"A grandson, wise Allseer, who is young," Izanagi said coolly. "Young and already suffering greatly from the curse of your house, as he has suffered greatly in many other respects. The power of the Phoenix is a burden that is only fit to be shouldered by those who are wise in the ways of the world, understanding their place in it and what they must do to maintain the cosmic order. It is not one fit for the shoulders of a child, even an extraordinary one such as your grandson – and I think that none of us would deny that his achievements have been extraordinary. But he is still a child. One, we believe, who has discovered the limits of his capacity for control. There is no shame in that."

There was a murmur of agreement, like a rumbling of a stirring volcano.

"Fine words, Father of the Kami," Odin said, voice hardening even further, hard control concealing a dangerous fury. "Except that all your words of sympathy and kindness only serve as a disguise, a _thin_ disguise, for your true intent. For all that you honour my grandson, you would see him bound or destroyed!"

"Have you an alternative, cousin?" Zeus asked impatiently. "Some way to control the fires of the Phoenix before they hollow him out and animate him as the agent of our destruction? Before he embraces them and his destiny as our destroyer."

"Do not try to play the seer, cousin," Odin said coldly. "It does not suit you."

"No, I am not the seer," Zeus said, squaring up to Odin, the air crackling with the sort of power that prefaced phrases like 'let there be light'. At close examination, it was easy to tell that they were cousins. After all, they looked very much alike. Both were tall and strong, both were powerfully built and richly bearded, their features unmistakably mirroring each other. The only obvious differences were relatively minor: in apparent age; where Odin seemed old like an oak tree that had only hardened with maturity, driving its roots deeper, and Zeus seemed to be in his prime, full of energy, vitality and power; in colouring, with Zeus being dark where Odin was fair; and in battle scars, which Odin bore proudly, and Zeus bore not at all. The last could lead to one of two conclusions: either that Zeus was too vain to allow such scars to be seen… or that he was so strong that he had never taken any at all.

"You claim that skill. So tell me, Odin Allfather, what do you see in our futures? Fire? Death?" His eyes narrowed. "Or perhaps you hope that when the Dark Phoenix erupts from the shell of your grandson, he will spare Asgard, your home, and Earth, your plaything, and instead destroy all of us! And then you will be able to enact you will without any fear of our reprisal!"

That garnered whispers of worry and shouts of outrage, both at the accusation itself and at the possibility that it might be true.

"Mind your words, cousin," Odin said, eye narrowed. "If you speak so again, then I will provide an answer that you will not like."

"Like the answer that my wife found under your roof?" Zeus demanded, incensed. "When she spoke harmless words to your grandson and your sons decided to threaten her life! When your grandson, who you claim is so capable of controlling the Phoenix, released her to attack my wife's mind! Your family holds us in contempt, holds us _all_ in contempt, to attack under guest-right!"

 _That_ caused a stir, one that only slowly settled down.

"Your account," Odin said. "And likely your wife's, considering that it is her you would have heard it from, misses several things. First, your wife was not permanently harmed." He looked around the amphitheatre. "You are all familiar with the might of the Phoenix. After all, that has been the subject of much of our discussion, has it not? So do you not think that if my grandson had directed the Phoenix to attack Queen Hera in earnest, she would have been unable to relay her tale to her husband? Do you not think that she would have been naught but ash?" His gaze returned to Zeus. "And I dare say that your wife did not tell you why my sons bridled, why the Phoenix – a fragment of whose power was placed in my son to protect him, mark you, and which only arises when he is threatened – stirred within him, at her words. I shall tell you. She threatened and insulted my grandson; behind deniable words, of course, ones that she could twist if confronted into a mere harmless discussion of possibilities. Some of you may be familiar with Queen Hera's hatred of demigods. For those who are not, I shall simply say this: what was a fury directed at those sired by her husband on other women, mortals, nymphs, even other goddesses, has now grown to encompass them all. Where she passes, demigods pass too, to the realms of death. My sons are no fools and they know this well, for one of their cousins, their friends, is Hercules, the Lion of Olympus, whose mortal life was often a tale of woe thanks to Hera's malice! And they have even more reason to be wary, for right now, Asgard plays host to another demigod, a demigoddess! She is Diana Herculeis, Princess of Themyscira, daughter of Hercules and Hippolyta, the latter one of the Amazons, the once mortal Valkyries of Olympus, and for her parentage she would have died at Hera's will in her infancy out of sheer spite!"

He turned on Zeus, closing with him. "Diana's adoption, her fostering, in Asgard was arranged in part by Loki, my younger son, who knew well the circumstances and the urgency of it. Do you think that either he or Thor would tolerate even the most oblique of threats from Hera, which, I remind you, were made under guest-right, in contempt of Asgard's hospitality? And do you think the Phoenix, resting within my grandson to protect him at his mother's behest, would tolerate them either? Indeed, it is testament to my grandson's restraint that Queen Hera lived to complain of what she received, which was little more than words of warning and a forcible revelation of how petty her actions and motivations have truly been, and far less than what she richly deserved!"

Zeus went purple with rage. He couldn't exactly dispute what Odin had said, since it was all true and he well knew it. However, he was also not exactly pleased to have his wife so excoriated, and his inability (or disinterest) to restrain her murderous impulses so blatantly revealed in front of his peers.

"Enough," Ra said, the falcon headed god standing and garnering the instant attention of all those present. The Heliopolitan pantheon was one of the oldest pantheons, and it had undergone something of a resurgence these last couple of centuries, thanks to the vast dissemination of the names and deeds of their members across the mortal world. As a result, their very names were instantly familiar throughout much of both West and East and they were therefore able, if they so chose, to act on the mortal plane with few restraints. With both of those things came power, and thus respect.

"We are not here," he said. "To discuss the conduct of Olympus' Queen, nor of Asgard's senior Princes. We are here to discuss the matter of the Dark Phoenix." His unblinking gaze shifted to Odin. "And its host."

"Ra speaks truly," Quetzalcoatl said. Unlike most of the gods, he had not chosen to appear in human form, instead choosing his favoured shape as a vast feathered serpent. The others suspected that he was making a point, though exactly what that point was wasn't exactly clear. Despite looking like he could swallow a dragon whole, however, his voice was calm, clipped and frankly, human. That being said, only the chronically deaf wouldn't be able to hear him. "Odin. You love the boy, for he is your blood. We do not deny his bravery, nor his previous deeds, including the banishment of Chthon."

That got a few whispers. Chthon was not a name that the gods liked mentioning.

"But like all gods, his story is one of reflection, of mirrors. As he has played the role of healer, of saviour, he can just as easily play the role of destroyer," Quetzalcoatl said. "And while if one of us so ran amok, our cousins could reason with us, restrain us before all was lost… I believe that you know better than most that the Dark Phoenix cannot be reasoned with. Restrained, perhaps, but only if it was caught early. And by the time it was caught, it would be too late. What worked this time will not work again. You will not catch the Dark Phoenix before he devours the mortal world, and if he does that with Phoenix fire, he will also devour every binding enchantment that keeps the likes of Chthon and the creatures of the Outside at bay."

"The Dark Phoenix is capable of such things, Wind-Lord," Odin agreed. "But it is not a certainty that my grandson will be come the Dark Phoenix again. The power he wielded he chose to divest, to infuse in an artefact now buried deep in Asgard's vaults. Only embers of that fire remain within him now."

"Embers are more than enough to start a fire, Allfather," Izanagi replied.

"Especially when they're fed by the kind of fury that the Lords of Asgard can muster," the Dagda remarked darkly. "The kind of fury that the boy has a particular knack for."

"You ain't short of it yourself, fat-ass," Muninn piped up.

Odin gripped his spear and closed his eye briefly. "Muninn," he said.

"He's got a point though," Huginn remarked. "I mean, yeah, the Dark Phoenix is bigger and badder than all of you. Hell, if it was never stopped, it would be bigger and badder than the lot of you put together. And it destroys everything, because it's the dark side of the Phoenix and it's chronically pissed off. But you're forgetting something." He gestured with a wing at Quetzalcoatl. "Fangs up there is right when he says that the Phoenix could eat all those fancy bindings you lot have got on all the big bads, to keep 'em from coming round uninvited. But there's something you've forgotten: _all of you can do that too._ "

He hopped off Odin's shoulder, shifting to a humanoid form in mid-air, joined immediately by his brother.

"You say that if one of you goes crackers, you can restrain them before its too late," Huginn continued. "Bullshit. Chthon was on Midgard, Earth, a few months ago. He'd been making little cameos for a while, too, and the Darkhold was loose, so it wasn't like it was anything new. When he and the boss," he said, nodding at Odin. "Threw down, under normal circumstances, the Earth wouldda been gone, destroyed, kaput."

"An ex-Earth," Muninn added helpfully. "Joined the choir invisible, ya know?"

"Right," Huginn said, eyeing his brother. "Point is… where the fuck were you? Only a few other gods were on Earth, like Hanuman, and they were off sortin' stuff out elsewhere. Chthon was every bit as bad as a baby Dark Phoenix, and getting worse by the second. And speaking of baby Dark Phoenixes, his majesty's right and embers can turn into a fire. But it takes a little while for the Dark Phoenix to get warmed up. Maybe not that long in the grand scheme of things, but long enough, and that's when he's more pissed and hurtin' than he's ever been. All of youse?" He snapped his fingers. "You could destroy the Earth like that. Well, most of youse could. A few of ya are out of shape and not well enough known on the mortal plane to start really flexin' ya cosmic muscles, but you get the idea."

There was a moment of silence. Then Ra spoke, sounding faintly puzzled.

"I think I understood about half of that."

"What they were trying to say was that if anything, any one of you is more of a threat to Earth than Harry Thorson is," a new voice said.

Everyone looked around sharply. And it was then that they'd noticed that their surroundings had changed. No longer were they in an amphitheatre of raw firmament, but instead, standing on a flat plane on a rock shaped like a vast diamond, one nestled in the midst of a vast starry night. Ahead of them was a set of stairs leading up to a rough-hewn chair, on which a tall figure sat with one leg resting on another in attitude of perfect insouciance. He was unhealthily, almost skeletally, thin, and with his colourful rune inscribed blue tunic and flowing red cloak, he resembled little more than a rather flamboyant scarecrow.

But there were a couple of things to take into account.

First, his eyes, intelligent blue eyes set deep in sunken sockets, above hollow cheeks, that gleamed with a manic energy that approached madness like sapphires set in a skull.

Second, what he held in his upturned right hand, long, clever and deceptively strong fingers clamped around it like a vice. It was a stone, no, a cube, one that burned even brighter than his eyes, and with an even more ominous blue light. It was the Tesseract.

When the assembled skyfathers looked up at him, he smiled a smile with a few too many teeth for comfort, stretching his already tight skin even tauter across his skull.

"Skyfathers, Earthmothers, gods and goddesses," he said. "Allow me to introduce myself. I am Doctor Strange." The smile turned mocking as he stood and bowed with a flourish. "And I bid you welcome to this quaint little hideaway of mine, a home away from home tucked between dimensions: the Rock of Eternity." The smile widened. "I hope you enjoy your stay."

 **And that is the end of that chapter, with a little cliffhanger or two. The next chapter will round off the aftermath of this arc, have some more detail on emotional reunions (e.g. Maddie and her parents, Magneto and Lorna), a little insight into Strange's struggles with Essex and the multi-layered aspect of his never-ending war to protect, and perhaps, just perhaps, a little insight into the past of Strange himself, and perhaps a reveal or two – after all… Stephen Strange is not his real name. We'll also be seeing more from Harry, as his recovery continues, more of him interacting with his friends, and the continuation, as you might have noticed, of the lightening of the tone of the fic after a** _ **particularly**_ **dark arc. I'm not done with the serious stuff (it's not just the gods who want a word about what Harry's been getting up to) putting Harry through the blender, of course, and his recovery will take time but he'll have a break for now.**


	17. Chapter 17: Aftermath II (Apply Mop)

**Two chapters in little over a week, and this one is an absolute sodding monster. 25,000 words, bloody hell. I'm on a little bit of a hot streak, it would seem. Also, blimey, it's chapter 17 already… I'd better kick it up a gear, I haven't even started the school year yet. Well, chronologically, it's technically starting already (we'll address that more in the next chapter, and see Ron and Hermione again, as well as a new and unexpected DADA teacher), but regardless.**

 **Anyway, we're back up and running again. This one's going to be more of a talking chapter, largely because it's I'm covering a** _ **lot**_ **of reaction, though there will be some plot progression. There'll also be a bit of a strategic time-skip, because I have no desire to show Harry mid recovery for months on end, and I'll try to avoid reiterating things that have already been said. However, again, I'm packing a lot of fallout into one chapter.**

 **That said, this is also where things, broadly speaking, start lightening up a bit. This chapter and the next one will mix light and serious stuff, but we'll be having more sweet, funny, and silly things in amongst the seriousness. Rebalancing a little, you could say. Anyhow… enjoy.**

 **Thunder Dragon:** _**I would if I believed you, which I don't - your reviews were, in places, entirely identical. If you wish to help, try PM. However, for the most part, I am not interested in ideas. Feedback, yes, that is always incredibly welcome. No problem.**_

 _ **I severely doubt that any hardcore Christians are still reading by this point.**_

 **Guest:** _**Short answer – they're all descended from Gaea, one way or another, even Asgard (who're very much the odd ones out for reasons that will be elaborated upon), and all the Elder Gods are siblings. This means that if Yahweh is an Elder God, as He is generally believed to be, then they're all His nieces and nephews, however distantly, and therefore all of them are Jesus' cousins, one way or another.**_

"Well," Jesus sighed, faintly amused. "You're mostly right. However, I didn't have a middle name, and if I did, it would not be 'fucking'. Aside from anything else, fucking really wasn't on my to-do list back then."

Harry just stared at him, jaw hanging loose. Jesus arched an eyebrow. "What? Were you expecting robes and quotes from scripture?" he asked dryly. "Or perhaps a closer resemblance to the works of the Italian masters – which, while superb pieces of art, seem to be of the firm belief that I was about six feet tall, white, and with enviably manageable hair. Not so much."

"The Dursleys always told me that I was going to hell," Harry said faintly, a vague non-sequitur being the best that he could manage.

"Yes, they gave you a rather skewed version of my word," Jesus said mildly. "Not the most skewed I've ever heard – honestly, there's no species like humanity for twisting words, in ways that truly beggar the imagination. That said, unless they buck up their act, I think that's rather more likely to be their destination, than yours, and well-deserved, too."

When Harry looked mildly surprised, he elaborated.

"While I believe that redemption is possible for everyone, and earnestly desire it, you have to want it. And, of course, to accept that you did wrong and are thus in need of redemption to begin with." He clapped his hands, rubbing them together. "Which brings us right back to you. Do you accept that you should not have embraced the Phoenix fragment within you for the purposes of vengeance and mass destruction, possibly mass slaughter, regardless of the consequences?"

Harry just stared at him.

"I'm not saying that you shouldn't have wanted it – or at least, I'm not condemning you for wanting," Jesus said kindly. "We cannot choose what temptations bedevil us, after all. We can only choose what we do with them. And before your mind was evacuated, you were doing a magnificent job of resisting that temptation. Afterwards, well."

Harry still stared at him, so he took a different tack.

"As long was we're alive and incarnate, we walk in both worlds, being neither one thing nor the other," Jesus said. "Your father's people have always been closer to mortal kind than most deities – they live and die in a way that most other gods do not. There's good reason for that, though I'm not the one to explain it. But even so, you are caught between the two, just as I was, and every other demigod has been. It is our burden, but it is also our gift, for it allows us to understand both the heavens and the Earth. That is why I was sent down in the first place, actually, not just to be a Messiah."

"I don't really want to be a messiah," Harry said quietly.

"It's not something you choose, I'm afraid," Jesus said sympathetically. "You can either face up to it and accept that that is how people are going to see you; without letting it go to your head, mind you. Or you can run from it. But believe me, little cousin, that never works in the long run." He smiled slightly. "Besides – I think we both know that you're not the type to run."

"It would probably save me a lot of trouble if I was, though," Harry said sourly.

"Well, that is very true," Jesus acknowledged. "Up to a point."

Harry raised an eyebrow.

"In the short term, yes, it would save you a great deal of grief," Jesus said. "In the long term, not so much."

Harry grimaced. "Why are you talking to me, anyway?" he said. "Don't you have more important things to do?"

"No," Jesus said bluntly. "I don't."

Harry stared at him uncomprehendingly, then nodded. "Of course. The Phoenix," he said.

"Your mother, wonderful woman that she is, and the protection she has laid on you are only incidentally relevant," Jesus said gently. "That is to say, all the supernatural aspects of your background are immaterial, because I do not, and will never, have anything better to do than talking to and helping a young person in pain." He leaned forward and gently prodded Harry, to emphasise his point. "You."

A moment later, Harry felt a sudden shift in the space around them, and Jesus looked up suddenly, frowning, as if he was being told something he didn't like. Or to be more precise, Harry thought with a sudden burst of inspiration, it was the exact expression that Ron got when Hermione was nagging him.

"I will admit that there are other things I need to discuss with you," Jesus said. "Which, in my view, are part and parcel of helping you." He rolled his eyes upwards. "Some of our relatives think differently."

"We're being watched?" Harry asked, startled and worried, now on his guard. Now that he looked, he could feel other presences, swirling around on the edge of perception. All of them were powerful, and at least one was vaguely familiar.

"We are," Jesus said, not sounding especially pleased by this. "Currently, the Council Elite of Skyfathers is discussing you. Many of them see you as a threat to be dealt with."

"Dealt with?" Harry asked, hairs on the back of his neck standing up.

"I and a select few others," Jesus continued. "Feel otherwise. We feel that you need help, rather than to be treated as a kind of unexploded bomb. We recognise the sight of someone struggling for their soul, and would rather not shut the door in your face. Most of my fellows want to get your measure, rather than rely on fear magnified tales at second or third hand."

"And why are you, specifically, speaking to me?" Harry asked suspiciously.

"The others felt that, owing to your cultural background, I would be the deity you would be most familiar with outside of Asgard, with the exceptions of Hercules and Athena," Jesus said. "And while the latter is among our number, they also thought that you would be less inclined to see me as a threat. I, for my part, asked to speak to you because I honestly want to help you." He looked upwards and added pointedly, "which I will do in my own way, in my own time, thank you very much."

There was another shift, but the presences receded slightly.

"Now," Jesus said. "You will, at this point, be tempted to start going it alone. Your instinct has always been to shrink away from others, especially those you care for, when you fear that you might hurt them by accident. This is laudable, but a mistake. Friends and family are our greatest strength, their love a greater and more elusive power than any that can be mustered by means natural or supernatural."

"You sound like Professor Dumbledore," Harry said.

"I am not surprised. He is a wise man," Jesus said. "One who took a long and difficult path to gain that wisdom, one that often veered into darkness. Yet he managed to find his way out again, as I am confident that you will." He gestured to Harry. "Walk with me."

"Where?" Harry asked. The landscape was uniformly bland.

"Hmm," Jesus said. "Good point."

And just like that, they were in Kings Cross Station, albeit entirely empty, and far cleaner than Harry had ever seen it.

"Appropriate, I think," Jesus remarked. "After all, you are at a crossroads in your life. What train you take is entirely your choice, one that will affect the rest of your life."

"No pressure, then," Harry muttered.

Jesus flickered a smile at him, then spoke in a reflective tone.

"Friends and family… they are more important than anything. I had family, parents who loved me dearly and raised me well, and siblings – well, half-siblings, technically. A cousin or two as well. As for friends… I had disciples, who would do anything for me, moments of doubt and fear notwithstanding. But they also put me on a pedestal." He smiled wryly. "Admittedly, declaring that I was the Son of God was probably the main reason for that. The various miracles didn't help, and in many ways it was necessary to my mission, cementing my moral authority. However, it was also extremely lonely. By definition, it means that you are isolated. And mark my words, no matter what you say or do, there will always be people, too many people, willing to put you on a pedestal. At the same time, there will be just as many willing to tear you down, whether it is because they think you are unworthy of being on a pedestal in the first place, because they feel that you have not lived up to what they believe you should be, or simply just because. And sometimes, they are several of those things at once."

"Why?" Harry asked. "I mean, I'm familiar with the idea," he added, thinking back to his second year at Hogwarts.

"You would be," Jesus remarked in knowing tones.

"But… why?"

Jesus sighed. "Because it is part of their nature," he said. "They are the point where infernal malice meets heavenly grace and accordingly, they spend much of their lives walking an uneasy line between the two. More to the point, on one level or another, they know it. They are aware of their flaws and imperfections, and often, they either embrace them or strive hard to surpass them – ascetics, for instance, mortify the flesh, hoping to pass beyond the temptations and limitations of their physical forms, and become something purer. They also regard those that they believe to be less flawed, in body or spirit, with reverence, with envy, and even with fear. Whatever the reaction, this leads to the view that such people are outside ordinary human society. Thus, pedestals."

"That… is a much more cynical view than I'd have expected from you," Harry said, somewhat surprised.

Jesus chuckled. "I am aware of the flaws in human nature," he said. "I was born as a human, lived as a human, specifically to understand them. To understand their failings, and to recognise their grace in spite, or even because, of them. After all, what meaning does virtue have if it is not contrasted with villainy? You may as well ask what is light without darkness." He smiled. "Besides – it has hardly as if mortals have the monopoly on flaws and failings. In many ways, gods, demigods, so-called higher beings of one form or another… we are humans writ large. We make so much noise about seeing far more of the universe than humanity, of understanding far more, of being wiser and greater." His smile faded, to be replaced by something more pensive. "But in truth, I wonder if we are not merely more powerful and correspondingly more arrogant. If we are not, in fact, just as flawed as the mortals we stand above – worse, indeed, not having the humility to admit it. Is there grace in our failings, I wonder?"

"Well, the fact you're even thinking about it, helps," Harry ventured.

"Ah, but I was human," Jesus said, raising a finger in the manner of one making a point. "Does that mean that I have a greater perspective on the flaws of the divine and its similarities to humanity, or does it mean that I am limited by a perspective still rooted in my human origins?"

"I don't know," Harry said honestly, a little puzzled.

"'Admitting one's ignorance is the beginning of wisdom'," Jesus said. "Socrates said that. Solomon said something very similar – 'rebuke a wise man, and he will love thee. Give instruction to a wise man, and he will be yet wiser: teach a just man, and he will increase in learning.'" He paused. "Of course, he didn't phrase it exactly like that, and wrote it in Hebrew, but the Hebrew would meaningless to you – you speak English. And the King James _does_ have rather lovely prose. Dodgy translations, at times, but lovely prose." He waved a hand. "Nevertheless, he was known for his wisdom, and was known for it partly because he acknowledged his own ignorance and sought wisdom in the first place."

"So, you're saying that I'm wise because I admit that I don't know?" Harry asked, thinking that this conversation had taken a turn for the utterly surreal.

"Yes," Jesus said simply. "And that is precisely why I, and a select few others who are also of my mind, are not worried about you, the way that many of the others are."

"Um. What?"

"In your willingness to admit your own ignorance, you reveal your capacity to question your own previous actions and convictions," Jesus said calmly. "In essence: you do not take your rightness, and righteousness, for granted."

"Still not getting it," Harry said.

Jesus smiled gently. "You are willing to change your mind," he said. "In my experience, the most dangerous people are those who will not change their mind, no matter what, either through pride, or stubbornness, or simple denial. You are proud, but not haughty. You are determined, yes, but not intransigent. And in these last few years, you have come to accept a great many things. Your expressed desire not to be a messiah speaks to far more than the obvious – as with your decision to reject Chthon's temptations, you do not want to shape the world in your image, or to tear it apart and leave a blank canvas for your own creation. Simply put, you do not believe that you know best. "

"So, I'm not about to go insane and destroy the world?" Harry asked dourly. "Good to know."

"I thought it might be a relief to hear," Jesus said dryly. "However, I wasn't quite finished. There is one thing that could drive you to the point of no return, that could blind you in a way that pride, stubbornness, or a messiah complex won't."

"And what's that?" Harry snapped, irritated.

Jesus arched an eyebrow, then said, tone wry but gentle. "Anger," he said.

Harry flushed a little.

"Anger is a natural condition for the young," Jesus said. "All those hormones, all that pent-up energy, all that frustration at being treated like a child when you consider yourself to be an adult or near enough, all that impatience at having to follow someone else's rules, and all that cast-iron certainty that so many of those around you are idiots, that you could do it all better if only you were given the chance… the latter in particular is a belief that, like cast-iron, is inflexible and tends to shatter when subject to the stresses of pressure and reality. And that is just the case for an ordinary, mortal teenager in the peaceful, wealthy parts of the industrialised world. While you also grew up in those parts, your experiences in these past few years have given you a greater maturity. But they have also given you a great many more reasons to be angry."

He met Harry's gaze, expression serious, and Harry found that he couldn't look away.

"And why shouldn't you be? Your entire life has been a catalogue of expectations and suffering based on things that you had no control over. You did not ask to be born a wizard, much less to Asgard's Crown Prince in mortal form, and a young woman who happened to possess within her DNA the potential for power capable of shaking worlds. You did not ask them to bequeath you their gifts. You did not ask to be marked out as a potential threat to a vicious dark lord by a prophecy, then sealed as such by his actions and malice. You did not ask to survive your parents' murder through your mother's deal with one of the Endless. You did not ask for that the man who indirectly arranged that deal, Stephen Strange, to choose you as his champion against the coming darkness, with all the suffering that entails. You did not ask for your father to go mad as a result of what had happened to him, or for your grandfather to erase his memory and forbid attention being drawn to you for fear of Asgard's enemies hunting you down and your father's memories returning before he was ready, his insanity with it."

Harry tried to look away, but he couldn't, as the calm litany went on.

"You did not ask to attract the attention of Nathaniel Essex, a man whose brilliance is only exceeded by his hubristic belief that the world and all its wonders are for him to use as he wills, who developed such an interest in you that he risked exposure, isolating you from all those who would have raised you with love and care, just to study you unimpeded. You did not ask to be targeted by Voldemort time and time again, with even the mere memory of him as a boy using the very darkest of arts and the body of an innocent to try and kill you, to take revenge for something you didn't even do. You did not even ask to have the gift of Parseltongue, unwittingly bequeathed to you by Voldemort's actions, which alienated you from your peers and made you an object of suspicion for far too long. You did not ask for Dementors to find you a particularly sweet meal, to target you in particular for torment. You did not ask to be a demigod, to develop vast powers that isolate you even further from humanity than you already feared. You did not ask for Lucius Malfoy, HYDRA, Gravemoss, and many yet to reveal themselves, to fear your potential and attempt to strike you down before you achieved your full potential. You did not ask for the Red Room, and others yet to reveal themselves, to try and enslave you, using your power for their own ends, for the Red Room to torture you in the process, for your body to be used as an engine of destruction. You did not ask for it. You did not ask for _any_ of it."

There was silence.

"Even so, you have had to endure all that suffering and pain. You have had to shoulder the curse of the Warrior's Madness, a blight on your House since the founding of Yggdrasil and the price for its great power. And the fact that you have had no choice in any of this – which is why I have not discussed those things that you have had a choice in – makes your anger with what has happened, with the whole world, that bit more toxic, that bit more furious… and that bit more likely to grow into something that will corrupt you, transform you, and consume you, burning away everything that was ever good in you. And all that will be left is a hollow shell, a thing filled by rage and by hatred, one that only knows how to destroy."

"I know," Harry said bitterly, after a long moment. "I didn't ask for that, either. And I tried it and I didn't like it."

"You chose it," Jesus retorted, calm and inexorable. "You were tormented by inconceivable psychic stress, by days of physical and mental torture compounded by six months of memories of your body being violated in some of the most horrific ways possible, of it being used as a weapon to perform the most terrible of deeds. Memories, mark you, that your returning mind instinctively incorporated as if they were your own, despite the fact that they very much weren't. The conflict nearly split your mind in two. Were that not enough, your body was still devastated from being sent into battle against one of the most formidable beings to walk the Earth, and from being nearly consumed by a mechanical intelligence of cold malevolence and endless hunger. You were blinded by pain, but most of all, by rage. In that moment, you could not have reasonably been expected to make a rational choice. But."

"But what?" Harry asked, glowering.

"But you still made a choice. You _chose_ to embrace the Phoenix fragment within you, despite knowing that as a defence mechanism, its instinctive response would be to lash out and destroy threats to you, having suppressed it while under the Red Room's torture _for that very reason_. You did not have any way of knowing how it or you would respond to merging, how the emotion amplifying factor of the Phoenix fragment would combine with the fact that the fragment is fed by emotion, no way of knowing that it would first lash out at everything that ever hurt you, then, as all semblance of rational thought burned away, lashing out at everything it could reach," Jesus said. His tone was calm, gentle, and non-judgemental, but the words still struck. "But what matters is that no matter the circumstances, no matter your ignorance, in your anger you instinctively chose to embrace it."

"I let it go, too," Harry said quietly.

"And you deserve great credit for that," Jesus said calmly. "As you chose to take up that particular sword, you also chose to put it down again. But as we both know, you did not do it alone. This is right and proper, for the love and support of our loved ones is the truest and most precious of gifts. You walked to the edge of the cliff, and it was with their help that you did not fall. But it was _only_ with their help that you did not fall. And even that joint success, of your loved ones and of your own strength of will, was only made possible by a case of impeccable timing."

He looked Harry in the eye. "Make no mistake, little cousin: you were caught as a fledgling Phoenix, one mostly grown, but only mostly. If you had not been caught as early as you were, then even if Strange had plucked all your loved ones from all of time and space, had joined your minds to theirs, they would not have been able to talk you down, because you would be the Dark Phoenix in full. There would not be enough of you left to hear to their words, and what remnants there were would not care even if they could. Your choice, no matter the circumstances it was made in, would have doomed you, and most probably the rest of us with you."

"So what?" Harry asked bitterly. "What's the message?"

"So don't go fooling yourself with the belief that the Dark Phoenix is like the Hulk, something that you can unleash when you are in trouble to defeat or destroy your enemies, before regaining control and locking it away again once its task is done – I know you are considering it, and no wonder," Jesus said evenly. "It is quite the tempting prospect, after all: to be able to unleash a power that makes even your own current powers like nothing as and when you need it. With your current power, you can play with molecules and minds on the other side of the planet. As Dark Phoenix, you can play with reality itself. With that kind of power, you could burn away every bit of evil in this world, leaving only goodness behind. All the good people who died before their time, your mother among them, you could bring them back. You could make it so that they would never have to die at all." He leaned forward, expression far too knowing. "And above all… with that kind of power, _no one could hurt you_ _ever again_."

Harry looked away and Jesus leaned back.

"But the Hulk is a part of Doctor Banner, a good and kind man. His power can be guided, harnessed," he said. "The Dark Phoenix is not. It is a force of nature corrupted by mortal darkness. Accordingly, it has no conscience, no mercy, and no restraint. It cannot be harnessed and it cannot be controlled. If you become the Dark Phoenix again, you will not be forming a symbiosis as Banner has with the Hulk, or as your mother has with the Phoenix. You will be using your mind, your soul, and everything you are as tinder for a bonfire that will destroy your enemies, yes, but then your friends and your family too. And after that, all that will remain is a hollow shell, a mockery of what you once were, one that unless it is stopped, will destroy _everything_ else because destruction is all it knows."

A chill ran down Harry's spine.

"I don't understand," he said. "One moment, you say that you're not worried about me becoming the Dark Phoenix. The next, you're telling me that I'm tempted, that I might do it just to not be hurt." He eyed Jesus. "Speaking of, isn't that your opposite number's department? Temptation, I mean."

Jesus smiled gently. "It is," he said. "But I know temptation. Do you honestly think that I have never been tempted? I was, frequently. One or two of the incidents were quite famous – one involved a desert. I was offered everything from simple material comfort to the chance to change the way I undertook my mission. Instead of going out and giving people the choice to choose goodness, I could go out, stand on high with all the world kneeling before me, and use my power to _make_ them better, to destroy evil and to enforce good." The smile turned wry. "I was definitely tempted to skip the part with the cross."

His smile saddened. "Many others, of course, never made it into scripture. So yes. I understand temptation. I understand your struggle. I understand resenting being feared and hunted for things that you cannot control, the ingratitude of mankind, and being tempted just to wave a hand and make all of your problems go away. You are not the first demigod to face those problems, nor was I, nor even was your cousin Hercules. More than a few humans could understand the temptation too, your friend Doctor Banner, your godmother Ms Maximoff, and your headmaster, Albus." He paused. "Speaking of demigods, actually, I should introduce you to Rama some time. You'd get along. And Adam, who really is my opposite number, being the Anti-Christ. He knows a little about being expected to destroy the world." Harry just stared at him. "Yes," Jesus mused. "I think you'd definitely get on. Possibly a little too well, actually."

He shook his head. "In any case, let me tell you, Phoenix or no Phoenix, when one of us decides to say 'fuck you all, there is no right, there is no wrong, there are no rules for me', it is _not_ pretty." He looked Harry in the eye. "One thing I also came to understand, one thing that most of us come to understand, and one thing I think you already know but may not yet quite understand… is that embracing your rage; in your case becoming the Dark Phoenix… it is the easy way out. It will not do you good, it will not bring you peace, and it comes at a price that is not worth paying."

He stood up. "By any reasonable measure, you deserve rest. You deserve peace. But sooner or later, I am afraid, you will be tested again. You will face pain, and loss, and many, many things that will make you so very angry. You will face temptation, some obvious and open, and some subtle and sly, which will rock you to your very core. And you will encounter the full burdens of walking in both worlds that you face, being pulled this way and that by competing heritages that will feel like they are tearing you apart from within," he said. "Under that circumstance, it would seem logical to worry, to fear that you would one day succumb to your rage and go down the path of the no return. Many of our brethren do. Right now, they are having a meeting, debating the threat you represent. After all, the power you have at your fingertips is one that is beyond even the Skyfathers and Earthmothers power to destroy, and only with the greatest of guile and sacrifice can it even be contained."

"But you don't," Harry said. "You and whoever these other gods you said agreed with you. Who are they, anyway?" He scowled. "Or can't you tell me?"

"I can, and with the greatest goodwill," Jesus said easily. "Your grandfather, of course. Others of my fellows include Ganesha, Athena, Anansi, Guan-Yin, Hestia, Vishnu, Brighid, Hades, the Zoryas, Isis, Osiris, Thoth, Laozi, Anahita, Amaterasu, and Mother Summer."

Harry blinked in surprise. That was rather more than he'd been expecting.

"More believe in you than you might think," Jesus said, seeing his expression. "Even among beings who are not disposed to believe in anything but themselves. That was not a full list, either."

"So I'm so special that gods believe in me?" Harry said, eyebrow raised. "Wonderful. I'll add it to the pile of unrealistic expectations people have of me."

"Well, I must admit that more than a few are playing the odds based on your personality," Jesus said mildly. "Others believe that you are most likely to become the Dark Phoenix, but they should try and forestall it, because there is no other practical option. But I do. I think that the expectation is very realistic."

"Why?" Harry asked.

"Because I believe that you can accept your anger, to control it and not to let it control you. Because I believe that you can accept your pain and your loss, and use them as a spur to be kind, not to lash out. Because I believe that when it comes down to it, when you are given the choice to choose what is right or what is easy, to choose to maintain hope or to give in to despair, to choose love or hate…" Jesus said. "I believe that you will control your anger. I believe that you will decide to be kind. And above all, I believe you can change your mind. I believe that, this time and always, you will choose love."

"What if you're wrong?" Harry asked, as Jesus turned to go. "What if I… what if I make the wrong choice? What if this was for nothing?"

The other demigod turned back with a half-smile. "Then at the very least, little cousin, I will know that in this time and this place, I chose to do something right."

OoOoO

"Strange," Ra said slowly. "What have you done?"

"Well, I've been doing quite a lot recently, your featheriness," Strange said, with a dangerous sort of manic cheer. "Which is more than can be said for you."

His gaze swept the lot of them, dark amusement draining from his face. "No, for the most part, you've spent the last thousand years sleeping, squabbling amongst yourselves, or reliving past glories. No wonder so few of you raised an objection to the Celestials' injunction not to interfere in the development of Earth a millennium ago - it hardly represented any great change in your behaviour," he said, tone cold and cutting. "For a millennium and a half before that, few of you paid more than cursory attention to Earth and its inhabitants, and perhaps that was for the best, because when you did pay attention, for the most part, it was anything but constructive."

He waved a dismissive hand. "Yes, yes, you slew _this_ monster, you sired _that_ hero, and sprinkled _those_ artefacts across the mortal world... but often the monster was your fault to begin with, in many cases the mother of the hero was hardly in any position to consent and siring a hero was more of a convenient byproduct than a matter of intent, and the artefacts caused as much harm as they did good, especially since their wielders rarely had a clue what to do with them."

He regarded them all with an unimpressed expression.

"In summation," he said. "Rarely did you ever actually leave the Earth a better place than when you found it. And when you did, it was usually by accident." He stood up. " _Now_ you are concerned about the Earth? _Now_ you care about what happens to it? _Now_ you will get involved in defending it? Why? Well, let's be honest. For the most of you – with honourable exceptions, who know who they are – what motivates this is not a desire to protect the Earth, it is a desire to protect yourselves. And therefore, in your fear and your arrogance, you have blundered into a situation which you do not understand the least part of, and propose a 'solution' that hardly deserves the word, since if you actually engaged your miserable excuses for brains, you would realise that it would actually make things worse and trigger the apocalypse you are all so damn afraid of!"

He looked around at them, expression cold. "So let me make my response completely and utterly crystal clear: How dare you, after spending millennia sitting on your cosmic arses doing _nothing_ , step in _now_ and claim that you know best? You have absolutely no concept of what is in motion, and even less of why! You know _nothing!_ " He swept them all with his gaze. "Thanos. Is. Coming."

Those gods who'd had been about to speak froze. This did not go unnoticed.

"Oh yes, you know that name, don't you?" Strange said with grim amusement. "You've heard the whispers on the star-ways. The stories of gods and demons alike that have challenged him, that he has destroyed, each becoming just one more corpse on the trail of blood and death that he has carved through the ages. He is coming. He is coming to Earth, because that is where the remaining Infinity Stones are, all he needs to achieve true omnipotence and succeed in his true aim: destroying everything that is, that was, and ever could be."

"And if the Dark Phoenix runs free, if your predictions are true, Honoured Sorcerer, then all Thanos will need to do is claim the stones from the ashes of Earth," the Yellow Emperor -remarked mildly. "If we do not resolve this matter satisfactorily, then we will be doing Thanos' work for him."

"You are right, your majesty," Strange said, inclining his head. "On both counts. However, let's think this through, shall we?" He smiled thinly. "I realise that the concept of thinking might be alien to a few of you, but I'm sure you'll get the hang of it. Don't worry, it'll stop hurting shortly."

Zeus stepped forward, jaw jutting out.

"Be careful, cousin," Vishnu said in a carrying undertone, as he placed a restraining hand on Zeus' shoulder. "Strange is mad and he is holding an Infinity Stone, one I believe he knows very well how to use. Provoking him would not be wise."

"He's right," Odin said, despite knowing that Zeus wouldn't listen. "Strange is not a man you wish to threaten."

Zeus shook him off and shot a contemptuous look at both Vishnu and Odin. "Unlike the two of you, I have no fear of an arrogant, insane mortal and his cheap tricks," he snarled, before turning on Strange. "You go too far, mortal," he growled. "Remember your place. Before I remind you of it."

Strange's response was lightning fast and came entirely without warning. In a split second, he was on his feet, had raised the Tesseract and spat several words in a language that made reality scream and even gods clutch at their ears. In an instant, pale crystals of frozen time erupted from the floor and engulfed the Olympian, freezing him in place, trapping him like an insect in amber.

"Well, I can hardly say that that was unexpected," Odin said, into the shocked silence, one that swallowed his words.

"Total sucker rule violation," Huginn agreed.

Vishnu simply sighed a long suffering sigh.

Then all went silent as Strange began to descend the stairs from his throne-like chair, footsteps echoing through the endless night, striding into the very midst of the assembled gods. And though many of them towered far above him, more than a few shrank away as he advanced, finally coming to a stop in the middle of the group.

"I am the Sorcerer Supreme," he said, in a low, deadly voice that concealed a barely controlled and mounting rage. "I am the Evergreen Man, the Lord of Time, and I know my place perfectly well. I fight beings like you e _very single day_. I have guarded reality against them for centuries, and for the most part, I have done it _alone_. For centuries I have stood, and I stand here still, now with an Infinity Stone in my hand. Do you really think that _you_ , _any_ of you, is a match for _me?_ " He spun to take in them all, the Tesseract burning blue-white in his right hand as he did, eyes blazing with rage and something close to madness. "So how dare _you?_ How dare _any_ of you? _**How dare any of you raise your voices to me!**_ "

The Rock of Eternity shook as he spoke, and more than one god took a half step back, suddenly becoming profoundly aware that they were onthin ice, and what was more, _it was creaking_.

The silence was now deafening, and Strange smiled coldly.

"I trust that you are all aware of a certain prison in the New World, buried deep under a certain lake, wherein countless horrors and dark gods are imprisoned, so many that their mere presence, limited as it is by their bindings, generates one of the most powerful dark ley lines in the Western Hemisphere?" he said, voice suddenly conversational again. "Yes, I see that from your expressions you are. Some of you may even have seen it up close, in which case, you will recognise the crystal in which Lord Zeus is bound."

Several dozen divine eyes turned to Zeus. More than a few of them showed dawning recognition.

"This is, of course, is not quite the same," Strange remarked. "The crystals of what is variously called the Deeper Well, the Crystal Cave, and Demonreach, are trans-temporal prisons and reinforced by the prison itself, and the fact that it's built on a foundation of one of the largest ley line convergences in the mortal world. As a convenient side-effect, it is itself now the source of what is quite possibly the largest dark ley line in the Western Hemisphere, meaning that if one has the skill to manage dark energy without being corrupted by it, it's really rather useful."

He turned, slowly, looking each and every one in the eye. "Additionally, that prison was built by myself and Merlin. I know exactly how to replicate it, and better, for my mastery of time magic exceeds even his, and in case you hadn't noticed, I am holding an Infinity Stone and I know how to use it. Plus, we based that prison on Agamotto's notes on the construction of this old thing in the Book of the Vishanti."

He tapped an outcrop of the Rock to make it very clear that that was he meant, letting the implications hang in the air, and smiled. "Yes," he said. "We're standing on what is quite possibly the ultimate prison."

"Are you getting it now?" he asked, after he was sure that it had sunk in. "Prince Harry Thorson's manifestation of the Phoenix is part of my plan to protect Earth and the universe at large. If you behave, I will inform you of some of the particulars of this plan. And you will not interfere with it for two reasons: First, if you succeeded, then as his learned majesty said, the Dark Phoenix will run free and all of you, and the Earth, will die, because none of you have a prayer of stopping it - or at least, those of you who would have even the slightest chance don't have the faintest idea how. And you will have done Thanos' work for him, and we will all be doomed. Second, you would not succeed. You would instead be bound here, your power leaking out in much the same way, to be tapped by yours truly."

He resumed his place on the throne-like chair. "In short: you will assist in my plans, and you will do so either by actively helping or by staying out of my way. If you attempt to impede me, then the ultimate prison will get a few more inmates, at which point, you will still assist in my plans – by serving as a gigantic fucking battery. Any questions?"

There was silence.

"No, I thought not. Now. Let's discuss what's going to happen next, shall we?"

OoOoO

In the end, the compromise was simple. Harry would learn how to manage the Phoenix within him, and, of course, his temper, while also getting no small degree of mental healing.

When the subject of mental healing came up, Harry consented to the plan of locking away the memories of the Red Son. He also consented to being trained in the same skills so that when he had to use them, he wouldn't have a flashback. It was at this point that everyone, including Harry himself, noticed that he was looking and feeling somewhat better. Not his old self, by any means, but better.

The reason for this was quickly found – those memories had already been locked away, and many of the mental wounds had been dulled, as if they had had years to heal rather than a mere couple of weeks. It didn't take much imagination to work out who was behind it.

"It is the Son's work," Frigga said, effortlessly capitalising the word to leave in no doubt who she meant.

This led to Harry revealing that he did, in fact, have something of a friend in Jesus and expand on the little chat that they'd had. In turn, this led to a case of the usual Avengers style bickering over matters theological, and whether or not Thor and Loki had, in fact, been a bad influence on him or vice versa, with much teasing of the quietly devout Steve.

All in all, life seemed to looking up.

OoOoO

And that turn-up for the books was not restricted to Harry.

Maddie had spent much of the last couple of weeks hovering nervously, unsure of where she stood – though the Avengers, and by extension those of Asgard, extended her unblinking trust after the fact that she had successfully proven Worthy to wield Mjolnir, and Jean, her twin sister (twin sister! She'd never even imagined that there could be anyone like her in the world, the very idea of family had been abstract to her), had been around so often that it was almost like the nigh mirror image that she resembled. And Professor Xavier had helped too, and…

"Everyone's just been so _kind_ ," she wailed, bewildered, overwhelmed and on the verge of tears, to Jono who was now inhabiting a cloned version of his original body, on the grounds that while his ability to make his astral form solid was an astonishing one, and it gave him access to a vast breadth of powers that he had only just begun to tap, it also left him excruciatingly vulnerable. Plus, as he noted, it was refreshing to be able to touch things without having to focus on them.

"I know, luv," he said, patting her back for lack of inspiration on what else to do, casting a helpless look at the other person with them: Gambit.

Who, naturally, rose to the occasion.

"And it ain't nothin' less than y' deserve," he said firmly.

"I don't feel like I deserve it," Maddie said, then added, after a moment. "And…"

"Y' ain't used to it," Gambit said quietly. "Because Essex didn' show y' a bit of kindness. Th' way 'e had y' brainwashed, 'e didn' think that 'e needed t' even pretend to care."

Maddie nodded, a little damply. "You did," she said.

"Yeah, well, about that…" Gambit said, looking guilty.

"I know why you did it at first," Maddie said. "I realised relatively quickly."

"Y'… y' did?" Gambit asked, startled.

"I am an Omega class telepath, we spent a lot of time in very close proximity, and while your body is distracting, it is not _that_ distracting," Maddie said dryly.

Gambit stared at her wide-eyed for a moment, before sharing a look with Jono, who'd started choking with laughter, then smiled wryly. "I shoulda guessed," he said. "Why didn' y' say? Or tell Essex?"

Maddie chewed her lip. "Because it was nice," she said, after a moment. "To have someone act like they cared about me."

"Oh _cherie_ ," Gambit said sadly. "Ah'm sorry. I really am."

"I know," Maddie said. "You were afraid. You wanted a way out. And it wasn't long after that that you actually did care. Looking back, I see now that you spent months risking everything to try and get me free of Doctor Essex. It is largely thanks to you that I found the courage to make the right choice." She looked down. "You and Harry. My cousin. My…"

"Family," Jono said, filling in the gap as she trailed off, then glanced around. "Where is he, anyway?"

Maddie nodded. "He's still recovering," she said.

"How is he?" Jono asked, then realised that he might have trodden on some awkward territory.

"Getting better," Maddie said.

There was an awkward silence.

"An' speakin' of family," Gambit said bracingly. "I hear that your momma and poppa are comin' to see y' later."

"They don't know about me yet," Maddie corrected him, a little subdued. "Professor Xavier and Mrs Carter are going to explain it to them."

"She was the woman with the fancy laser gun, wasn't she?" Jono said, and Gambit nodded.

" _Très belle, et très dangereux,"_ he remarked, in tones of respect. "Like her granddaughter."

"Too bloody right, mate," Jono said, then turned to Maddie. "So, you're meeting your parents today. That's good, isn't it?"

Maddie looked non-committal and nervous.

Specifically, she was nervous of how they'd react once they knew what she'd done, what she'd spent her life doing, being, a weapon for Doctor Essex. Especially when they compared her to Jean – and it was logical for them to do so. After all, they were twins, with the same looks, the same build, the same powers; a perfect case study of nature versus nurture. In one, it had produced someone warm, gentle and unthinkingly kind, someone who had embraced her, Maddie, without blinking, despite knowing very well what she had done and what she was. In Maddie's eyes, Jean was an angel in human form, a standard that she could never possibly live up to, and when her parents saw how the two compared –

"Hey," Gambit said, doing a fair imitation of telepathy. "Stop comparin' y'self to Jean."

"But I'm her twin," Maddie said. "The flawed copy."

"Bullshit," Gambit and Jono said in perfect unison.

"Y' ain't her flawed copy any more than I'm Chief o' the New Orleans Police," Gambit said. "You're you an' she's her. Yeah, y' may have damn near the same genetics, because y' are twins, but y' have different minds, different souls. I'd bet good money that if y' were raised together, you'd turn out different, because y' two different people, not one in two bodies. She was raised t' do good, taught by one o' the most downright decent men I've ever met. Y' were raised an' taught by the biggest damn asshole that I've ever known, an' believe me, _cherie_ , I've known some real big assholes, an' y' know what? Despite all he did t' y', tried t' do t' y', y' turned out a right proper hero. Y' lifted Thor's hammer! I did a bit o' asking, an' the only other people who _ever_ managed t' lift that thing are Thor, his daddy, a girl called Diana who's meant t' be real damn lovely an' brave, an' Captain fuckin' America. Y' in the company o' heroes, an' it's because y' deserve t' be there. An' from what I hear, y' saved y' baby cousin's mind, if not his damn life, with what y' did."

"It went wrong, though," Maddie said quietly.

"And when it did, luv, you went right back in to fix it," Jono retorted. "Even though you had no way of knowing that your friendly neighbourhood cosmic whatsit was going to remove the trigger words in your brain, or that we were going to get help from a bunch of cosmic whatsits, a couple of major league hero types, and the Scary Bugger Supreme."

"Sorcerer Supreme," Maddie corrected, her lips twitching slightly.

"I stand by my choice of words," Jono said. "And even before that, you saved me from life as little more than a floating brain in a jar, taught me how to be a real boy again, gave me the basics on my powers."

"They're right, you know."

All three of them jumped. They had been so caught up in their discussion that they hadn't noticed Jean listening. It might seem puzzling that a skilled psychic tracker like Maddie could miss someone with a presence like Jean's, but the simple fact was that without a certain re-calibration, psychics had trouble sensing Jean in the same way that people in Trafalgar Square had trouble seeing England.

"You've done some amazing things," Jean continued. "You've been braver than I could ever imagine being, faced down things more terrifying than I could even comprehend. You've been through hell and you turned out a hero." She slipped into the seat next to Maddie and slipped an arm around her twin. "And I'm not perfect, Maddie. I make mistakes. I do things I regret. I've misused my powers in the past – and yes, I get angry." Her expression saddened. "You misused your powers because that's how you were taught to use them, what you were taught was right. When I misused mine, I knew better. My family was visiting Harry's, and that cousin of his, Dudley –"

"Him that calls himself the Beast these days," Jono interjected, for Maddie's comprehension, then frowned vaguely. "I wonder what happened to him…"

"Right," Jean said. "Well, he had no powers. He was just an ordinary, mean little boy, who was beating up Harry with his friends. I got angry and I lashed out. Luckily, I didn't do any permanent damage." Her expression turned troubled. "I don't think." She shook her head. "My point is, I could have put him in a coma, even killed him. I misused my powers when I knew better, because I got angry. So you see? I'm not perfect. And it wasn't just when I was a kid, either." She grinned. "I think that Captain America's ears are still ringing from when I yelled at him, poor man."

Maddie laughed softly, then, cautiously, laid her head on her sister's shoulder. She was beginning to be a little more comfortable with casual physical contact, though was a little nervous of initiating it – like all abused children, she feared rejection.

She would not face it from Jean, however, whose maternal streak was all-encompassing, especially when it came to family. She therefore gave her twin a comforting squeeze, sending a reassuring psychic pulse of warmth and affection to her sister. Then, she looked up at Jono and Gambit with an expression that said one thing more clearly than any words, verbal or psychic ever could: 'thank you'.

Both nodded, in Gambit's case, the nod turning into a neat bow, before quietly leaving the sisters to it.

"You're sure they won't hate me?" Maddie asked eventually.

"I'm certain," Jean said.

Maddie nodded, head rubbing against her sister's shoulder. "Okay," she said. "When are they coming?"

"They're already here," Jean said, and Maddie tensed. "They're downstairs, talking to the Professor and Mrs Carter."

Maddie nodded again, sitting up, the hair on one side fluffing up. "I'd better go downstairs, then," she said.

"Not before your hair gets a good brushing you won't," Jean said, amused.

Maddie went pink. "Of course."

OoOoO

Others, meanwhile, were engaged in more business-like matters.

Loki, for instance, had been hunting the Red Room across Eastern Europe and Asia, and had chased most of the survivors down into India. Where, as it turned out, they had promptly linked up with the Indian government, which had been an ally of the old Soviet Union, largely with geopolitical motives on both sides. In this case, the motive of the Indian government was to extract as much of the Red Room's exceedingly useful and often ill-gotten knowledge and technology as possible.

While the likes of Thor would have cared little for this and wrought spine-chilling vengeance on the Red Room wherever they hid, Loki took a more subtle approach. Namely, by taking tea with the Indian Prime Minister.

"Now, Mister Prime Minister, I should first say that I do not intend to intimidate you in any way," Loki said. "While fear can be a useful tool, it is a temporary one. Additionally, I realise that you are not afraid of me. Or at least, not sufficiently to change your course. This I understand, indeed, applaud." This was punctuated with a graceful inclination of the head. "However, there is something you should take into account. You are a devotee of Shakti, I believe?"

"I am," the Indian Prime Minister said. "I presume that this has a degree of relevance."

Loki nodded. "The entity that you know as Shakti is not a goddess. She is an aspect of something much older, and much more powerful. She is one of the Seven Eldest, the beings known as the Endless," he said. "If you do not believe my claim, then I will happily swear it by my blood and power – and as your mystics could tell you, those oaths are closely binding indeed."

"For now, let us continue as if what you say is true," came the measured reply.

"Very well," Loki said. "In that capacity, she has other names. One is Destruction - specifically, in the name of rebirth. Another is the Phoenix. And this is very important, you see, because of one crucial fact. She is Harry's mother. Or to be precise, Harry's mother was a mortal witch, but she managed to invoke the Phoenix, with the secret assistance of the Sorcerer Supreme. In exchange for protecting Harry from Voldemort's wrath, on her death, she merged with the Phoenix. In that capacity, she has acted to protect Harry in the past. It was that protection that brought him back from the dead, something you may have heard rumours of it. It was that power which he used to wreak vengeance on the Red Room, who tortured and tormented him for many months in a deep, dark region of the Spirit World. As you might imagine, she is not best pleased with them. Nor would she be best pleased with those who harbour them."

"Is this meant to be a threat?" the Prime Minister asked steadily, voice carrying barely a tremor.

"Hardly," Loki said. "It is a warning." He leaned forward. "No, Prime Minister, I am not interested in threats. Instead, I have a proposal to our mutual advantage."

"Please elaborate."

"But of course. In our function as Avengers, myself and my brother provide mortal powers and mortal laws with a certain respect, for we are guests on this world," Loki said. "But my nephew was taken. Tortured. By men and women whose superiors, inferiors, and colleagues, have fled far and wide. Many of those who have not suffered unfortunate accidents have chosen your nation, because of old alliances that they still trust to. We are not acting as Avengers now, because they declared war on Asgard. You cannot protect them from us, and you would be well advised not try. However. I, at least, am not quite so blinded by rage as to simply come in and start slaughtering my enemies, extracting my nephew's blood price, without offering a more sensible option."

"And what would that option be?" the Indian Prime Minister asked carefully.

"You are an intelligent man, and you have surely deduced that to harbour the Red Room means the chance to share in the spoils of their knowledge, of their technology, and far more so than in previous cooperative efforts, for they are desperate. Such an advantage is priceless: the Red Room are renowned technologists, among very many other things," Loki said. "They have historically matched SHIELD, the USA - though the extent to which one can be separated from the other is debatable - and HYDRA alike, and unlike SHIELD, with which your nation has an... _interesting_ history, any technology derived from them could be used solely for your nation's benefit."

He sipped at his tea. "In essence, in allowing myself, my brother, and perhaps a few chosen associates, free rein - or, to be perfectly frank, not getting in our way - you feel that you risk such knowledge being lost. I, for one, am hardly so crude. I suggest instead that you use your position of relative trust to claim the knowledge and technology the Red Room have to offer - whether you use deception or force is entirely up to you. Then, you step aside, and we will do what needs to be done. While I concede that you would make a loss in long term technological gain, I think that it will be a comparatively small one."

Putting down his cup, he smiled. "You see, the Russians are cowed, for now, and their political establishment is in chaos," he said. "The remains of the Red Room are in disarray thanks to many of its more senior officers taking... early retirement, shall we say. Funding is likely to be limited, as is innovation. On the other hand, with the knowledge of the Red Room to build on, I am sure that your own scientists will be able to do remarkable things. In addition, your assistance in this matter would be greatly appreciated. For one thing, I do believe that a very considerable proportion of your people depend on agriculture, and well: my brother _does_ control the weather. I am sure that he would be happy to return your favour. I am equally sure that the Phoenix, Shakti, would be rather pleased too."

The Indian Prime Minister mulled over this. "This seems to be acceptable," he said. "Though I am sure that your knowledge of the locations of my guests, some of which they have not seen fit to share with us, could prove helpful."

Loki inclined his head. "It will be on your desk in hours, Prime Minister," he said. "Oh, and I feel that you should be aware that at least two of your citizens were formerly Red Room prisoners. One, a young man called Nagraj, Nagraj Shah, managed to make his escape. A police officer, meanwhile, Officer Karima Shapandar, was not quite so fortunate, but is now receiving the best mortal medical care. I believe that this is particularly worth mentioning because we have been looking to expand the Avengers – after all, for all our skills and powers, we seven cannot be everywhere – and the two of them have been identified as very promising candidates."

"I know of the young man you speak of," the Indian Prime Minister said carefully.

Loki nodded. "Leaving aside the manifold advantages of an Avengers branch in your own country, an autonomous one, the utility of which has been demonstrated by Britain's Excalibur team," he said smoothly. "It seems rather unfair and impractical for so many of the emergent superhumans to congregate in the West. Perhaps a suitable first mission, for one or both, would be to direct them to strike against the Red Room that so tormented them?" He paused. "And, of course, keeping busy, taking revenge on those who deserve it, might drive certain thoughts out of Officer Shapandar's time. Such as inquiries of how, after her accident, she wound up in the hands of the Red Room to begin with."

The Indian Prime Minister's eyes narrowed, and Loki smiled slightly. "I will bear that in mind," he said.

"Superb," Loki said, standing and shaking the man's hand. "As ever, Prime Minister, it is a pleasure doing business with you."

"And you, Prince Loki," the Indian Prime Minister replied, not saying that, as ever, when doing business with Loki, he felt the urge to check that he still had all ten fingers afterwards.

OoOoO

All, it seemed, was proceeding swimmingly, and Harry's recovery was continuing apace. While Asgard did not have many therapists, there were a few who specialised in mental healing, combined with Dream's prevention of nightmares, Jesus' sly bout of mental healing, and the support of family and friends, a few regular sessions helped enormously.

While his sense of humour tended to be quite dark and there were periods when he retreated into himself under a cloud of emotional darkness, and he was generally grimmer and considerably more jumpy than before (as Uhtred had found out when he once caught Harry unawares, at the cost of three cracked ribs. Predictably, he shrugged off Harry's horrified apologies and was fine within hours).

In the meantime, Maddie need not have worried about her parents (though inevitably would have done anyway) who, as soon as they laid eyes on her, burst into tears and hugged her. Then, her mother, still tearful, insisted on thanking and hugging a very surprised Gambit and an even more surprised Jono, and Jean for good measure. She would likely have hugged and thanked Harry, but he was still in Asgard at the time.

Meanwhile, the Phoenix power within the feather remained quiescent, despite Odin's close examination of it.

And so did the other pantheons – though one got the general impression that many of them were sulking, in between fear of Strange.

All in all, everything seemed to have taken a turn for the better. And soon, towards the end of September, serious discussions were being had about Harry's return to Hogwarts.

OoOoO

When that subject was brought up, however, the answer was not one to their liking.

"Not a bloody chance," Wisdom said bluntly, without looking up from his papers. Thor and Sirius had chosen to address this matter, and had done so by arranging a meeting with Wisdom – Thor because he was Harry's father, and Sirius both because he was Harry's godfather and because even Wisdom couldn't fob off his older brother forever.

"What?" Sirius asked, beating Thor to the punch.

"You heard me," Wisdom said. "Now unless you have something else to discuss, kindly get out of my office."

"Director Wisdom," Thor began, tone one of strained patience.

"No," Wisdom said, still not looking up. "I could live just fine with the boy when he was capable of blowing up castles, or small towns, if he lost control. When he was just a particularly powerful psychic wizard, with a few incipient demigod genes. Even that protection of his would have been fine if it had just stayed as exactly that: a protection. But now, it's a great deal more than that. Now, if he loses control, it's goodbye to the country, if not the planet. Now, if he has a nasty flashback or something, we're looking at the second coming of the Red Son. No fucking thank you."

"Come off it, Reg," Sirius said. "You must –"

"I must what?" Wisdom asked dangerously, lowering the papers and glaring at Sirius. "Also, as I have told you in the past, Sirius, I don't go by that name any more."

A spasm of pain passed across Sirius' face for a half instant, then his expression hardened. "You answer to it quickly enough," he snapped. "When it's me or that disgusting house elf."

"Kreacher gets a pass because he's old and he can barely live with me going by another name in public. The idea of me giving up the name of Regulus Black completely would probably kill him," Wisdom growled. "You, on the other hand, are trying the last of my patience." He shook his head sharply. "I must nothing, Sirius. There are only two people above me in my chain of command, and you aren't either of them." He turned to Thor. "And neither are you, Thor." His expression softened a little. "Look, I haven't got anything against the boy. I'm sorry about what happened to him, I really am. I've been on the wrong end of torture and mental invasions and…" He sighed. "I know a thing or two about what the Red Room are like. I joined MI13 in the last few years before they were taken out the first time, and I had more than a few run-ins with them. The sort of things they do, the sort of things I saw, I wouldn't wish them on anyone." He paused. "Well, actually, there's a few people I'd wish them on." He shook his head. "A few people, yeah. But an innocent lad, a boy who just wants to do some good in the world? He's the last person who deserves it."

"Then you know that –"

"None of it was his fault?" Wisdom asked. "More or less. He made the call to evacuate his body, left it for the Red Room to use, but it was with a plan in mind, after days of torture, and, frankly, a lot of older and better trained people I know would have made the same call for worse reasons under the circumstances. Besides, having the memories of what they made his body do is more than punishment enough, deserved or otherwise. But."

"But what?" Thor asked flatly.

"But you bloody well know what," Wisdom said, without rancour. "My job is to attend to the defence of the realm against supernatural threats. Your son might not mean to be one, but he's potentially the worst I've run across. Not through malice, but through sheer power and lack of control. I won't pretend to know even a fraction of the lore around the Phoenix, but I know enough to know that it's the kind of power not meant to be held for long, much less by an angry, traumatised child." He sat back. "I can't stop you from taking him to New York, or somewhere else on Earth. But equally, I wouldn't be doing my job if I didn't do my damn best to prevent him from staying on Earth, and with what I could tell people, my opposite numbers around the world would probably listen."

"This is bullshit," Sirius said furiously. "Harry's got as much right to attend Hogwarts as anyone – more, since he was bloody well killed defending the damn place!"

"No, Sirius, this is reality," Wisdom snapped, getting to his feet. "It might be better for the boy's feelings to go back to Hogwarts, but I am not going to put one boy's feelings ahead of the sixty odd million people who I am sworn to protect!"

"Is it now?" Sirius demanded heatedly, also rising.

"Yes," Wisdom snapped. "It is." He turned to Thor, who had also risen, ready to separate the two brothers, and some of the heat left his tone. "Keep him at home, Thor. In Asgard, with the rest of his people. Teach him about control there, until, like you and Loki, he can keep his powers in check."

"He can, Director," Thor said. "And he has forsaken almost all the power of the Phoenix. He poured it into Laevateinn."

"Liva-what?" Wisdom asked, bemused.

"Laevateinn," Thor said. "It is an ancient artefact, one closely tied to the Phoenix. Once it was a wand. Now… now, it is masquerading as a simple phoenix feather, as it has since I was a small child. It contains the power Harry summoned up. Harry does not have the power to unleash the Dark Phoenix, even if he wished to."

Wisdom folded his arms. "But he's still got some," he said shrewdly. "You said almost all. And unless I'm missing something, that kind of power grows if given fuel."

Thor inclined his head. "Embers," he said. "Little more than the protection he was given to begin with."

"And if he loses it, we're back to square one," Wisdom retorted.

"He only 'lost it' after being tortured for days and having six months of memories of his body used as a fucking puppet for torture and murder," Sirius said. "I'd say that's pretty good reason."

"And it is also something that will not happen again," Thor said.

"You can't promise that," Wisdom said.

"I can reason it," Thor said simply. "Harry has been kidnapped successfully twice. The first time was by the Disir, ancient creatures aided by the arts of the Darkhold, which is now locked away once more. And he was in Asgard anyway, so it would make no difference where he was if the situation repeated itself. The second time was by the Red Room, who in Essex had someone with unparalleled knowledge of Harry, and in Maddie had a psychic more powerful than Harry himself, who caught Harry off-guard. Even then, as you said yourself, he only left his body vacant by choice. He could have unleashed the Phoenix any time he wished while he was being tortured, yet he held out for days." He met Wisdom's gaze. "HYDRA also tried to take him when they were at the height of their power and they failed. The Red Room are being reduced – by the time they rise again, if they ever do, something I think unlikely, Harry will be a grown man. You will know better than I how few organisations, mortal or supernatural, are capable of mustering the kind of power that the Red Room and HYDRA had." He gave Wisdom a pointed raised eyebrow.

"If we're counting SHIELD as puppeted by HYDRA in the equation of HYDRA's power, and the Darkhold too, and effectively Russia and the old Eastern bloc under the Red Room, brief as that was… no mortal organisation," Wisdom said reluctantly. "The American and Chinese militaries, maybe – what they lack in superhuman firepower, they make up for in numbers, resources, and highly sophisticated conventional firepower. SHIELD, if it ever regains its old power, would be up there. And probably Atlantis, if they're even half as powerful as I think they are." He drummed his fingers. "As for supernatural, practically speaking, the big guns are the Fae Courts, the Vampire Courts, and the White Council. The ICW's got power on paper, but not something it can really back."

"And how many of those would have an interest in kidnapping and torturing my son as the Red Room did?" Thor asked, keeping his tone even, despite a brief wobble over the word 'torturing'.

"I'm pretty sure that Weapon X would like to know what makes him tick," Wisdom said. "And they're getting the band back together." He sighed. "But they're not stupid. Because –"

"Because they'll have seen what happens to those who try to harm him," Thor said quietly. "The Vampire Courts do not desire more enemies, and they know to fear my kind." His forehead creased in a frown. "Dracula hates the Phoenix, it is true." He gave Wisdom a shrewd look. "But from what I know, he will also not set foot in Britain. There is another vampire here, I am told. A powerful one, that keeps others out, tolerating only a few transitory White Court vampires that flee as soon as it bestirs itself to demonstrate its displeasure if they out-stay their welcome."

"Since when?" Sirius asked, eyebrow raised.

"A couple of decades ago," Wisdom said curtly. "We call him the Welshman, most of the time. He lives in Cardiff, keeps himself to himself, and usually feeds off the spares from blood banks and any monsters daft enough to chance their arm in South Wales. I think he has some sort of arrangement with Strange, though exactly what it is, I have no idea." He shrugged. "He's powerful enough that Dracula doesn't like to come calling – the two had a meeting which didn't end well for either. Voldemort also tended to avoid that part of the country, after one of his giants got eaten."

Sirius let out a low whistle.

"Anyway," Wisdom said. "Why does Dracula hate the Phoenix?"

Thor explained Dumbledore's tale of his encounter with the Grey Court and the Clan Akkaba and the Phoenix in Vienna at the end of the 19th century.

Wisdom nodded slowly. "That explains it," he said. "But still. Drac can put two and two together, and if the boy's on Earth, he'll make a play at some point. Maybe not on British soil, but he will. And if that leads to the Phoenix…"

"I can face that glorified corpse," Thor said. "I have done it before, and if needs be, I will do it again, and again, and as many times as is need."

Wisdom eyed him, then nodded curtly. "I'm sure you will," he said. "But that leads us to the elephant in the room: gods, goddesses, demons and devils. Where do they factor in?"

"The pantheons of Earth have decided to take a live and let live attitude to Harry," Thor said, with a certain grim satisfaction.

Wisdom raised a sceptical eyebrow. "And they don't fear the Phoenix at all?" he said.

"Not as much as they fear Doctor Strange," Thor said. "Who explained to them that it was his will that Harry possessed some measure of the Phoenix's power, as part of his plans to prepare the Earth to face Thanos."

"Yes, he mentioned the fella in question," Wisdom said darkly. "I suppose that makes sense. But how the hell did he scare them into submission? He's not _that_ strong."

"He's not," Sirius said. "The Tesseract is."

Wisdom stared at them. "You… _gave_ Strange the Tesseract?"

"Lent it to him," Thor corrected. "And frankly, Director, going by past experience, if Strange wishes, he can steal just about whatever he pleases."

"True enough," Wisdom muttered. "And the demons and devils?"

"Have no wish to invite a war with Asgard or arouse the wrath of the Phoenix," Thor said. "I cannot pretend that there will be none that covet the power of the Phoenix, even the embers that Harry possesses still. But they will be wary of trying to claim them. They know that Harry technically invited Chthon into himself this last summer, then banished him. They know that he set reality to rights shortly after." He paused. "And every single other pantheon will come down on them like an avalanche if they even suspect them of making the attempt, for fear of the Dark Phoenix."

"You make some compelling points," Wisdom said. "Though I'll have to look into them myself. And have your oath on them. Right now, though, even if all you say pans out… I'm not quite convinced. Why should I take this gamble?"

Thor smiled thinly. "Because you are a man who likes to have all things under his eye," he said. "Because if Harry transforms into the Dark Phoenix once more, then his being in Asgard will not protect Midgard, Earth, for long. Because if Harry attends Hogwarts once more, you will have a chance to determine Harry's future, rather than simply stand powerless at the sidelines." He leaned forward. "And because Voldemort has returned, with more power than ever before, including the ability to control the mind of all who bear the Dark Mark. Harry is the one with the prophesied power to destroy him, once and for all."

Wisdom's eyes narrowed dangerously. "To be clear," he said, in a slow, soft, deadly voice that set both Thor and Sirius on their guard. "Are you suggesting that I would put a personal motive, in this case, my own fear of what Voldemort may or may not do to me, may use my Dark Mark to do, ahead of my duty to Queen and Country?"

"No," Thor said evenly. "I know your kind well enough, Peter Wisdom, Regulus Black, whatever you seek to call yourself. You skulk in the darkness, doing dark and foul deeds and shrug them off, playing the part of one without principle. But in truth, you are a man of honour, one with one principle that you hold dear, so dear that you are willing to sacrifice all others to preserve it. With you, it is loyalty to your country; its protection is your utmost priority." He sat back. "Do you not think that your country would be threatened by Voldemort, even before he became what he is now? Do you not think that his ability to bypass whatever mental defences you have would be a threat, when in your mind, you hold all the secrets of the defence of Britain? Do you not want the one person destined to destroy Voldemort once and for all in Britain?"

Wisdom eyed Thor, then his lips twisted into a wry smile. "You're smarter than you look," he said mildly. "Then again, you always were." The smile turned into a smirk. "Which is more than can be said for Sirius, anyway."

"Oi," Sirius said, if somewhat half-heartedly.

Thor smiled faintly. "Do we have an accord, then, Director?"

Wisdom considered, rubbing his jaw. "Ah what the hell, I was planning to have a few of my lot at Hogwarts for the Triwizard anyway," he said, nodding. "Keep an eye on proceedings."

"And demonstrate to Fudge and the Headteachers of Durmstrang and Beauxbatons, as well as any other international observers, who the real power in these Isles is," Thor said shrewdly.

Wisdom let out a bark of laughter, sounding very much like his brother. "That too," he said casually, before his expression hardened. "Full disclosure, though. I'm not just going to have my lot sit around and keep an eye on the boy, or play therapist. I'm willing to hope for the best, to play the odds, because as you point out, I don't have many other options. Even if I was willing to put a bullet through the boy's head, it wouldn't work." He paused as Sirius growled threateningly and the arms of Thor's chair creaked as his fingers dug into them, arching an eyebrow. "What? You're surprised I considered it? It wouldn't be my first choice, and like I said – I have nothing against the boy. But make no mistake, if I had no other option, I'd do it in a heartbeat and take the nightmares and divine torture vengeance as they came."

The muscles in Thor's jaw bunched. "I'm not," he said. "Surprised."

"But you're still pissed off to hear it," Wisdom said matter-of-factly, nodding as if this was exactly what he expected. "Understandable."

"I am," Sirius said quietly, then snorted. "I thought that I was supposed to be the mad one. Yet after twelve years in Azkaban, I'm practically a fucking vision of sanity compared to you."

"I'm not mad, Sirius," Wisdom said. "Just pragmatic."

"Well pragmatic or not, brother or not, lay a finger on Harry and I'll tear your throat out with my teeth," Sirius said, voice utterly serious.

Wisdom nodded. "I'm not planning to," he said, standing up. "There's no point. All it would do is make matters worse, wake the Phoenix up, and probably ring the bells for Armageddon. No fucking thank you. Only reason I mentioned it is because I feel that it's worth establishing exactly where we stand. I am not letting your boy go back to Hogwarts because I've got a sudden case of the warm fuzzies, nor will I be sitting idle while he wanders around with a ticking time-bomb inside him. I'm doing this because, assuming that everything pans out as you've said it will, you've convinced me that in the grand scheme of things, this is the best choice for Britain. Am I clear?"

Thor and Sirius stood. "You are," Thor said coldly.

"Good," Wisdom said. "Now kindly get the hell out of my office, I have an appointment." He paused. "Oh, and speaking of therapists, though, I can offer you a few good ones. I know that Xavier's the best, but I'd imagine that he has his hands full at the moment."

Thor stopped, seemed to struggle with his emotions, then strode out, saying nothing. Sirius, for his part, just stared at his brother, as if wondering what the hell had gone wrong, before following his best friend out.

The worries of other mortal power brokers, however, were not so easily assuaged, as Harry Dresden soon found out.

OoOoO

Usually, when I get a call from the White Council, I expect it. Why? Because the shit has hit, or is about to hit, the fan in the most spectacular way possible and they either deem it so spectacular that they can't reasonably leave their unwanted problem child out, or they blame me for it and want me to set about clearing it up. Or tie me to my staff and use me as a mop to clean it up with.

Since my teacher-girlfriend's godson had been kidnapped and engaged in a psychic duel in the Nevernever with someone who was his peer, hell, his superior in age, power, and skill, and caused global scale headaches (or, in the case of yours truly, migraines and black-outs while blood ran from various orifices. It scaled based on psychic sensitivity, apparently, which left Bob wondering why it had affected me at all), setting the spirit world on its ear, I'd expect it for that alone.

But that was not it.

After that, he had manufactured his escape, but decided to follow his psychic opponent – a cousin of his, stolen at birth and shaped into a living weapon by one of the most evil bastards I've ever run across – into a collapsing spirit portal to try and continue persuading her to come with him. Then, being exhausted and caught off-guard, he'd been recaptured, tortured and his mortal form had been turned into a living weapon while his mind went to live in a magic feather, courtesy of said cousin who made a righteous choice after managing to muster up some free will, before their plan to restore him to his body as soon as the Red Room's collective backs were turned went horribly wrong. The results had been the assassination of the Russian President, the general upending the geopolitical map of the mortal and supernatural worlds, a fist fight between Thor and the Juggernaut that caused tremors up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and a brutal duel between the so-called Red Son and Magneto over upstate New York, with side effects registering half way across the country. That, by itself, would also have garnered a Council phone call.

But that was _still_ not it. Said godson had, when restored to his body and found that half of it had been turned into something like _The Thing_ meets _The Terminator_ , as well as getting six compressed months of unspeakable horror and black ops mission forced on him, quite understandably gone absolutely apeshit. As a result, he'd transformed into a humanoid abomination whose emergence was heralded by global scale nightmares, and while (or so I was reliably informed) merely warming up, had left permanent craters on the Moon, shrugged off multiple nuclear missiles, ripped a mountain sized hole into the Nevernever several thousand feet in the air, permanently rearranged the geography of mortal and spirit world alike, and been well on the way to becoming a nigh unstoppable cosmic abomination before he'd been talked down.

Look, the Council may have their heads halfway up their asses most of the time, but there was no way in hell that they were going to miss all _that_.

Especially not since I had a personal relationship with Wanda. While she hadn't exactly broadcast that I was her Apprentice, let alone boyfriend, us very publicly fighting together against the Mabdhara and N'Garai in Chicago a few months back, then at the Battle of London a couple of months later, with some serious and public making out after the first fight, certain inferences could be drawn. And Wanda was well known to be Harry Thorson's godmother.

I was a little surprised that it was Ebenezar, though.

"Hoss," he growled down the phone, after giving the relevant pass-phrase and getting the right one back; standard precautions when fighting a war against the Red Court. That wasn't him trying to be intimidating, by the way. He just generally growled everything.

"Sir," I said, a little frostily. Not so long ago, I'd found out that he was the Blackstaff, the White Council's hitman, their own equivalent of the Winter Soldier, who did the dirty jobs behind the scenes and broke the Laws of Magic that they so sanctimoniously upheld with impunity. Considering that he was my mentor, the man who had taught me that magic, the force of life itself, should be used only for good, that being a wizard was not even mainly about what you _could_ do, but what you _should_ do, whose standard I had held myself to for all my adult life, who had taught me all about that while lying through his teeth all the while, I was a little sore about that.

Sometimes, I wondered if the way I thought about Ebenezar was like how Wanda thought about her mentor, Doctor Strange. I doubted it. While I was angry at Ebenezar, I didn't hate him. Wanda, on the other hand… well, I'm not sure if she truly hated Strange, but sometimes, it got close. Certainly, there was a lot more bad blood between them than there was between me and Ebenezar.

I was not on the best terms with him at the moment, anyway. On the other hand, he was just about the only Wizard on the Council that I was on speaking terms with at all.

"What do you want?" I asked.

I said speaking terms, not good terms. Some wounds don't heal that fast.

"I'm in town. How about a catch-up drink," he said. "Accorded Neutral Territory."

Even if his tone hadn't made it clear, the last three words had. This was not simply my old mentor wanting to catch up and shoot the breeze over a few bottles of Mac's heavenly beer, and bridge a wide rift in the process. This was business.

"Fifteen minutes," I said, then hung up.

It didn't take that long to get to Mac's, less than the fifteen minutes I said it would, but even so, Ebenezar was already there, sitting at a table with two bottles of Mac's pale.

He looked much the same as he had the last time I'd seen him, the same as he always had. Short and stocky and largely bald, with glasses on his nose, he looked like what he was to most of the world – an old Ozark farmer who'd walked all his life and kept his muscles in his old age. Of course, I doubted that many of his mundane acquaintances imagined that he was one of the seven oldest and most powerful wandless wizards in the world, and capable of doing things like setting off volcanoes, triggering earthquakes, and ripping satellites and meteors from the sky.

His oak staff rested beside him, and, despite our estrangement and the seriousness of the occasion, he gave me a quick smile and indicated the chair opposite him. I took it, not smiling. I think I managed a grimace of sorts, but it probably looked forced as hell. He was polite enough not to comment on it.

"Sir," I said, in acknowledgement. "Thanks for the beer."

"Least I could do, hoss," he said.

I nodded. "Somehow I doubt you came halfway across the world to buy me a beer," I said. "Why are you really here, sir?"

He winced a little at that, but I wasn't in the mood for awkward small talk.

"I'll be plain, then," he said. "Some damn strange things have been happening the last couple of weeks."

I snorted. That was the understatement of the century. Ebenezar caught my dark amusement and smiled wryly.

"Damn strange," he repeated. "And dangerous. The Council's put together a decent timeline of events, but it's missing a few pieces. Some quite important ones, as it happens. And we think that you know what they are and where they fit, or if you don't, you can find out."

"If the Council wants me to investigate something that they could find out for themselves by ringing up Avengers Mansion and asking nicely, then I have a two day minimum," I said.

Ebenezar sighed. "Hoss," he said, and he sounded genuinely tired, enough that I felt a twinge of guilt for the snark. "Don't fight me, boy. I'm not your enemy."

"Despite the fact that you once had standing orders to kill me if I put a toe out of line," I said, and regretted it the moment I said it.

"Orders I ignored," the old man said after a moment, voice steady. "We've had this discussion already, Hoss. It's not about me and you and what's gone between us, it's not even about the Council. It's about the fate of the world. First, we've got everyone with a lick of talent in the precognition department screaming random gibberish prophecies and everyone else with the mother of all migraines as part of the spirit world gets turned upside down. Second, Russia seems suddenly set to reconstruct its old empire in a couple of weeks, and every supernatural power in their orbit is either destroyed or brought to heel by a bunch people are calling the Winter Guard, led by a madwoman calling herself the Black Widow, and spearheaded by something with enough power to singlehandedly obliterate four Red Court Dukes and Duchesses, five Counts and Countesses, and two Barons, their retinues and whatever demons they could rustle up. And backing that Winter Guard is a name that we thought long buried: the Red Room. Third, everyone sleeping has nightmares about the world ending in flames, a massive portal to the Nevernever appears in midair over Russia, then later a giant fireball appears in the sky and flashfries one of their larger lakes, and the Moon's left with a new crater – again."

He leaned forward, expression serious. "The Fae aren't saying anything, but they're buzzing around like bees who's hive's just been kicked, in ways that they last did when the Summer Lady went mad. The vampires are in disarray, which is good for us, but also not a good sign, since they have even less idea of what's going on than we do. The wanded lot are screaming about new witch-hunts, and more than a few on the Council agree with them," he said. "And as for calling Avengers Mansion, there hasn't been a word. As far as we know, most of the Avengers aren't even there, and the ones who are won't talk to anyone."

"What about SHIELD?" I asked.

"Fury gave us an edited version that was undoubtedly full of shite," Ebenezar said. "No more dancing around this, boy. We need to know what's happening, and you're the only Council Wizard with contacts on the Avengers and around them."

I thought of about a million snarky retorts, but most of them were about as imaginative and mature as 'oh, now you need me', or 'oh, now _you_ want _me_ to be _open_ and _honest_ ', so I resisted the temptation.

"What do you know already?" I asked, and as Ebenezar scowled, I raised a hand. "I'm not asking just to be difficult. It saves time not having to explain things twice." The kid's expression when he'd come back to himself after his mind had been restored ahead of schedule and he'd all the hell the Red Room had used his body to do dumped on him at once swam into the front of my mind, and I was dimly aware that my good hand clenched tight around the bottle of beer, my knuckles whitening as I looked away from Ebenezar. "And there's things I'd rather not discuss. Things that aren't for me to talk about, if I can avoid doing so."

"The Merlin won't like that," Ebenezar said, but in a tone that suggested that he could live with it just fine.

"The Merlin is a crusty old asshole whose heart withered and died from lack of use centuries ago," I growled. "He can go fuck himself."

Ebenezar grunted, but didn't say anything. He certainly didn't disagree. Then, he crisply laid out the Council's version of events. It wasn't too far off what had actually happened, actually.

They'd guessed at Magneto's involvement, for one, though that wasn't too hard to figure out. Aside from missing the details that the Red Son was Harry, that the almighty psychic at the Red Room's disposal was Maddie (they thought that that psychic and the Red Son were one and the same) or her role in events, they didn't know about Essex, and that he'd been most of the way to being a fully fledged version of the creature known as the Dark Phoenix, of course.

"And this isn't the first time that something like this has happened," he said eventually. "Dreams of everything burning, massive psychic disruption, grand scale destruction… its happened before. The dreams were confined to the supernaturally gifted, and the destruction was much more precise and localised, but it has the same stamp. The same power is behind it, even if it has a different wielder, I can smell it."

"When?" I asked, curious, and privately thinking that Phoenix fire probably smelled like wood smoke. Or, you know, burning.

"1897," Ebenezar said. "Emanating from Vienna. A group called the Akkaba, a clan of superhumans of sorts… not Scions, Changelings, Cursed, or practitioners. Not inherently magical at all. A few had some power, but that wasn't what powered their gifts." He shrugged. "Just a group of people born with abilities, which came from who knew where. Back in the day, they used to be called Wonders by some. Or freaks of nature, I suppose."

"Mutants," I said.

Ebenezar nodded. "Almost certainly," he said. "This was back before genetics, of course, and before the X-Gene was discovered by your friend Charles Xavier, so we can't be certain – they claimed descent from some kind of obscure Egyptian god, one they called 'the First One', but mutants is probably what they were."

I blinked a little in surprise as I took this in. Mutation ran in families, that much I could tell; Wanda was a mutant as well as a practitioner, like her father, and her half-siblings had both inherited the X-Gene too, while a whole bunch of Harry's maternal cousins had the X-Gene too. But I also thought of mutants as a very recent phenomenon, dating back to the 20th century at the earliest.

Clearly I'd been wrong about that. But still, entire _clans_ of mutants…

Ebenezar caught my expression and smiled wryly. "Caught me by surprise too, when I heard about it," he said. "I thought that there had to be some magical explanation, but there wasn't. There's probably been a few more mutants encountered by the Council than we ever realised – psychics in particular are close enough to magical that it can be hard to tell them apart at first glance." He shook his head. "Even still, Xavier could probably tell you how rare they are, and before modern times, they didn't tend to gather. The Akkaba were one of the very few exceptions. There's rumours of others, one in the Himalayas, but there's only one other that we know of, a bunch that call themselves the Askani."

"Psychics," I said, and Ebenezar looked up at me sharply.

"You've met them?" he asked.

"No," I said. "Professor Xavier was trained by them."

Ebenezar grunted. "Makes sense," he said. "A psychic as strong as him, they'd have found very interesting." His brow creased in a frown. "Though I am rather surprised that they let him go."

"I somehow doubt that they had much choice in the matter," I said. Charles Xavier was a pacifist, first and foremost. However, this did not mean that he was a pushover - he'd treated my pyrophobia after a particularly creative Black Court minion, a Renfield, roasted my left hand through my then heat permeable shield with a homemade flamethrower, and a few other issues besides.

In the process, I got a real feel not just for how strong he was, but how deft. I'm a powerful Wizard; on a good day, I'm in the top 50 in the world for raw power (stamina and precision are still works in progress), I'm absurdly stubborn, and I've had enough experience at resisting mental intrusion that it takes more than your average psychic predator to get one over me. Xavier, though, could have crushed my mind the way I would crush an egg, defences or no defences. And while I hadn't seen him in a fight, the thousands upon thousands of demon corpses found within a couple of dozen miles of Bayville without a mark on them told their own story.

In other words, pacifist or no pacifist, Xavier could play hardball. And if he had his wits about him, I really doubt that even a clan of middle-weight psychics could do anything to stop him coming and going as he pleased.

Ebenezar nodded an acknowledgement, then waved a hand, dismissing this line of discussion. "The Askani are strange, but mostly harmless," he said. "They're probably just about powerful enough to get representation under the Accords if they really wanted, but they're not interested. They keep their bloodlines going, stay on the lookout for new psychics to recruit and add some new blood, and keep their heads down."

"What about the Laws?" I asked. "Do they apply to them?"

Ebenezar grimaced. "So long as they don't step on our toes, we don't step on theirs," he said.

I nodded. "So the Akkaba," I said. "What do they have to do with anything?"

"They'd annoyed Dracula," Ebenezar said flatly. "And he wanted to make an example of them. All the oldest and most powerful members of the Grey Court were in Vienna, ready to take down the survivors of the Akkaba at their leisure. Then Albus Dumbledore stuck his nose in, tried to help out the Akkaba. According to him, they rejected him, said that they had something up their sleeve, and tried to kill him for good measure."

"They were going to try and summon something to deal with their vampire problem," I said, following the train of thought.

"They succeeded," Ebenezar said. "That night, we had burning dreams, sensed a massive psychic disruption, and the first Wardens on the scene found a nasty mess: every vampire in Vienna, not just Grey Court, was burned to ash, and all the Akkaba that had been part of the ritual went the same way. The only survivors were Dracula, who got out in time, a couple of the Akkaba who hadn't been involved, and Dumbledore."

"Why not ask him about it?" I asked.

"Took us a while to figure out he was there," Ebenezar said. "Whatever they summoned burned hot enough to scour away any real traces we had to work with, and truth be told, we were mostly trying to figure what the hell they'd summoned and where the hell it had gone. Eventually, we realised that whatever it was, it had gone home. We didn't even think to look for someone who'd been around for the ritual and who'd survived, not for years. When we finally found out he'd been there, he'd had years to get his story straight. He said that he'd interrupted the ritual, summoning a demon of some sort, one he didn't recognise. He tried to banish it anyway, and succeeded, but not before it performed the task it had been summoned for and destroyed its summoners while he was banishing it."

"And you didn't buy that," I said.

Ebenezar snorted. "You're the investigator hoss, but I know bullshit when I hear it," he said. He shook his head. "He was wanded, the darling of the magical worlds, and it wasn't a current investigation, so the Council had to drop it. In any case, Kemmler was becoming a problem around then, so we had bigger problems to worry about." He leaned forward. "I've said my share, hoss. Now it's your turn."

I grunted and nodded acknowledgement, then paused before I began. "Out of curiosity," I asked. "And I do want to know, sir, really. You know that the kid was heavily involved. So why come to me rather than Albus Dumbledore or one of his staff? Someone who knows Thor, who taught him when he was mortal, and teaches his kid, I mean."

Ebenezar looked sour. "The staff aren't saying a thing," he said. "Not even that Snape fella, and he's usually not short of something to say about Thor and his boy, usually bad." He scowled. "Dumbledore, meanwhile, is even less open than he used to be," he added.

I raised an eyebrow, and Ebenezar's scowled deepened.

"He sent a letter, too," he said.

"' _Dear Arthur._

 _As I am regrettably detained by prior engagements, this missive will have to serve as my answer. As Headmaster of Hogwarts School, I am, of course, privileged to have a certain insight into the private lives of my students and my parents. However, I must regrettably remind you that I am also obliged to respect their privacy and keep their confidences._

 _If I come across a matter that I deem to fall under your purview, then I will, of course, immediately inform you, as I did on my appointment of my new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, whose skills lie on the border between my skills and your own. Until that time, unfortunately I have little else to inform you of. If you wish for me to provide you with the contact details for Mister Odinson, then I would be delighted to put you in touch._

 _Regards,_

 _Albus._ "

The scowl cracked slightly, revealing a hint of amusement.

"' _P.S. I almost forgot. There was, in fact, something rather important that I wished to tell you: I have finally found the recipe for the eel pie that you so enjoyed last time you visited. The hint of garlic is, I believe, the secret. You will find it attached. Enjoy!'_ "

I nearly spat out a mouthful of beer. As it was, I managed to swallow it before I committed the grievous sin of wasting the ambrosia that is Mac's beer, then burst into appreciative laughter. It was quite possibly the politest and funniest way of telling someone to fuck off that I'd ever heard. The fact that the recipient was the Merlin, a man so conscious of his own dignity that I could well imagine him worriedly standing in front of a mirror before a meeting in his Gandalf lite robes and saying, 'Does my butt like fat in this?', made it that much better.

Ebenezar's own lips were twitching and he let out a reluctant chuckle.

"I'm guessing the Merlin didn't like that," I said, once I'd calmed down.

"I thought he was about to have a stroke," Ebenezar agreed, smiling slightly. "Especially since the letter read itself. Aloud." His lips twitched again. "And started listing ingredients for eel pie."

I might have let out a small giggle. Then, I sobered up. Ebenezar was here to talk about what had happened, which inevitably meant discussing the Dark Phoenix.

"That's why we're talking to you, Hoss," Ebenezar said. "No one else who knows anything will talk."

I sighed. "Fine," I said. "But not here. And I'll only talk to the Senior Council – if I see Morgan anywhere near this, I'm not saying a thing. Also, I don't want him anywhere near the kid."

"Hoss," Ebenezar said warningly. "The Merlin won't like that."

I folded my arms and glared back. "And I can't find the words to tell you how little I care, sir," I said.

Ebenezar sighed. "I know," he said, with strained patience. "My point, boy, is that while he'll probably agree with limiting it to the Senior Council, he won't respond well to being ordered around by a buck-shee young wizard. Especially not you."

I glowered at him, then grimaced, letting some of my anger and truculence fall away. "Fine," I said. "Recommend it to him. Put it however you have to so that it turns out that way, because believe you me, sir, if this information gets into the wrong hands, he'll have a lot more to worry about than me."

Ebenezar eyed me. He was one of the few people who could look me in the eye without worrying about a Soulgaze, and knew me better than almost anyone. He could read what my eyes were saying. He nodded slowly. "I'll bear that in mind, hoss," he said, then gave me a pointed look. "Speaking of mutants and your associations with the Avengers… what are you up to with Wanda Maximoff?"

I opened my mouth, then hesitated, thinking before I spoke – I know. Shocking, isn't it? Had to happen sometime, though, I suppose.

"Is that Ebenezar asking," I asked carefully. "Or Wizard McCoy?"

"Oh hoss," Ebenezar sighed. "What have you got yourself into now?" He shook his head. "That woman is dangerous."

"So am I," I said. "So are you. So's just about any wizard worth their salt, and plenty of people without a lick of magic."

"Neither of us is damn near to a walking, talking violation of the Seventh Law," Ebenezar said.

"No, you're just a walking, talking violation of all of them," I snapped.

Ebenezar went red with anger. I met his gaze unflinchingly, and for a moment, the air was heavy with pulsing, dangerous power. The rest of Mac's clientele, all of whom recognised me, and most of whom recognised a heavyweight wizard in Ebenezar, began to scuttle towards the door. Mac himself was already halfway towards us, and arrived in moments, raising an eyebrow.

"Problem?" he asked.

Mac is a man of few syllables.

There was another dangerous moment, then Ebenezar sighed. "No, no," he said. "Another two beers?"

Mac looked from him to me, and back again, before nodding and going to get some more beer.

"This little meet-up isn't going quite as I hoped," Ebenezar said eventually, staring at his beer. It was clear that he didn't mean the intelligence gathering part of it.

"Nor me," I said after a moment, contemplating my own bottle. Then a smile tugged at my lips. "We've had worse, though."

Ebenezar let out a rough bark of laughter. "Aye, laddie, haven't we just," he said, and as if on cue, the two of us relaxed, the tension draining away. "I suppose I had that one coming," he remarked after another few moments.

I said nothing.

"You and her…" he began.

"We're seeing each other," I said, then added, as Ebenezar nodded resignedly. "And I'm her apprentice."

Ebenezar choked on nothing, and stared at me wide-eyed.

"No, I'm not joking," I said. "Apparently, Strange was feeling a bit mortal a few months ago and decided that Wanda should take an apprentice." I shrugged. "Apparently, I was at the top of the short list. Dating was kind of an after-thought." I folded my arms. "And before you say anything, I know about her history with Chthon, and I've met her dad. Twice."

Ebenezar's eyes didn't look like they could go any wider, but they certainly gave it a good go.

"Hoss," he said, in a strangled voice.

"Magneto's not that bad once you get to know him," I said, shrugging. "Terrifying, sure, but friendly enough."

Ebenezar sighed again. He'd been doing that a lot today – though not without reason, I had to admit. "Hoss," he said tiredly. "You don't know what you've done."

I looked puzzled.

"Doctor Strange picked you out for a reason," Ebenezar said. "And it wasn't just about your skills. Yes, you're the most powerful and talented wandless practitioner of your generation. Yes, you've got a combat record that puts Wardens with centuries under their belt in the shade. But you aren't the only talented and powerful young wizard out there with some combat experience. There are plenty of Wanded and Wandless practitioners out there – not all of the latter on the Council, either – who would fit the bill."

"Then why?" I asked, eyebrow raised.

"Part of it, I'd imagine, is that you're far more familiar than most with the temptations of dark magic," Ebenezar said. He shook his head. "I won't say you're not qualified, because you are, you more than are. But there's more to it than that."

"Like what?" I asked.

"There's bad blood between Strange and the Council," Ebenezar said.

"The thing with Wanda?" I asked. "I already know about that."

"No. That's not even close to the start of it. This bit of bad blood that goes back a long time, long before either you or Ms Maximoff was born." He snorted. "Hell, it was around even before _I_ was born."

"Why?" I asked, genuinely puzzled.

"Strange isn't a team player," Ebenezar said. "He never has been."

"Gee," I said. "What a shocker. What a crime."

"Don't be childish," Ebenezar said quietly, and I felt a hot flush of shame and embarrassment. "All Wizards have their secrets. But Strange has more than any I've known or heard of, and he got them by violating the Sixth Law time and time again – it's one of the things he's famous for." He grunted. "Now, granted, that one's a Law not so much because it's intrinsically dark magic, but because the side-effects if someone screws up while time travelling can be more horrific than any of the other Laws. Except for the Seventh, of course. Not many see much of that." He gave a thin smile. "Though you've probably seen as much of that as any Wizard on the Council."

I nodded. Chthon, aside from being an Elder God and a gigantic back of dicks, was what was called an Outsider – that is to say, he was from outside this universe, living in the space between realities. He wasn't native to it, technically speaking, having been banished long ago by his siblings, but he'd adjusted well enough. And as he'd demonstrated, a mere fragment of his power acting through someone was like a weight on thin ice – as it pressed harder and harder against our reality, pushing through, more and more cracks appeared. Eventually, it would break through entirely and all that ice would shatter into fragments. In the meantime, it could duel the most powerful of Earth's Skyfathers to a draw, set reality to randomise, and cause the steady collapse of all known borders of time and space. If he'd been on Earth much longer before he was banished, then everything that was, had been, or could be, just… wouldn't. It would all be gone.

"The Sorcerer Supreme has a certain latitude with the Laws, as do their apprentices," Ebenezar said. "The latter in particular has been a problem in the past – some of history's worst Warlocks are ex-Apprentices gone to the bad. But Strange takes it to a whole new level. He meddles with history and, nearly as bad, he meddles with not just our world, but the mortal one as well. You probably think that the White Council doesn't step in during mortal political disputes because it doesn't care."

"The thought had crossed my mind," I remarked.

"Well, it's not true," Ebenezar said forcefully. "I can see why you would: your mother thought the same thing."

"She did?" I asked, surprised.

"Oh yes," Ebenezar said, and smiled slightly. "You're so much like her, hoss. She liked to point out the loopholes, the grey areas in the Laws, the way that Wizards could abuse mortals without breaking the Laws and the Council wouldn't lift a finger." The smile widened. "Believe me, boy, the Merlin and his faction find you irritating, but it's nothing to how infuriating they found your mother." His smile faded. "Then, she started dabbling in black magic. Took up with the likes of Raith."

"What, and you think that one leads to the other?" I demanded. "Question the Council and the status quo and go bad?"

"No," Ebenezar said. "God knows the Council needs questioning – in private, mind. Keeps 'em honest, or as honest as they'll get. But if you want to overturn the status quo in the Council, and you can't do it from inside…"

"Then you're going to turn to the Council's enemies," I said quietly. It made sense.

"Your mother was a brilliant woman," Ebenezar said. "Brilliant, passionate, and infuriating and infuriated in equal measure. She wanted the Laws of Magic to focus on justice. I can understand the point. But where does it stop? You overturn a dictator, fine. There are a lot of Wizards on the Council who remember what the United States did to the Natives, what the European powers did to Africa, Asia, and South America, what Japan did to much of Asia, and countless other atrocities. Don't they deserve justice? Don't you think that a lot of people might object to the US for its past crimes and current foolishness? What would you do if the White Council turned against the US? Would you stand with it?"

"Well, no," I said, blinking. "I mean, I'm American. All my friends, all my stuff, they're here."

"Exactly," Ebenezar said bluntly. "What do you think that leads to?"

"Civil war," I said quietly. "The Council falls apart."

"Or?" Ebenezar asked, prompting me. "How would the Council bring all these nations to heel?"

"By seeking power," I said promptly, like I was a student again.

Ebenezar nodded. "The Laws stand as written because they do one thing above all," he said. "Restrict power. The Wanded Statute of Secrecy, and other laws, they do the same thing. More complex of course, because there's a lot more of 'em than there are Council members, and they have their own nations. But the point is the same: while a practitioner can do harm if they get creative with their magic, there's only so much harm they can do without breaking the Laws." He looked grim. "And Strange blows that all to pieces."

"How?" I asked. "I mean, I know he's been involved with the Avengers – a lot – and Wanda mentioned that he's been involved with SHIELD, but…"

"The Sorcerer Supreme is meant to be the guardian of reality, stopping those things that would slip through the gaps. They deal with the greater Demon-Lords; the dark Gods; the worst Warlocks, the Dark Lords and Ladies; and most of all, the Outsiders," Ebenezar said. "That's what they're given their powers for."

"They're meant to be all defence," I said, catching on. "Strange is different, he thinks that the best defence is a good offence."

Ebenezar nodded. "I've never seen any evidence that says that he neglects his protective duties," he said, a little grudgingly. "The same way that when it comes to things done, for the most part I've only heard good about Wanda Maximoff. She deals with the sort of things that need dealing with, and she's picked up on more than a few burgeoning talents, pointed them the Council's way. In her case, the main worries are about what she could do, what her father has shown himself capable of."

"I've seen him fight. Believe me, sir, I don't need any persuading that he's dangerous," I said, interrupting.

"It's not just his powers, hoss," Ebenezar said, but left it at that. "Worse, though, is what she could be. With her connection to Chthon – one she didn't ask for or deserve, I know – she's an ever present risk for use as his avatar on this plane. As it is, her powers can set reality on its ear without any help from him."

"Maybe that's why Strange took her in," I suggested. "To teach her how to defend herself and deal with it."

Ebenezar inclined his head. "Maybe," he said. "Probably, even – turn a potential threat into a great asset, that's Strange all over." He shook his head. "My point, hoss, is that Strange has powers that the Sorcerer Supreme was never meant to have, uses them and the ones that he is meant to have in ways that they were never meant to, meddling freely in the world on an unthinkably vast scale. He's collected more power than any one man was ever meant to have and he only managed that by steering clear of the Council, most all organisations of practitioners, anyone who might have stopped him." He looked at me. "And that's why you have no idea what you've gotten yourself into, boy. The Council will see you as Strange's pawn, will worry about what he intends for you, whether he's going to use you as a weapon against the Council – he's never made any bones about his dislike for it."

"Well, I'm not planning to be a weapon, if that helps," I ventured.

"I believe you," Ebenezar said simply. "But many won't. And even if they do, they'll say that that doesn't matter, that Strange arranges matters so neatly that you'll do what he plans without even knowing that you're doing it."

"I…" I began, then stopped and grimaced. I'd met Strange. I'd seen him at work. I had no way of knowing if those fears were wrong or not. Then something struck me. "If he's capable of manipulating someone like me that much, isn't he capable of manipulating the entire Council the same way?" I asked.

"That's the part they wouldn't like to consider," Ebenezar said. "Though they'd probably say that there's too many of them to manipulate all together."

I rolled my eyes at that and Ebenezar nodded.

"It's bullshit," he said bluntly. "But it helps them sleep at night." He leaned forward. "Now listen to me. When you go up in front of the Senior Council and tell them that you're Maximoff's new Apprentice, and tell them what you saw, what you know… bear what I've told you in mind, Hoss. Fear can make people do some damn fool things."

"Like serve me up on a platter for the Reds?" I suggested sourly.

"Aye," Ebenezar said. "Very much like."

I sighed. "Well if they're going to panic about me being Wanda's apprentice, I don't even want to think about how they're going to react to what I've got to tell them," I said.

And I didn't. I'd been wary of it before. Now, I was positively dreading it.

OoOoO

As it was, when that debrief final took place in one of the White Council's older and stonier meeting rooms at the headquarters under Edinburgh, the Senior Council took my explanation of events in stony silence.

"So," LaFortier said – in English. All the Senior Council spoke it, and it was begrudgingly agreed that it would save time if Ebenezar didn't have to translate for me. "Tell me, Wizard Dresden. Why did you not think to involve the Council in the search for the boy?"

"I brought up the subject early on," I said. "Loki said that he'd prefer not bringing someone else in, and Wanda concurred. Since the two of them and Albus Dumbledore were already involved, plus Charles Xavier, and all the resources Asgard could bring to bear, I figured that they had their bases covered."

"Do you know why he would not have wished for Council involvement, Wizard Dresden?" the Merlin asked.

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe they thought that a Warden might get a little excited and have an accident with their sword." I looked him in the eye, breaking contact just as a Soulgaze was about to begin. "I can't imagine where he'd have got that idea. I mean, it's not like a Warden would ever do anything like trying to goad someone who they'd rather have dead than alive into a fight so that they could claim self-defence… now would they?"

The Merlin was completely expressionless, but I could see a slight tightening of the muscles in his jaw. A couple of years ago, shortly after I'd started the war between the Council and the Red Court (short version, a Red Court noble with a grudge tried to kill me at a party, half-turned my girlfriend, and did it all in such a way as to mean that it didn't break the letter of supernatural law. I got angry and burnt her house down with her inside it), he'd tried a couple of methods of serving me up on a platter for the Reds, dead or alive, after they'd made that a condition of ceasing hostilities.

As it turned out, that was only because they didn't think they were quite ready for a war yet, but either way, the last of the Merlin's attempts had been to send Morgan, a senior Warden and my former parole officer, with whom I had enjoyed a long and fruitful mutual hatred, to provoke me into attacking him. Since Morgan is a great deal older, more experienced, and more or less as powerful as I am, if not more so, and I was angry and not thinking straight, he'd have killed me in pretty short order if I hadn't seen through it.

Suffice it to say, the Merlin didn't like being reminded of that.

"Yeah, if I had to guess, for some unaccountable reason, I don't think that any of them really thought that the White Council would be fair to a kid in a bad situation," I continued, mock-thoughtful. "Funny thing, that."

"Your point is made, Wizard Dresden," Ebenezar said, tone bland. But his expression carried a hint of warning: don't push it. "Do you have any closing remarks, before the Senior Council discusses this?"

I glanced up at the Merlin. The muscle in his jaw was twitching in earnest. "I do," I said. "All the things that went on proved a couple of things. First, if you go after Harry Thorson, you'll be pissing off the Avengers, Wanda Maximoff, SHIELD, Albus Dumbledore, Charles Xavier, Magneto, Asgard, Strange, and at least four of the Endless. And probably both Queens of Faerie, too, since they got invested in taking him back from the Red Room."

"That," Ancient Mai pointed out, with the swiftness of a bug collector impaling a new specimen. "Was before he embraced the power one of those Endless gave to him, which, if you inform us correctly, was only ever intended for protection, _not_ to be used. The motivation of the Queens was most likely to be seen to be doing something after a Prince of Asgard was held and tortured on territory that both claim."

Ancient Mai is a very small and very old Chinese lady, whose hair is done up in a bun with jade combs, and looks like a Court extra from a movie set in Imperial China. She also scares the living daylights out of me.

"Which still leaves a lot of very powerful people," Wizard Liberty, a tall, regal looking black woman said. As far as I could grasp, she, Listens-To-Wind, and Ebenezar formed one faction of the Senior Council, while the Merlin, Ancient Mai, and LaFortier formed another. The Gatekeeper made up the seventh vote. He was the odd one out. A mysterious wizard who was tall enough to look down on me – and I can look down on some guys in the NBA – he had a metal false eye, a hood that usually covered his face, and an attendance record even worse than mine. This was because, according to Wanda, his job was very demanding – the Outer Gates, the borders of reality that I had previously thought merely metaphorical were, in fact, real physical objects, on the very far edges of the spirit world.

This meant that his main job was fighting Outsiders, things like Chthon (though, mercifully, orders of magnitude weaker), acting as a border guard against the horrors of the Outside. Wanda knew him quite well as a result, since their jobs overlapped a lot of the time; for the most part, she and Strange dealt with those things lucky or strong enough to slip through the cracks elsewhere.

He was present today, and true to form, hadn't spoken yet. Neither had Listens-To-Wind, mind you, but he mostly seemed attentive and ready to speak. The Gatekeeper, on the other hand, was unreadable, mostly because his face was cast in shadow by his hood.

"Wizard Liberty is right, Ancient Mai," Listens-To-Wind said. "We're already fighting a war, and we can't afford more enemies; enemies, might I remind you, who include among their number important allies against the vampires. If we try and push this, then we'll be in the same position that we were over Wanda Maximoff thirty years ago, but far worse. There'll be all the people who were lined up against us last time, and a good deal more besides."

"If the boy turns the planet to ash, then enemies will be the least of our worries," LaFortier retorted. "The Wanded communities will stand with us on this, as will the Queens of Faerie, and I believe that a number of Fury's superiors at SHIELD will be willing to overrule him. Even the vampires could be persuaded to make common cause with us on this, considering what happened to a vampire court the last time this Phoenix entity ran loose."

"Stand with you doing what?" I asked, and all of them turned to me, expressions mildly surprised, or somewhat affronted, that I had spoken up.

"Informing Asgard that we recommend Prince Harry Thorson stay in Asgard to recover from his experiences," Ancient Mai said.

"For how long?" I asked. "I'm asking because they'll ask me."

Ancient Mai's lips thinned. "Indefinitely," she said.

I snorted.

"Does something amuse you, Wizard Dresden?" the Merlin asked, voice icy cold.

"Nothing," I said. "Except the fact that that little recommendation has got to be backed up by a threat that you'll do something if they don't do what you ask, right? But what are you going to do? The only things you can do are things that'll make you more enemies; the ones you just admitted that you don't need. Also, keeping him in Asgard is a flawed strategy for three reasons."

"And what would those be?" the Merlin asked, voice cold and silken. I couldn't restrain a shiver as a cold feeling ran down my spine, and shook myself, before raising three fingers.

"First," I said, ticking off one finger. "Being on Earth, his friends down here, they keep him grounded." I ticked off a second. "Second," I said. "The power of the Phoenix is stored in an artefact that's in Asgard's most secure vaults, under their capitol. All you'll be doing is ensuring that he's right on top of it, night and day." I ticked off the last finger. "Third, I don't think you get the kind of power I'm talking about. There is no minimum safe distance. The last time a Phoenix host went rogue, it ate an entire _galaxy_. Here or in Asgard, if he goes Dark Phoenix again, then we are still screwed, and the first we'll know about it is when we're turning to ash. And can I make a point?"

"You have already made several, Wizard Dresden," LaFortier said, glaring down at me coldly, beady eyes staring out of deep sockets. "Each more insolent than the last."

"But not necessarily wrong, for all the tone of their delivery," Listens-To-Wind said mildly. "Wizard Dresden is the only Wizard of the Council who can claim to know Harry Thorson, or have a close association with the Avengers. While his attitude towards the Council could do with some improvement, his thoughts are well worth listening to."

LaFortier sneered, and was about to riposte, doubtless with something ridiculing my intelligence and/or judgement, when something unusual happened.

The Gatekeeper spoke.

"There have been two attempts to bind the Endless on Earth in recent history," he said. "In 1897, it was Destruction, the Phoenix, which was summoned. She destroyed those who summoned her, sparing only the host she was summoned into. Dream, Morpheus, was summoned in 1913. He spent much of the 20th century in captivity, and on his escape, trapped the son of his summoner, his jailer for much of that time, in a curse of eternal waking, never quite breaking free of his nightmares. Both were summoned with rituals derived from the Darkhold. Both responded ruthlessly to attempts to bind and control them, attempts which ultimately failed." He looked around at his colleagues. "There may well be magics that can successfully bind one of the Endless, to exorcise their power – if Wizard Dresden is correct, then all that remains within the boy are those embers that were intended for his protection in the first place. But does any among us know those magics? No. Of course not. And as for attempting to destroy him outright…" His gaze swung to me, both eyes, dark human and pale metal, glittering.

"That doesn't work," I chipped in. "He's been hit by the Killing Curse, attacked by a full grown dark wizard, bitten by a basilisk, stabbed through the heart, possessed by an Elder God, had half his body blasted off by Magneto, been hit by a gigantic lightning bolt by Magneto, infected by some kind of nanotech virus… the moment it looks like he's in critical condition, the Phoenix steps in, one way or another. Sometimes, it's by sending a phoenix – the bird – to cry on the wound or something like that. And sometimes, it's by possessing him and obliterating everything that even looks like threatening him. Which is leaving aside the fact that even when he wasn't in charge, his body was capable of going ten rounds with Magneto, and when he was in charge, he took on a psychic who was older, more powerful, and one hell of a lot more skilled than he was, and kept her at arms length for long enough for the Avengers to home in on the disruption. And a couple of months ago, I personally witnessed him kick Chthon out of his head. He had help that time, sure, but still: he takes a licking and he keeps on ticking."

"What are you saying, Wizard Dresden?" The Merlin asked.

"I'm saying, honoured Merlin," I said. "That you could take him. But it wouldn't be easy, and when you did, even if he didn't reach for the Phoenix on his own, because he's a kid and panicking, She'd step in all by Herself, because She's his freaking mom. Best case scenario, you've got Asgard and a whole bunch of other powerful people mad at you. Less bad scenario, you recreate the exact problem you're trying to avoid. Worst case scenario, you've got one of the Endless mad and out to make your life hell because you hurt her little boy. So leave him be. Let the freaking sleeping dragon lie. And don't conveniently forget to mention some monster gearing up to go after him if you hear about it in the hope that they'll take each other out or something like that." I paused, and though I hated to do it, decided to throw them a bone. "And if you do that, well… the kid's crazy powerful now, and he's only getting stronger. The Phoenix doesn't like vampires, we know that much, he's really freaking good with fire, and according to Thor, vampire hunting is considered a fun day out in Asgard – in short, I'm pretty sure that the kid isn't going to be a fan of the vamps. One way or another, if you, if we, leave him be now, let him get his head straight, then we might have a really powerful ally against the vampires a few years down the line."

"An impassioned argument, Wizard Dresden," LaFortier said. "But if I may ask one question before the Senior Council votes on the matter of Harry Thorson… would you not say that your testimony is potentially biased?"

"Biased how?" I asked.

"Harry Thorson's godmother is Wanda Maximoff, correct?" LaFortier said.

"Yeah," I said. "So what?"

"You are in a relationship with her, are you not?"

"Point of order," Liberty said. "Wizard Dresden's private life is not relevant to this discussion."

"Point of order," Ancient Mai said emotionlessly. "Since he is the Council's only witness to events, and apparently its sole source of advice, it is potentially relevant."

I ground my teeth. "Yes, I am," I said.

"What form does that relationship take?" LaFortier asked.

"We go on dates. We have fun. And in between romantic nights at home in-front of the fire, she teaches me magic as her apprentice," I snapped. None of the Senior Council looked surprised, which told me that Ebenezar had decided that it was best to tell them before I… did something like this, I suppose. "And my testimony in the kid's favour isn't based or conditional on us dating or her teaching. It's based on common sense and common decency, you should try them sometime."

LaFortier went white with anger, compounding his resemblance to a recently reanimated corpse.

"Wizard Dresden," the Merlin said, voice warning. I grudgingly accept your point, it said. But I don't like you and if you get smart with me one more time, I will make your life a misery. "You have been invited to speak in front of this Council, not given a license to exercise your capacity for insolence. Wizard LaFortier's line of questioning was relevant and your reply was out of order. You will apologise."

I ground my teeth again, but at a slight nod from Ebenezar, I gritted out an apology.

"And," I added. "I swear by my power that everything I have said is, to the best of my knowledge, true." I glowered at LaFortier, who glared back. Of the Merlin's faction on the Council, he'd always liked me the least, apparently being convinced that I was a threat to the Council. Being apprenticed to/dating the daughter of Magneto and heir apparent to Doctor Strange, two of the men who the Council liked least – and in the case of Strange, outright feared – had probably only confirmed that suspicion in his eyes. "Is that sufficient?"

"It is," the Merlin said firmly. "Thank you, Wizard Dresden. I believe that Captain Luccio would like your assessment of the threat posed by the newest forms of mortal weaponry, which you have unique experience with."

Taking this blatant dismissal for what it was, I left the room, hoping that the Council wouldn't do anything stupid.

OoOoO

As it was, I needn't have worried.

I underwent two hours of extensive debriefing by Captain Luccio, a leathery Italian woman with iron grey hair, the sinewy build of a blacksmith, and enough scars from centuries of heavy combat experience against the Council's many enemies to prove that she'd earned her rank in battle and make me disposed to respect her.

That respect grew somewhat, as she proved that unlike most of the Council, she was living in this century, not the last, or even the one before that, asking me the sort of brisk, no-nonsense questions I'd expect from someone like Coulson or another senior SHIELD Agent. As we spoke, she made copious notes in what looked like a form of shorthand.

After she was done, she stood up and nodded to me, the sort of nod that one would accord a junior but respected colleague, which left me staring in shock for a second before I returned it. The attitude I had come to expect from Senior Wardens was less 'respected colleague', more 'ticking time-bomb'.

"Thank you, Wizard Dresden, that was very helpful," she said, English fluent and inflected with her native Italian. "Intelligence reports from the Venatori or SHIELD are all very well, but they are no substitute for a seasoned combat Wizard's experience on how they respond to magic."

"'Seasoned combat wizard'?" I asked, eyebrow raised.

She smiled wryly. "Dresden, you have seen more combat than many wizards a century older than you, and more than a few of my Wardens," she said. "If you did not have such a poor relationship with the Council as whole, then I would offer you a job. You are more than qualified."

"Uh, no offence, but hell no!" I said. "I'd rather," I began, then paused. The following words, 'french-kiss a Red Court vampire' probably wouldn't go down well with the Captain of the Wardens. I coughed. "I mean, I don't think it would work."

Luccio looked amused at my unconvincing verbal gear-shift and nodded. "I happen to agree with you," she said. "You have had bad experiences in the past, and they have soured you. But we are not your enemy, Dresden."

I glanced back towards the meeting room. "Please explain that to LaFortier," I said. "And Ancient Mai. And the Merlin. And above all, freaking Morgan."

"They think you are dangerous," Luccio said. "And that much is true. They believe that you are a threat to the Council, but I do not."

"You… don't?" I said, surprised. "I was under the impression that all the senior Wardens thought I was the next best thing to Darth Vader."

"Many do," Luccio said. "Even most. But not all." Her lips twitched. "And the younger Wardens and many of the other Wizards of your generation think that you are… cool."

Oh, that's all I needed, to be idolised by a bunch of baby Wardens. "Great," I said aloud. "Morgan probably thinks that I'm corrupting the youth."

"Quite likely," Luccio agreed. "And don't rule us out yet, Dresden. There may yet be a career for you as a Warden. I know that you have made a career fighting dark creatures. As a Warden, you would have the chance to hone your skills and work with others to do so more efficiently."

I stared at the brisk, tough, and frankly, likeable woman, who'd treated me with more decency than anyone on the Council other than Ebenezar and his cronies. Then, my imagination superimposed the image that had haunted my nightmares throughout my early adulthood, one that still occasionally came back to haunt me in the early hours of the morning: an implacable shadowy grey-cloaked figure wielding an ice-bright razor-sharp sword, coming for my head.

I closed my eyes briefly and fought down an instinctive shiver. "Some bad experiences," I said. "Stick with you."

Luccio met my gaze, looking at me in a way that seemed uncomfortably like she was able to see right through me, then nodded slowly. "I understand," she said.

I nodded. "And you may do good things, Captain, but you do bad ones too," I said. "You kill children. Maybe they're Warlocks, maybe they're beyond the point of no return, maybe it's a necessary evil… but they're still children. And necessary or not, it's still an evil."

"You think that Morgan enjoys what he does?" Luccio asked, tone quiet but intense. "That I enjoyed it, when I was in his place?"

I looked back at her, and got many things – one of them a sense that this woman could quite comfortably kick my ass. "I could believe that Morgan did," I said. "You? I don't know you, Captain. That said, you don't seem like the type."

"But Morgan does," Luccio said.

"He spent half a decade following me around, waiting for the slightest excuse to cut my head off," I said flatly. "He dragged me out of a burning house, yeah, but considering how he's behaved since, I'm almost inclined to think that was only because he wants the pleasure of killing me himself. So yeah, I can believe it." I met her gaze briefly. "And even if you didn't enjoy it, Captain, even if you hated every moment of it, you still did it. I can't be a part of something like that."

"Do you think that the Avengers do not do similar things?" she asked, in tones of genuine inquiry.

"Murder people?" I asked. "I'm sure a few of them do. But do they kill kids? No. Hell no. That's a line, Captain, and it's one that even the Winter Soldier didn't cross. And it's not one that I'm going to cross, either."

Luccio stared at me hard for a long time, then nodded. "You are sincere in your convictions," she said. "I can respect that. But beware, Dresden: the more you get drawn into the orbit of the likes of Stephen Strange, Loki, and the Black Widow, the more you will find yourself questioning where those lines are, and which ones you are willing to cross." She stood up. "Thank you again for your assessments: with the taste of the Red Court in particular for mortal weaponry, this information can mean the difference between life and death for many Wizards."

I'm not often short of words, but this time was one of them, so instead, I just returned her nod, a little deeper. Thankfully, not a moment later, a trainee Warden knocked on the door and announced that the Senior Council would like to speak to me, having made their decision: they were, grudgingly, going with a strategy of live and let live.

Though frankly, after the conversation I'd just had, it didn't leave me as relieved as it should. After all, while I'd saved one kid who'd been in a bad place from having the sharp sword of the White Council's justice coming after him, he'd been well-enough protected anyway. And there were plenty of others without that protection who wouldn't be half so lucky.

OoOoO

Harry, meanwhile, was blissfully unaware of this and was talking a walk. Not alone, mind you. This was partly because Jesus' words about valuing friends and not pushing them away rang in his ears, and partly because various friends and family wouldn't let him go anywhere alone.

While Carol, who'd previously been limpet like in her attachment to him, had been nigh literally dragged away to go back to school (Harry, for his part, was having the relevant homework sent to him and being tutored by his father, uncle, and godmother, to ensure that as and when he did go back to Hogwarts, he wasn't behind), she had ensured that Uhtred took her place.

While less snuggling was involved, Uhtred was taking that directive and his oath as Harry's Sworn Sword incredibly seriously, having felt that he had failed Harry by not being there – this in spite of the fact that Harry had irritably pointed out, then briefly demonstrated by making him fall asleep for five minutes, before forcibly waking him up, he wouldn't have been able to do much against Essex, let alone Maddie. Uhtred had set his jaw and prepared to argue until Diana defused the situation.

"Harry, Uhtred is your friend. He cares about you. Additionally, he has a sworn duty to you, whether you like it or not," she said. "Uhtred, Harry is not a child and needs space to breathe. Additionally, he is correct – against a powerful mortal psychic, you would not have been much help even if you had been there, and would likely have suffered in much the same way that he did. And you could not have known that there would have been danger, for even those far older and wiser than you did not foresee what would happen. Now, I would much prefer it if the two of you behaved as young adults, rather than snapping wolves."

Freki and Geri, now present once more, looked up, letting out slightly offended whines.

"My apologies," Diana said, addressing them. "You two are, of course, far better behaved."

Both wolves, mollified, settled down. While they followed Harry around now that he was in Asgard again, much of their attention was occupied by the fact that, after an incident with a couple of the bitches in the royal hunting pack, they now had cubs/puppies (the terminology was still up for debate). Whatever they were referred to as, the meanderings of these small, adorable bundles of fluff provided their fathers with much to keep an eye out for, and much raising of spirits for everyone else – especially as they had been quickly toilet trained.

Harry chuckled as one of the puppies nosed at his ankles, looking up at him with hopeful expression that telegraphed a desire for treats and/or attention, and gave it a scratch behind the ears. The puppies were coming to an age where they would be old enough to find owners of their own. One boisterous little male had adopted Uhtred, while a graceful young female had seemed to similarly attach herself to Diana – though most of them seemed inclined to attach themselves to Diana.

Harry, meanwhile, didn't especially feel inclined to own a dog, or even a wolf-dog – he already had an owl, Hedwig, who had fussed over him after he'd got home, and then spent the next couple of weeks hopefully presenting him with dead mice in an attempt to speed up his recovery. The puppies seemed to notice this, so didn't really latch onto him.

One, however, had been taken home by Carol – not for her. She already had a rather grumpy cat called Chewie. No, it was for her uncle.

OoOoO

"Well," O'Neill said slowly, staring at the large fluffy thing bouncing around his feet. He was standing on his own two feet again, having begrudgingly decided to have the Serum in his DNA activated. This didn't change much, other than remove a few lines and add a little muscle, but the differences went far beyond skin-deep. "I _have_ always wanted a dog."

"I know, right?" Carol said, smiling winningly. "And aren't I such a good niece for getting you one?"

"It's not Christmas _or_ my birthday," O'Neill said, tone unchanged. "It's not even Thanksgiving."

"Make that _amazing_ niece."

"Uh-huh. Now, where did this puppy come from?" O'Neill said.

Carol looked shifty.

"And how old is it?"

Carol looked even shiftier.

"Carol Susan Jane Danvers..."

"Agh, not the full name," Carol said, making a face. "He's eight weeks old."

O'Neill stared at the puppy. It was up to his knees. "Eight weeks."

"Yup."

"What kind of dog are we talking here?"

"I'm not sure if this is exactly a breed," Carol said. "But it's half Asgardian hunting hound, half..." She coughed. "Wolf."

"Wolf."

"Either Freki or Geri," Carol said. "They're Odin's wolves, and one night, they and a few of the female dogs got a little frisky."

O'Neill gave her a flat look. "Half wolf. Half _Asgardian_ wolf," he said.

"Yeah."

"How am I going to play fetch with something like that?" O'Neill asked. "Uproot a tree and get a tank to drag it along behind?"

"On the plus side, you'll never have to worry about intruders again."

"Yes, Carol, because it would eat them."

"He wouldn't," Carol said. "Well. Not whole, anyway."

O'Neill sighed. "Look, Carol," he began.

"They're really loyal, and Freki and Geri, they're total softies," Carol said hurriedly. "He won't be any trouble and like you said, you've always wanted a dog."

"Carol, if he runs off, I will be dragged along behind like the cans on a wedding car," O'Neill said. "I try to take a stick from him, he pulls back, I lose an arm. I do not want to be the cans on a wedding car. I do not want to lose an arm."

"That's why I brought this," Carol said, producing a collar, grabbing the puppy. "Its magic," she continued, trying to put the collar on the squirming fuzzball. "Really neat magic: it restricts his strength unless you're in danger."

"I've seen Freki and Geri, you've shown me pictures," O'Neill said. "Superpowers or no superpowers, they could still swallow most dogs whole."

"Well, you can teach him not to," Carol said.

"I... oh, look, give it here," O'Neill said, taking the puppy with a grunt of effort and grabbing it by the scruff of the neck. "Behave," he said sternly. The puppy stopped, if only because it was staring, fascinated, at him. "Collar," O'Neill said, without looking away. Carol handed it over, and, puppy under arm, he attached the collar. The puppy let out a happy bark.

"So, you want to keep him?" Carol asked.

"I'm thinking about it."

"He's bonded with you," Carol said in a sing song voice. "Look at the look on his cute little face."

"I've seen that look on your cute little face, it never stopped me telling you that you couldn't have more ice cream," O'Neill said, but he wasn't looking at her.

Carol smirked and played her trump card. "That hot Major you've been working with, Major Carter. I hear that she likes dogs," she said.

"She does?" O'Neill asked, surprised, then glowered at his smirking niece. "Fine," he said. "I'll take him. If you stop looking so smug."

"I'm just happy for you, uncle Jack," Carol said, the picture of innocence.

"And I'm the Queen of Sheba," O'Neill muttered, and looked the dog over. "Part wolf, huh?"

"Yup."

"That dog, in _Call of the Wild_... Buck. He was part wolf, right?"

"I think so," Carol said suspiciously, then her eyes widened. "Oh, you're not thinking..."

O'Neill grinned. "Bucky it is."

"Grandpa Steve is going to have a fit, you know that."

"The look on his face will be worth all the Christmas presents I never got," O'Neill said. "Now, I think I'd better go get a leash. And stop it with the smugness."

 **Aaand ending the chapter on a lighter note. I hope you enjoyed it. Barring a sudden, feverish burst of writing, this will be my last chapter before I head up to Edinburgh, whereupon I will likely soon become very busy. In any case, though, the chapter in question will largely contain Ron and Hermione's response to events (basically, being worried to death about Harry), Harry's return to Hogwarts, and more serious matters, such as the origins of the Odinforce, of Yggdrasil, and Asgard as we know it, all those things that Odin wanted to explain to Thor. Also, we find out the origin of Doctor Strange!**

 **In short: things that will make a lot of hints that I've been dropping make a lot of rather terrifying sense.**

 **Sooo… my usual blend of fluff and terror, I suppose. Reviews and editing of the fic's tv tropes page are always appreciated, so please feel free to do both.**


	18. Chapter 18: Guesswork

**Aaand I'm back, now being firmly ensconced in Edinburgh, and mostly sobered up after the Welcome Week. Urgh, I'm never drinking again (okay, so that's a downright lie, but I'm not inclined to drink again for a while). Though, honestly, drinking is probably a smarter decision than trying to learn to ancient languages at once (or in the case of Latin, partially relearn, while Ancient Greek I'm starting from scratch). Both melt your brain and at least drinking is fun at the time. While I'm technically just auditing Latin, ugh. Not my best idea. Also, Postgrad stress is getting to me a bit, and while normally I'd stop writing, writing is my main source of relaxation and… *sigh***

 **Anyhow, I know I said that this chapter would end with Harry back at Hogwarts, and the secret origin of Stephen Strange, but with one thing and another, I tried to do too much in one chapter, and while it's nearly complete, it would be around 25,000 words. Therefore, I decided to cut into two more digestible chunks, and this way you'd get two chapters in a month.**

 **Chronologically speaking, I think it actually works better this way, since there's a bit less temporal jumping around this way. Thematically too, it works better, since this will be the grounded, Earth based chapter, where we get a look at how things are looking to those who aren't inside the Avengers' circle, and are therefore rather confused and worried.**

 **In any case, while Harry won't be back at Hogwarts, his absence will be discussed, and we'll be seeing a** _ **lot**_ **of Ron and Hermione, and while Strange's origin and who he really is/was isn't elaborated on (no one has so far guessed without prompting), for those of you who have some idea about my corkscrew thinking might pick up on the whacking great clue. Also, there will be reveals, including of the new Hogwarts Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher.**

 **Now, please, dear reader, read on.**

Normally, Hermione was excited to return to Hogwarts. While she loved her parents dearly, and they were very understanding about supplying her with books on and of magic, the fact that it was illegal to perform magic outside of school, the lack of access to the Hogwarts Library – which, even taking into account the Restricted Section, was far more extensive than Flourish & Blotts could ever hope to be – and frankly, the inability to talk to anyone who _understood_ about magic… it was maddening. Especially with all the strange things that had been happening these last couple of weeks, which just _had_ to be magic related. She couldn't _wait_ to get her teeth into some serious research.

Additionally, aside from letters to Ron and Ginny, which were unlikely to lead to serious discussions on magic per se, and while Loki had said that he was more than happy to respond to queries by text or email, she didn't want to bother him (and he'd seemed very busy recently). The only people she was actually _allowed_ to talk to about magic were her parents, who were amiably ignorant about it – they knew enough to be very proud of their daughter, but they tended to glaze over when she went into detail.

Of course, she supposed that in theory she could find someone else to talk to, a muggle. But to frank, even most witches and wizards either tended to assume that she couldn't really understand what she was talking about, or glazed over in much the same way. There had been that nice man she'd met in the Leaky Cauldron after she'd met up with Harry and his friends, a somewhat scruffy looking dark-haired wizard who'd introduced himself as Ambrose Penn after she'd nerved herself up to inquire why a wizard, one casually stirring his tea with a twiddle of his finger while reading a book, would choose _A Brief History of Time_ by Stephen Hawking to read.

As it transpired, he was a Welsh muggle raised half-blood, wandless by background – he alluded vaguely to a history with the White Council, but skipped over the details – and his mentor had drilled him in both magic and the sciences. As for the book in particular, it was a favourite of his and he re-read it every year or so. They'd had a very pleasant discussion about magical theory and the differences between wandless and wanded magic – he'd been intrigued by, but surprisingly accepting of, the idea that she was being tutored by Loki – before her parents, who'd done some shopping in muggle London, came to pick her up.

It had been a very pleasant experience, but sadly, a rare one. For one thing, unlike Harry, she didn't have a knack for making friends. Harry, of course, was somewhat reserved, but he was nice, friendly, and accidentally charming. It also helped that everyone in the Wizarding World knew who he was, though mostly he seemed to find that aggravating, and that powers and background aside, in interests at least, he was in many respects a very normal teenage boy. Certainly, though, he never had any problem making friends. Hermione had never been very ordinary in terms of her interests, or her attitude, and neither had helped her make friends. Until Harry and Ron, she hadn't really had any, actually. Now she had Ginny too, and she got on with a number of the other Gryffindor girls and girls in her year, but still…

Anyway, that was largely academic. Unlike Harry, she wasn't Asgardian royalty and a national hero in the Wizarding World, and therefore couldn't treat the Statute of Secrecy with the same cavalier disregard that he did, even if she had wanted to. Besides, anyone who knew who his father was knew who his uncle was too, and knew that his uncle could do magic, meaning that he could discuss magic without any necessary connection being made to the Wizarding World. In theory, he _could_ bend the Statute without breaking it… though knowing Harry, he probably wouldn't bother even if it occurred to him. As Hermione knew very well, Harry tended to regard most rules as things to be worked around rather than obeyed, and the consequences of breaking them as reasons not to be caught instead of actual deterrents. Knowing his father and uncle, she suspected that it was hereditary.

Now, though, she was looking around the Great Hall in puzzlement and increasing worry – a mood not improved by the gale they'd faced when getting off the train and Peeves' water-balloon bomb ambush. She was not the only one, either. Ron was looking too, and both of them had noticed, even if no one else, one very important thing: Harry was not there. He hadn't been on the train, and any faint hope that he'd been taken directly to Hogwarts was evaporating before their eyes.

"You're _sure_ he was all right," Ron said, for the fifth time that day.

"For the last time, Ron, _yes_ ," Hermione said impatiently. "He looked as well as he's ever been, better, even, just two weeks ago when I saw him in Diagon Alley."

"Well, what's happened to him?" Ron asked, frowning.

"I have no idea," Hermione said.

It should at this point be noted that right now, Harry was still in the early stages of recovery in Asgard, while Loki was very busy plotting the mass murder of every Red Room Agent or Senior Official he could lay hands on, or plotting to arrange for other people to do it for him. Which, as it happened, would be where he would remain for the next few weeks, and what Loki would be doing for the next few weeks, as has already been covered.

However, it goes without saying that Ron and Hermione did not know this. So, they were still puzzled and worrying.

"And what I want to know," Hermione continued irately. "Is why _no one_ else has _noticed?_ "

Ron, for the first time, properly looked up at the staff table and let out a low whistle. "I think I might know why," he said.

Hermione blinked at him in confusion, then looked up at the staff table properly for the first time that night. At first, she didn't see anything out of the ordinary. Then, she noticed two newcomers. One was relatively ordinary looking, a youngish man with chin length honey brown hair and a pleasantly unmemorable face of the sort that could be anywhere between 21 and 35 in the right light. All that really stood out about him were a remarkable pair of sapphire blue eyes and an amused expression.

The other, however, seemed to have the attention of most of the hall, especially the male half. She was young, in her early twenties, and dressed in an unusual set of red lined black robes with a white blouse like arrangement underneath. She had wavy dark hair that fell to her shoulders, dark eyes, and a Mediterranean complexion. She was also, by common consent of that chunk of the Hogwarts population that was attracted to women – and in some cases among the younger students, very suddenly realising that they were attracted to women – absolutely stunning.

Hermione let out a disgusted sigh. Of course, everyone was paying attention to the pretty new teacher.

Then again, she had to admit, there was reason for the attention beyond the fact that she was attractive. New teachers (and with the rapid turnover of Defence Against the Dark Arts teachers, a new one was expected practically every year) were of interest to the entire school, especially when there was more than one, as there was this year. That was different. While Hagrid had become part of the teaching faculty last year, he'd always sat at the staff table anyway, so it hadn't been immediately apparent.

And as for Harry, well. There had been lengthy discussions about him on the train, which Ron and Hermione had been accosted for their opinions on – even the _Daily Prophet_ couldn't miss the Battle of London, and it certainly hadn't missed Harry's involvement, even if it – like everything else – was vague on the details. But everyone, with reason, assumed that he would turn up at some point, and likely in spectacular fashion. After all, it wouldn't be the first time he'd missed the feast, as he had a couple of years ago, at which point he and Ron turned up by crashing a flying car into the Whomping Willow.

Hermione was pulled out of her thoughts as the Sorting Hat was placed on its pedestal. And, as tradition had it, a tear opened in its brim and it began to sing.

 _A thousand years or more ago_

 _When I was newly sewn,_

 _There lived four wizards of renown,_

 _Whose names are still well known:_

 _Bold Gryffindor, from wild moor,_

 _Fair Ravenclaw, from glen,_

 _Sweet Hufflepuff, from valley broad,_

 _Shrewd Slytherin, from fen._

 _They knew each other well,_

 _Families through ages intertwined,_

 _Taught and raised together,_

 _They were greatest when combined._

 _They shared a wish, a hope, a dream,_

 _They hatched a daring plan_

 _To educate young sorcerers_

 _Thus Hogwarts School began._

 _And what a school Hogwarts was,_

 _A beacon against the dark,_

 _Met with relief by Merlin's Council,_

 _For no wand was their mark._

 _But as mages were split in two,_

 _Along a meaningless line,_

 _So the founders made the same mistake,_

 _By dividing with intent to define._

 _Each of these four founders_

 _Formed their own house, for each_

 _Did value different virtues_

 _In the ones they had to teach._

 _By Gryffindor, the bravest were_

 _Prized far beyond the rest;_

 _For Ravenclaw, the cleverest_

 _Would always be the best;_

 _For Hufflepuff, hard workers were_

 _Most worthy of admission;_

 _And power-hungry Slytherin_

 _Loved those of great ambition._

 _While still alive they did divide_

 _Their favourites from the throng,_

 _But saw not how their differences,_

 _Grew before they were dead and gone._

 _And grow they did,_

 _Until angry words were spoken,_

 _Words of bitterness and division,_

 _And everlasting friendship was broken._

 _No longer combined, the split grew,_

 _Between Gryffindor and Slytherin,_

 _And wizard and muggle,_

 _A sundering of kith and kin._

 _Now, the world is much changed,_

 _The age of heroes is returned,_

 _And in our disarray,_

 _The error in division is seemingly confirmed._

 _Yet still, divide you I must,_

 _But remember while in houses four,_

 _Once four were one,_

 _And combined were so much more._

"Did it have to go on longer than usual?" Ron groused.

"Honestly, Ron, didn't you listen to what it said?" Hermione whispered as the Sorting began, while frowning at the Hat. "That was a warning, a very clear one, about sticking together – and not just wizards, either. The world's changing, and we all need to work together, or we'll repeat old mistakes, that's what it's saying."

Ron subsided as the Sorting continued, while Hermione kept a close eye on Dumbledore. Maybe he might provide some clue on what was going on.

When it came to it, that was indeed the case.

As usual, when Dumbledore rose, an attentive silence fell. He smiled, and spread his arms wide.

"For the time being, I have only two words to say to you," he said. " _Tuck in."_

"Hear, hear!" Ron said loudly, looking expectantly as his plate as it began to fill magically before his eyes.

Hermione frowned, but opted to start eating, all while keeping an eye on both Dumbledore and the doors, just in case Harry burst in. This involved her eyes darting between the two much of the time, and her neglecting Ron, but in truth, Ron was so set on sating his hunger and trying to distract himself from worrying about his best friend that he was happily occupied anyway.

Soon enough, the puddings were demolished, and the last crumbs vanished, and Dumbledore got to his feet again. Almost immediately, the chatter stopped as if cut by a knife, leaving only the howling wind and pounding rain outside to be heard.

"So," Dumbledore said. "Now that we are all fed and watered, I must once more ask for your attention and forbearance, while I give out a few notices. Mr Filch, the caretaker, has asked me to tell you that the list of objects forbidden inside the castle has this years been extended to include Screaming Yo-yos, Fanged Frisbees, and Ever-Bashing Boomerangs. The full list comprises some four hundred and thirty-seven items, I believe, and can be viewed in Mr Filch's office, if anybody would like to check it." The twitch of his lips suggested that he felt this was unlikely, as did just about everyone else. Then, he continued. "As ever, I would like to remind you all that the Forest in the grounds is out-of-bounds to students, as is the village of Hogsmeade to all below third year."

His expression suddenly turned serious. "This warning takes on an especial significance this year. I am sure that none of you missed the day earlier this summer when the skies went red, and the many articles that covered the events in London. While many of those articles were largely inaccurate, there is some truth to what they were saying. The jointly muggle and magical terrorist organisation known as HYDRA successfully wielded ancient and immensely powerful dark magic, magic that quickly grew far beyond their control. That magic tore at the fabric of reality, and I personally witnessed the horrors that it unleashed. While the vast majority of those horrors were banished back to whence they came, not all were. Moreover."

He looked over the students, and suddenly, Hermione noticed that he looked very old. This was not as an odd an observation as it might seem, as while Dumbledore was old, he mostly seemed somehow ageless. Now, he seemed every year of his very great age.

"As every one of you in Second Year and above will know, there is one student who should be entering her Third Year tonight who is not here," he said. "Luna Lovegood. A wise, kind, and intelligent girl, she was killed by HYDRA when they attacked this castle simply because she happened to be in their way. Thanks to the courage of the staff, and one particular student, Harry Thorson – better known to many of you as Harry Potter – that was the limit of the permanent harm HYDRA did in Hogwarts that night. As all of us are well aware, however, that was not even close to the limit of the harm they did elsewhere and in the days that followed."

His gaze swept the hall. "HYDRA have been defeated, their armies shattered, and their lairs destroyed, while those few remnants that escaped have gone into hiding. They are, for the time being at least, no real threat to anyone. But they are far from the only source of darkness in this world, and their actions have stirred up far more, awakening things that had been dormant up until now. Some of those things have made their home in the Forbidden Forest."

He let this sink in.

"While you are in the Castle and on the grounds, we, as teachers, are able to protect you," he said. "And we will strive to do so with every breath in our bodies. In the eyes of some parents, that is not enough. Some among you might have noticed that there are other students who are not here who perhaps should be. Those of you who remain are here because your parents chose to send you to Hogwarts and to put your safety in our hands. If you stray off the grounds, then you are taking yourselves out of our hands and we will not be able to protect you. This is not an absolution of responsibility, it is a sincere warning. Stay out of the Forest."

Then, the seriousness faded somewhat, to be replaced by a smile. "Now, on to lighter matters, though ones I think that many of you will find more immediately distressing, it is my painful duty to inform you that the inter-house Quidditch Cup will not take place this year."

Hermione vaguely noticed that most of the boys, particularly Ron and his brothers, looked appalled, but listened ferociously.

"This is due to an event that will be starting in October, and continuing throughout the school year, taking up much of the teachers' time and energy – but I am sure you will all enjoy it immensely. I have great pleasure in announcing that this year at Hogwarts we will be hosting the Triwizard Tournament."

"You're JOKING!" Fred said loudly.

The tension that had filled the hall since Dumbledore's grim warning suddenly broke, and dissolved into laughter, with Dumbledore joining in.

"I am _not_ joking, Mr Weasley," he said. "Though, now you mention it, I did hear an excellent one about a troll, a hag and a leprechaun who all go into a bar –"

Professor McGonagall cleared her throat loudly, cutting off this perambulation in its tracks. The unidentified young man appeared to be sniggering.

"Er – but maybe this is not the time," Dumbledore said. "Where was I? Ah yes, the Tournament. Since some of you will not know what this Tournament involves, so I hope those who _do_ know will forgive me for a brief explanation and allow their attention to wander freely."

Hermione, however, paid close attention as Dumbledore sketched out a brief history of the Tournament: in essence, it was between Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, and Durmstrang, hosted on rotation every five years, with three magical tasks to be completed by one champion from each school. It had been cancelled, however, because of the death toll, and recently revived by the Ministry Departments of International Magical Co-Operation and Magical Games.

"Due to recent problems, security will be overseen by MI13, the Muggle government's supernatural security agency," Dumbledore said.

"Who?" Ron asked, puzzled.

"I'll explain later," Hermione said, listening carefully as Dumbledore explained the arrival dates of the Heads of the schools, their short list of contenders, the selection date and the mysterious 'impartial judge', and the prize. In the process, she tuned out the surrounding excitement. Then, Dumbledore made to speak again, after a brief pause, and all went quiet.

"Eager though I know all of you will be to bring the Triwizard Cup to Hogwarts," he said in a quelling tone. "The Heads of the participating schools, along with the Ministry of Magic and MI13, have agreed to impose an age restriction on contenders this year. Only students who are of age – that is to say, seventeen years or older – will be allowed to put their names forward for consideration. This," Dumbledore continued, over sounds of outrage, those made by the Weasley Twins prominent among them. "Is a measure we feel is necessary, given that the Tournament tasks will still be difficult and dangerous, no matter the precautions we take, and it is highly unlikely that students below sixth and seventh year will be able to cope with them. I will be personally ensuring that no underage student hoodwinks our impartial judge into making them Hogwarts Champion." His light blue eyes seemed to linger, twinkling, on Fred and George's mutinous expressions. "Therefore, I beg you not to waste your time submitting yourself if you are under seventeen."

He then turned to the rest of the staff table. "Speaking of the Tournament, it is rather fortunate this year that we are hosting the tournament because of one of our new members of staff," he said. "Who is a graduate of Beauxbatons Academy. I would like to introduce to you all to your new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, Professor Zatanna Zatara!"

The young woman, Italian if Hermione had to guess, stood up with a brilliant smile to accept an enthusiastic round of applause, before settling down again.

"Professor Zatara will also be teaching an optional class for those sixth and seventh years who have chosen to drop Defence Against the Dark Arts for their NEWTS in her area of specialisation, merging wanded and wandless magic," Dumbledore said.

 _That_ caused a stir.

"She will also be joined by our other new member of staff," Dumbledore said. "Professor Gwion Bach, who will be teaching an optional class on Magical Theory and Musical Magic."

This got a more polite and perfunctory round of applause, one that might have ruffled another man's feathers. Professor Bach, however, simply stood, sapphire blue eyes twinkling with a strangely familiar kind of mischief, and accepted it with a flourishing bow that drew laughter, before it died down again.

"And with introductions completed," Dumbledore said. "I will keep you from your beds no longer. Bedtime! Chop chop!"

With that, he sat down again, talking, oddly, to Professor Bach, as with a great scraping and banging the students of Hogwarts got to their feet.

"Hermione!"

Hermione looked up, surprised, to see Ron standing over her impatiently. "Come on," he said.

"Oh, right," Hermione said, standing up. "But don't you think it's odd? All that mention of missing students and what's been going on these past few months, and Dumbledore never even mentioned that Harry wasn't here." She frowned. "Which means," she continued slowly. "That for whatever reason, it's some kind of secret."

She was, as it happened, right about that.

OoOoO

Speaking of Harry, most of the recent discussions on dangerous people had focused on him, for the entirely understandable reason that his body under the Red Room's control had upended half the planet. And most hadn't really bothered to make the distinction that his mind had evacuated his body, and in the minds of most of those who had, if anything, that made it worse. The Red Son had been ruthless, but very technical, very by the numbers. Harry himself added an x-factor: humanity. He had plenty of imagination, emotion (mainly rage, in terms of what was relevant), and a degree of stubborn determination that beggared belief. And that, as experience had demonstrated, made him far more dangerous than he should logically be.

And then, were that not enough, there was his manifestation of the Dark Phoenix, which attracted, nay, demanded, attention. And what attention there was left to spare had been devoted to the apparent psychotic break of Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, a man with more power than was good for anyone, more knowledge than anyone had ever successfully estimated, and a habit of stealing Infinity Stones for his own purposes/amusement.

Taken together, it was almost enough to make one forget that the twin sister of the most powerful psychic ever born had emerged, having been stolen as an infant and raised as a weapon by an immortal, sociopathic shapeshifting telepath, imbued with all his vast and dark skills, and his rather skewed sense of morality. And, more to the point, she had now discovered the joys of free will, meaning that, frankly, anything could happen.

Almost.

The subject of Madelyn Pryor, born Rachel Grey, and currently settling on a compromise form of Maddie Grey, came up eventually.

"She's dangerous," Fury said. "Too dangerous to run loose."

"She's a child," Steve said.

"She's also an Omega class psychic, one of the two most powerful ever to exist, twisted from birth into a living weapon by a madman so canny that even Doctor Strange couldn't track him," Fury said flatly. "One piece of subconscious programming activates, or she just snaps one day, and we're all dead, along with half the planet. She needs a psychic and psychological assessment, somewhere where she can't hurt anyone."

"Surely Professor Xavier is the best qualified to perform such an assessment," Thor said. "And need I remind you, Nicholas, Mjolnir deemed her Worthy. That is no small thing."

"Thor, I have great faith in the abilities and will of Charles Xavier. But he already has two Omega Class students, one Omega Class associate student of sorts in your son, and multiple Alpha Class students to deal with," Fury said.

"Even before you take into account that a member of his faculty, Logan, is one of the most dangerous men alive and has had his minded fucked by people turning him into a living weapon on numerous occasions," Alison remarked. "To the point where it is hard to tell where his original personality begins and the alterations end, with any amount of psychic scar tissue in between."

Her involvement might have been a puzzler at first, but it was simple fact that her reconfirmation as joint Deputy Director with Maria Hill at the stage where the actual confirmation was a mere formality. Therefore, she was taking part in this discussion too. Hill, meanwhile, was running SHIELD's side of the operations that were scrambling to deal with those groups looking to take advantage of the gaping hole that the Red Room's sudden demise (mostly at Loki's hands) had left. Nature abhors a vacuum, and everyone from Chechen rebels to Islamic fundamentalists to half a dozen HYDRA splinter factions, while also trying to track down senior HYDRA leaders such as Lucius Malfoy, Baron Zemo, and Doctor Zola.

Fury inclined his head to his old mentor. "He might be beefing up his faculty with his old students, but I'm also planning to send all the young superhumans evacuated from the Red Room to him for, at the very least, preliminary mental assessment," he said. "Add an Omega Class living weapon to that list? Even Xavier has limits." He folded his arms. "And as for being Worthy, that's all well and good, but I'd rather not count on that alone."

"Well, you're not taking her and locking her away," another voice said coldly.

Everyone turned to the youngest person present. Harry, formerly a subject of similar discussions, had recovered sufficiently to take part in this one. As for why he was taking part of it, the simple fact was that of those present, he knew Maddie best. And it went unspoken that considering how he'd put his body and mind on the line to try and save her soul even before he'd suffered the torments of the Red Room and the memories of the Red Son, it was probably best that he was involved in this discussion from the start, so he didn't hear about it later in part and get the wrong idea and, well. It was generally agreed that that would be bad.

His eyes, though, were only on Fury, who met his gaze without blinking.

"Because if you're planning to do that, you'll have to go through me," Harry continued. His eyes ignited, burning a dangerous gold and he squared up to Fury. "Or to be more accurate; _I'll go through you."_

The threat was unmistakeable, even without the echoing timbre Harry's voice acquired at the end. Fury, though, to his credit, didn't even blink, as the tension in the room ratcheted up several dozen notches to near breaking point.

"Harry," Loki said carefully.

"No!" Harry snapped, whirling on his uncle, shaking off his father's restraining arm as he did, eyes literally blazing. "I mean it! She's family, she's been through hell, and I'm not seeing her go through more just because someone's feeling paranoid!"

"How would you even contain her in the first place?" Bruce asked. There was a hint of green in his eyes, but otherwise he was keeping his calm. "Let alone get into her mind. If she can overpower and contain Harry, she can do the same to anyone SHIELD have."

"Psychic abilities aren't just about power," Fury said, and gave Harry a pointed look. "As recent events have demonstrated."

Harry flinched.

"Nicholas," Thor growled.

"Truth hurts," Fury said flatly. "And much as I would like to, the subject we are dealing with means that we do not have the luxury of treating it with kid gloves." He folded his arms. "As recent events have also demonstrated, there are ways around the power thing."

"Like what?" Steve asked, in tones that made it very clear that if Fury was planning to replicate the techniques of the Red Room, they were going to have Words.

"Psychic abilities require focus," Natasha said, tone detached. "Reduce a psychic's ability to focus and they're as vulnerable as anyone else. Drugs. Gas. Physical pain. Sensory overload. Thirst, starvation and sleep deprivation also work, if you've got the time. Though pain and sensory overload risk the psychic lashing out. And if all that fails, they're as vulnerable as anyone to sniper round through the head from a kilometre away."

There was a long moment in which everyone remembered that Natasha was kind of terrifying.

"It would work," Harry contributed flatly, and Natasha gave him a look that on anyone else would have been neutral, but on her was closer to apologetic, and received a minute shrug in reply.

"Fury," Steve said, horrified. "You wouldn't."

"Oh, he would, if he felt it necessary," Loki said darkly. "He wouldn't like it, but making the choice between the lives of tens, hundreds, of millions and the comfort of one living weapon? That's no choice at all."

"Takes one to know one," Fury replied.

Loki smiled thinly. "Quite," he said, and sighed. "And he does have a point. There is no denying that Maddie is unbelievably dangerous. She may not want to hurt anyone, but she could easily do so through simple ignorance; while she knows very well the mechanics of her powers, she is still struggling through their morality. While I do not feel that buried triggers or control words are any real threat; going by the varied accounts of their travels into the Dreaming, it seems that Lily purged her of them, there is the potential issue of, frankly, mental stability. That might be worth looking into. Though there is a practical problem with delving into her mind, Director, even if that were the appropriate course of action – a mind that powerful is not going to be easy to grapple with, even weakened and sedated. In the worst case scenario, the result could be the fracturing of her mind, leaving an insane Omega Class psychic capable of unleashing such horrors on this world as have never been witnessed."

"So what alternative do you have to offer?" Fury asked.

"Trust," Steve said simply.

"Excuse me?" Fury asked, eyebrow raised.

"Trust her," Steve said. "Harry and Jean have shared minds with her, and they trust her. They'd arguably be in the best position to know."

"Or be deceived," Fury countered.

"Maybe," Steve allowed. "But look around this room, Fury. Look at the Avengers. As Doctor Strange put it, we know the value of a second chance more than any other group in the world. All of us were given a chance to prove ourselves, a chance we took. You gave us the chance to prove ourselves as a team. You took a leap of faith, you trusted us. I don't know all of what went on in that Red Room base, and I probably won't until we have a full debriefing. But I know this much: Maddie wants to change. Despite being raised from birth to be Essex's weapon, when she was offered a way out, she took it. More than that, she put her own escape at risk to do the right thing."

He looked Fury in the eye. "She's out there right now, Fury. She could have run, have left to make a life somewhere else and with what she can do, you'd probably never have found her. But she came in of her own free will, knowing the risks. She's trusting us, Fury. The very least we owe her is to return the favour. She's shown that she deserves it."

"There is also empirical evidence for our trust, Director," Loki said. "Simply consider the differences between how she has treated those who treated her as a weapon, who did not trust her in the least, most especially the one who stole her from her crib and made her that weapon, installing trigger phrases in her mind, and how she has treated those who have trusted her, opening their minds to her, and treated her as a person. To those who treated her as a weapon, that is what she was, one that turned on them and destroyed them. But to those who treated her as a young woman, a girl, someone who wanted to be better, someone in need of kindness and compassion, that is what she was – someone who was better."

"Also, you owe me about twelve years of Christmas and Birthday presents," Harry said bluntly. "Give her a chance and I'll call it even."

That broke the tension, and after the laughter subsided, Fury looked around at them. "You're all agreed, then?" he said.

"Yes," Steve said firmly.

"Yes," Loki said.

"I know what it is to trust someone who is seen as dangerous, as a threat," Thor said, getting a wry smile from Loki. "I also know what it is to need a second chance. Most of all," he added, putting a hand on Harry's shoulder. "I trust my son's judgement. I say yes."

"I know a little something about being seen as a weapon and a monster," Bruce said. "Loki's right. I say yes."

"She made the right call, went out on a limb to do the right thing," Clint said, then nodded at Harry. "Plus, like Thor said, I trust the kid's judgement. Sounds like a good egg to me."

"I wasn't going to say anything. I figured that Steve would probably say it better," Tony said. "But…" He shrugged. "It might just be the dad hormones talking, but I know weapons, and to me, she looks more like a scared kid than a living weapon." He shrugged again. "Also, if she does snap and decide to kill us all, it's not like there's going to be any real way to stop her. I say yes."

"Yes," Natasha said simply.

There was silence, until Harry realised that everyone was looking at him. "What? Oh. Yes."

"Seems like it's settled then," Fury said. "I just hope you're right."

OoOoO

Other discussions, on other similar side-effects of cataclysmic actions were thankfully rather less fraught.

"Following the upheavals caused by Harry and Maddie's psychic battle, and the more recent... outburst," Loki said. "I think we'd best examine the side-effects of Chthon's actions. And Harry's in repairing them. While he did a phenomenal job under unbelievably trying circumstances, there were changes made."

"What sort of changes?" Steve asked.

"There is a place in the English Midlands called the Forest of Arden, since it was once forested, but all the forest had long since been cut down," Loki said. "The inhabitants of the area were therefore rather surprised when the forest reappeared overnight, over-running a large golf course. The owners are not pleased. Director Wisdom is supposedly not pleased either, though the impression I got was that he actually thinks it's funny."

"You mean, that guy actually enjoys something other than other people's suffering?" Tony asked.

"Surprisingly enough, yes, though I think that the suffering of the owners of the golf course was what he found particularly amusing."

"I take it that this isn't an isolated incident," Steve said.

"Indeed it is not," Loki said. "By my estimates, global forest coverage has increased, not quite to pre-Industrial levels, but significantly nevertheless. The Amazon rainforest in particular seems to have devoured quite a few logging operations and ranches of dubious legality. The effects have focused on specific areas of known decline of the natural world - retreating glaciers, ice cover in the Arctic, that sort of thing. They've made comebacks, as has the Aral Sea. The Sahara desert also seems to have shrunk. Greenhouse gas levels in the Earth's atmosphere seem to have declined significantly - again, not quite to pre-Industrial levels, but close. In the main, however, the effects have focused on Britain. Forest cover has re-expanded, water pollution has greatly decreased, and long term forecasts are being revised for a snowy winter. At first, I thought that this was simply a side effect of the altering effects of Chthon's emergence, like the credible sightings confirmed by Heimdall of various creatures long extinct, such as Megalodon - a sixty foot long shark, Woolly Mammoths, Terror Birds and several varieties of ancient dragon."

"Terror Birds?" Clint asked.

"Imagine a combination of an over-sized ostrich and a velociraptor and you're close," Loki said briefly. "Wolves are also being seen in regions they were previously extirpated from, and Australia now has its formerly extinct range of horrifying giant creatures to add to its current range of horrifying small to medium sized creatures. The locals are, of course, delighted and celebrating by trying to find out how such formerly extinct creatures taste when barbecued. The local dragon species, particularly the Antipodean Opal-Eye, are also thriving as a result."

"You said at first you thought it was a side-effect," Natasha said. "What do you think it is now?"

"I think that it is partly a side-effect, creatures slipping through time," Loki said. "I also think, however, that some of it was Harry's subconscious at work. He is, after all, a young man in many respects, but a boy in many others. I believe his subconscious expectations reshaped the world. Weather patterns, for instance: he grew up in Britain, with a cultural expectation of snow at Christmas despite a usual lack of more than a slight dusting of snow in lower altitudes, with rain being a rather more common occurrence. Now, we may see the first Thames Frost Fair in two centuries. Children's books, such as _the Sword in the Stone_ , which Steve introduced him to, talk about large, thick forests, the sort he has been exposed to at Hogwarts. Forest cover in Britain is now at an all time high."

"Well, as side-effects go, I'd say that those aren't too bad," Bruce remarked.

"Indeed not," Loki said. "However, there are other side-effects: strange islands being seen in places where no islands are known. Roads appearing that seem to lead to nowhere. Strange creatures being seen in forests and mountains. The animals and the climatic alterations are not the issue. The issue, in my view, is what else might have slipped through..." His lips thinned. "And I can state for certainty that those will be far from the only consequences of the events of the last few months. The ripples of more recent ones, as we have noticed, are still making themselves known."

And indeed they were. After all, as it is said: for every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

OoOoO

While it was only Ron and Hermione at first, as well as the Weasley Twins, and Draco Malfoy, oddly enough, it was soon widely noticed by the Wizarding public that Harry was nowhere to be seen.

It even made the _Daily Prophet_.

 _Where in the World is Harry Potter?_

 _By Rita Skeeter_

 _That's the question everyone in the Wizarding World is asking. Perhaps a more accurate question would be 'where in the Nine Worlds is Harry Potter', or even 'Harry Thorson', which he now apparently goes by. But even so, the question stands. Despite the destruction wrought upon the ancient castle when HYDRA, You-Know-Who's muggle allies, now under the command of Lucius Malfoy, You-Know-Who's right hand man, attacked, the Hogwarts school term started a couple of weeks ago. All seems normal, and preparations are in full swing for the Triwizard Tournament, the first to be contested for over two hundred years, aside from an abortive attempt in 1940, which was cancelled as the war against Grindelwald and the muggle conflict of the same time intensified._

 _All, of course, except for the glaring lack of one young student. Normally, Harry Potter would be entering his fourth year at Hogwarts. A Gryffindor, he is possibly the most famous member of that House that Hogwarts has seen in many years. This is quite an assertion, considering that former Gryffindors include the internationally renowned current Headmaster Albus Dumbledore; Sirius Black, Harry Potter's godfather, who was long believed to be a highly ranked supporter of You-Know-Who and the murderer of Peter Pettigrew, along with 13 muggles, before escaping Azkaban last year by as yet unknown means; the infamous Pettigrew himself, an animagus who apparently faked his death via removing a finger and transforming into a rat, blasting apart the street to cover his escape and framing Black for his crimes; and, of course Lily and James Potter, parents of Harry, the latter having revealed himself to be Thor Odinson and whose testimony was key to exonerating Black and making Pettigrew a wanted man._

 _However, it is an assertion that few would contest, even without taking into account the legend of the Boy Who Lived. While the Hogwarts faculty maintain a policy of silence on most of the events at Hogwarts these last few years, the stories that do slip out are remarkable – in each of them, Harry Potter is at the heart of events. During his first year, a fully grown mountain troll was secretly let into the school by Quirinius Quirrell, then Professor of Defence Against the Dark Arts. It was found in a girls bathroom, rendered unconscious by its own club, surrounded by three first years: Harry Potter, and his friends Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger. At the end of that year, it emerged that an unknown object of great value had been relocated to Hogwarts after a break-in at Gringotts, its former location, and protected by multiple arcane defences constructed by the staff. As Quirrell bypassed these, so did Harry Potter._

 _This led to a confrontation: on one side, Quirrell, a highly accomplished dark wizard acting on what he believed to be the orders of the spirit of You-Know-Who. On the other, Harry Potter, apparently nothing more than a moderately talented first year with endless reserves of courage and a nose for trouble. No one knows exactly what happened, but Potter wound up in the Hospital Wing, unconscious for the best part of a day without a mark on him, while Quirrell's remains were burned beyond recognition, his identification made by his wand. While Dumbledore, lured away from Hogwarts by a false message from the Ministry, returned and most likely was the one to deal with Quirrell, the implication is that Harry Potter once again survived a confrontation with a powerful Dark Wizard that by all logic he should not have done._

 _The following year was even more shrouded in mystery: ominous messages painted on the walls warning that the heir of Salazar Slytherin, founder of that most infamous house, had returned to Hogwarts and was now cleansing it with the aid of the monster that resided in the mythical Chamber of Secrets. A series of attacks followed, petrifying the victims, leading to the arrest of Rubeus Hagrid, then Gamekeeper and current teacher of Care of Magical Creatures, with a known unhealthy interest in strange and monstrous creatures, and the suspension of Professor Dumbledore. Then, finally, Ginny Weasley, daughter of the late Arthur Weasley, was dragged into the Chamber by the Heir, who was said to be none other than You-Know-Who, having infiltrated the castle with the aid of none other than Lucius Malfoy. An ominous message was left, saying that her bones would lie hidden in the Chamber forever; a Chamber, lest it be forgotten, that had not been found in a millennium of exploration by students, teachers, headmasters and headmistresses alike._

 _And yet Harry Potter found it. He descended into the Chamber, discovering a place that a millennium of witches and wizards have been unable to find a shred of evidence for, with one of Miss Weasley's older brothers and Professor Gilderoy Lockhart. In the end, he faced down Slytherin's monster, a basilisk, alone. Again, he triumphed, emerging apparently unscathed with Miss Weasley, her brother, the now amnesiac Professor Lockhart at his side and the legendary Sword of Gryffindor, covered in basilisk blood, in his hand. The means of the apparent enchantment, an artefact of powerful dark magic, was destroyed and its master was forced to flee once more._

 _No over-arching mystery covered the castle last year, though it was hardly without notable events – the return of James Potter in his true form as Thor Odinson, for one. And yet the school year itself was mostly quiet, even with MI13 Agents attached to the faculty._

 _Then, towards the end of the school year, HYDRA attacked in force. It is unclear exactly what transpired, but some events can be guessed at. The only Hogwarts casualty was Luna Lovegood, a 2_ _nd_ _year Ravenclaw and daughter of Xenophilius Lovegood, editor of notorious conspiracy rag_ The Quibbler _, who was apparently killed by a stray bullet (a muggle projectile weapon) while searching for her lost things late at night. This was a spectacularly unwise move on HYDRA's part, as rumour had it that Harry had grown quite attached to the girl._

 _These rumours had been fed by his response to claims of bullying by her housemates in the next Gryffindor-Ravenclaw Quidditch match with creative savagery. While Harry is Seeker, a position known for favouring small, slight players and near exclusive avoidance of physical contact wherever possible, seemingly leaving few avenues for the expression of fury, he found a way to make his displeasure clear. Specifically, via the so-called 'Dangerous Dai Decoy'. The Decoy is a technically legal tactic frowned upon as being both unsporting and extremely dangerous, invented by 'Dangerous' Dai Llewellyn, where the player attracts the attention of a Bludger and then leads towards the other team's players. Needless to say, it is a gambit that requires both exceptional skill and absolute ruthlessness._

 _Startling and unnerving as this display was, when his friend was merely being teased and bullied, it was nothing to his reaction on discovery of her death. Eyewitness accounts claim that he attacked HYDRA's troops singlehandedly in a breathtaking display of wandless magic, engaging their leader, some kind of clawed part-human, in hand to hand combat, while his rage built to greater and greater heights. Even a demigod's capacity for containing anger is not limitless, however, and as with many an overwrought witch and wizard, it emerged in the form of wandless magic. Usually, such outbursts are brief and their effects are limited to little more than some broken glass._

 _In this case, however, it was on an entirely different scale. A gigantic blast ripped apart the Great Hall and Entrance Hall in one incandescent instant, leaving a gaping hole in the ancient castle, smashing its ancient stones to dust and leaving only some rather pathetic looking piles of ash strewn across the Hogwarts grounds as indication of what had happened to HYDRA. The ruins left behind stood as mute testament to the young demigod's power and the true extent of his taste for revenge._

 _His later involvement in the so-called 'Battle of London', where witnesses credit him with feats of wandless magic that beggar belief, underlined this, with rumours crediting him with the successful re-banishment of the Elder God Chthon. Unlikely as such claims are, his powers and capabilities are undeniable, far beyond any expectations his demigodhood has inspired – he is not just the Boy Who Lived, he is the Boy Who Has Continued To Live. The same cannot be said for his enemies._

 _At this point, some might wonder at what kind of young man, young god, Harry is growing into. A nose for trouble has evolved into a taste for blood; an opposition to darkness into a proclivity for ruthlessly precise violence against all deemed to threaten those he likes; and a habit of associating with the outsiders and oddities of the Wizarding Community into, it would seem, a fondness for those whose differences are far less harmless. Reliable sources confirm that of his teachers, Harry has been particularly close to former Defence Against the Dark Arts Professor Remus Lupin, who was revealed to be a werewolf some months ago, Professor Sean Cassidy, an Agent of MI13 attached to Hogwarts' faculty and who is believed to have Banshee ancestry to thank for his unusual and deadly vocal abilities, and the aforementioned Rubeus Hagrid, whose vast size, fondness for monstrous creatures and expulsion from Hogwarts in his third year suggests a questionable case of cross-breeding further back in his family tree._

 _He is also known to have associated with Warren Worthington III, another MI13 agent attached to Hogwarts, whose lethally sharp metallic wings speak to a history of unauthorised magical experimentation, and to have been tutored by Lady Elizabeth Braddock. While Lady Braddock seems by far the most normal of this collection of oddities, appearances deceive: a wandless legilimens of great power, despite her youth she is a right hand woman of the notorious Peter Wisdom, Director of MI13. Furthermore, her abilities, status as a renowned beauty, and certain persistent rumours attached to the Braddock family, all suggest fae ancestry._

 _A member of the Dark Force Defence League, speaking under condition of anonymity, remarked that, "anyone who finds themselves drawn towards vicious creatures like werewolves and banshees would appear to have a fondness for violence."_

 _Of course, it could be said that as a Prince of Asgard, son of a warrior people, a taste for battle could be expected to be in the blood. It could hardly be denied that his father has it. A renowned hero as Thor, and in his life as James Potter, he was a prominent part of the fight against You Know Who, personally defying the Dark Lord three times. Seeking out trouble seems to be second nature to him, as it is to his son. The only question, on that score, seems to be whether Harry can restrain such desires, to direct them to good purpose – after all, as his uncle demonstrated only a few years ago, when a Prince of Asgard goes off the rails, the results can be horrific._

 _And all this leads to two rather worrying questions: where is he now? And what has happened to him?_

 _Whatever it was, it happened relatively recently – he and the Avengers were seen at the Quidditch World Cup final (with sources being uncertain on the extent of his involvement with the Death Eater rampage, but being equally certain that he was in some fashion involved), and shop owners in Diagon Alley confirmed that he was present and apparently entirely healthy when buying his school things a mere two weeks before the start of term. Intriguingly, he was sighted speaking to Draco Malfoy, son of Lucius Malfoy. After an initial rivalry in their early years at Hogwarts, the two boys have apparently struck up a cordial friendship, despite their fathers' mutual hatred – and despite the fact that Arthur Weasley, father of Ronald Weasley who is apparently another close friend of Harry's, was murdered on Lucius Malfoy's orders._

 _Shortly after that, though, there were a series of grand scale of magical upheavals that even ordinary muggles noticed, further fracturing the already wobbly foundations of the Statute of Secrecy. The Statute was even further undermined by rumours that the mysterious faction in Russia and Eastern Europe, known only as 'the Red Room', like Lucius Malfoy and HYDRA, used Imperiused muggles as shock troops and meddled heavily in muggle political affairs. The latter was at least seemingly being borne out by the fact that the finest memory modifiers in Europe have spent the last two weeks rushed off their feet, even if they have been very close mouthed on what they were doing. Aside from using enchanted muggles, the mysterious Red Room, believed to be a deadly relict of the Soviet era that bedevilled magical nations from Berlin to Samarkand that had been attempting to make a comeback in the wake of HYDRA's return, initiated a devastating purge of all supernatural rivals from its dominions, enslaving those it did not destroy, before collapsing in a matter of weeks._

 _While it is unclear what part they played in whatever happened to Harry, and it is indeed unclear what happened to him, it is very hard to believe that these two things are completely unrelated. Especially, it has to be said, since those in the Wizarding Community who are especially sensitive to psychic phenomena were hit hardest, and the clearest rumours on exactly what Harry is capable of say that he is a naturally vastly gifted legilimens. It would certainly explain why he might attract the likes of Lady Braddock as a tutor – though, of course, the facts that he is a young Prince of divine heritage, great power, and increasingly, good looks that would catch any girl's eye, can also not be ignored._

 _So what took place? Some kind of mental confrontation between Harry and some terrible beast summoned up by the mysterious Red Room? A direct attack by the Red Room on Harry, identifying him as a primary threat, the disturbance being the result of his attempts to fight back? Or was it something even worse?_

 _The young man himself has not been seen in public since his trip to Diagon Alley, meaning that it is impossible to tell how deep the scars from his latest escapade go. The Avengers have refused to say anything beyond that Harry Thorson is dealing with a great trauma and that he will return to Hogwarts when he is ready. And the mystery of just what happened grows stranger by the day, but you can rest assured of this: your correspondent isn't going to let this dragon lie._

Hermione closed the _Prophet_ in disgust.

"Anything?" Ron asked, glancing up from his breakfast.

"Nothing," she said, frustrated and furious. "Nothing but lies, disgusting innuendo, and lurid speculation."

"Have you tried asking Hagrid?" Ron suggested. "Again?"

"No," Hermione said. "Because you know that he doesn't know; he's every bit as worried as we are, but he's taking Dumbledore at his word that Harry is fine."

"What about Loki? He's your teacher, isn't he?"

Hermione sighed. "As you very well know, I last asked him three days ago," she said in tones of strained patience. "And got the same vague answer: Harry got hurt, he's getting better, and he'll back soon. As ever, he's said nothing on _how_ Harry got hurt, _why_ he got hurt, _where_ he is now, or _when_ , exactly, he'll be back." She glanced at Ron. "Doesn't Percy work for the Ministry now? He might know."

Ron shook his head. "I asked him," he said, and made a face. "Said that it was 'a very serious matter' and 'none of my business', and that I 'would be informed of the particulars of the situation when the Ministry felt that the time was right.'"

"Which means that they don't know a thing," Fred said, sitting down beside them.

"And if they don't, the _Prophet_ certainly won't," George added, joining his twin. "Still set on working out what's up with Harry, then?"

"He's our friend," Ron said frowning. "Of course we are."

"Very commendable of you, little brother," Fred said. "But a bit pointless."

"What do you mean?" Hermione asked.

"Well, we've already asked Loki too," George said.

"We didn't really expect an answer there, to be honest," Fred said.

"Keeping secrets is kind of what Loki does."

"Mostly we just got told to work on our homework."

"Homework?" Ron asked, puzzled.

"Loki's busy a lot of the time, so he gives the three of us homework to do," Hermione said. "If it's written, it's enchanted so he knows when it's finished. I didn't mention it because, well…"

Ron grunted. He had long since come to accept that he wasn't considered apprentice material by Loki, something made rather easier by the lack of reminders. For most of the last year, Loki had been occupied finding and fighting HYDRA with the Avengers, and was now occupied with who knew what, probably to do with Harry, meaning that the apprenticeship was one mostly carried on at a distance via homework.

It had also helped that Thor had compared Ron to himself when the subject had come up some months ago, pointing out that someone needed to have their feet on the ground and deal with practical matters, while praising Ron's skills as a strategist. This was a characterisation that had suited Ron and his understandably wounded pride just fine and it was, it had to be said, an accurate one: Hermione had her nose in a book half the time, her mind on magical theory and history the other half, while the Twins were usually scheming for some prank or their planned joke shop – something which in recent months seemed to have become a planned career as inventors merging muggle and magical technology, the way their father had.

Ron wasn't usually given to being emotionally perceptive, but he rather suspected that it wasn't merely Tony Stark's influence; more, if anything, the Twins' way of honouring their father. And as for Harry… well, you didn't need to be emotionally perceptive to know that Harry's feet were many things, and on the ground was not usually one of them.

No, Ron didn't mind being the grounded one, the normal one. Frankly, after seeing the sort of things that Harry went through, seeing what they were doing to him, he didn't mind being normal at all. But sometimes, just sometimes, it stung a little to be the one left out, to be the normal one.

"What about Mister Stark?" he asked. "He talks. A lot. He talks to you two. He took you both to the World Cup, which you _still_ haven't said anything about."

"That, brother dearest, is because if we did," Fred said. "Mum wouldn't let us out of the house."

"Ever again," George added.

"It involved Harry," Hermione said. It wasn't a question.

"You got that from Rita Skeeter?" Fred asked, eyebrow raised.

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Rita Skeeter is one of the most disgusting examples of a gutter journalist that I've ever had the misfortune to read," she said. "However, even she gets some things right, if only by accident. Harry was there. And he never saw trouble that he didn't immediately want to stick is nose into. Of course he was involved. Besides, he's incredibly good with fire, he likes using the phoenix motif, and increasingly, he's got a flair for the dramatic. On the front of the Daily Prophet was a picture of a giant phoenix destroying some dark magical symbol that I didn't recognise. On the inside were pictures of a lot of burnt and smashed trees and the Avengers tend to be more precise than that, except for the Hulk, and while the trees look like his work, the firebird definitely isn't. After that, it was basic deduction."

The Twins traded a look.

"You, Hermione," Fred said. "Have a dangerous mind."

"A very dangerous mind," George said.

"You mean that I'm right," Hermione said, folding her arms. "What happened?"

The Twins traded another look, this one grimmer. "It's not exactly something we like to talk about," Fred said.

"What do you mean?" Ron asked, frowning.

"Well, Ron, how much do you enjoy reliving the time you were belted over the head by a giant chess-piece?" George asked.

"Or you, Hermione, the time you were petrified by a basilisk?" Fred asked.

"Or Ginny the time she was possessed and…" George began, then trailed off. "Well. Let's just say that we have a bit of perspective on how she felt."

Ron's jaw dropped. "Are you saying that you," he began.

"We aren't saying anything," Fred said flatly, in tones that did not invite further inquiry.

"Also," George added. "If we did want to discuss it – "

"Which we don't."

"And decided to discuss it here –"

"Which we aren't."

"It might cause a bit of a panic."

"Are you going to tell us or not?" Ron asked loudly.

The Twins traded another look, a speaking one.

"We'll give you the condensed version," Fred eventually said, grudgingly.

"Later, and away from prying eyes."

"And ears."

OoOoO

And they were good to their word. That evening the Twins took up a secluded corner in the Common Room of Gryffindor Tower. As Ron and Hermione approached, though they could see them talking to each other, all they could hear was a faint buzzing sound, until they got within five feet of them.

"Like it?" Fred asked.

"Is it some invention of yours?" Hermione asked suspiciously.

"Alas, we cannot claim credit," George said.

"Though we are looking into enchanting certain small, personal objects –"

"Watches, rings, hats, that sort of thing."

"To produce the same effect."

"So it's a spell?" Ron asked. "Neat. Where did you learn it?"

"Sirius Black, actually," Fred said.

"The man is a goldmine of creative magic," George added.

"Which he is very happy to pass on to a new generation of pranksters."

"Which really isn't a surprise, considering."

"Considering what?" Ron asked.

"Considering that –"

"Whatever it is, it can wait," Hermione said. "You wanted to talk to us."

"Well, wanted might be stretching it," Fred said.

"We are willing to give you the short version of what happened at the World Cup," George said.

"Death Eaters went on the rampage. The Avengers went off to deal with it. And we got attacked," Fred said.

"By who?" Hermione asked.

"You Know Who."

There was dead silence for a moment, then Ron snorted in disbelief. "Come off it," he said. "You Know Who?"

"You don't think he's back?" George asked.

"Considering that your best friend went up against him twice in your first two years at Hogwarts, I wouldn't have thought you'd be so sceptical, Ron," Fred said.

Their tones, Hermione noted with a certain unease, were superficially mild. But only superficially, for that mildness didn't reach their eyes, eyes that were cold and hard with the mental scar tissue of remembered trauma. And on seeing those eyes, for the first time Hermione considered the possibility that the Twins, who she'd always seen as Ron's street-smart, irresponsible, and deceptively talented older brothers, who were bad role models but good friends, could be two very dangerous and very frightening young men.

At the very least, she thought, Ron was on thin ice, which was why she drove an elbow into his side and gave him a meaningful look when he yelped indignantly. Thankfully, he got the gist of her meaning.

"I can believe he's back," he said, voice measured. "I don't want to, but I could believe it. But he's not stupid, is he? Thor, Loki, all the Avengers, they hate his guts, they'd kill him on sight! Against them, even You-Know-Who wouldn't stand a chance! He wouldn't go after Harry while they were around."

A little of the tension seeped out of the air.

"Why do you think the Death Eaters picked that moment for a little reunion party, idiot?" George asked brusquely.

"Wait, it was _planned?_ " Hermione asked.

The Twins exchanged a look. "Maybe," Fred said.

"Maybe not," George said.

"See, one thing we found out was that You Know Who can control people," Fred said. "The way Harry can."

"Harry can't," Ron began.

"Harry _doesn't_ , Ron," Hermione said quietly. "There's a difference." She turned to Fred. "Does that mean that…"

"You Know Who has powers like Harry?" George finished. "Yeah. We're pretty sure he does."

"And he used them on you," Hermione said, with dawning horror.

The Twins nodded tightly.

"Us and everyone else in the tents who wasn't an Avenger and therefore elsewhere," George said. "Doctor Foster, Ms Potts, and a few friends of Harry's – a girl called Diana, a bloke called Uhtred, they were both from Asgard. And an American girl called Carol."

"I've met her," Hermione said. "Carol, I mean. Not the other two."

"She made an impression on you, did she?" Fred said, reading her expression.

"A bit," Hermione said. She took a deep breath. "Anyway. You said that You Know Who, he…"

"Ran us around like puppets," George said.

"Used us as hostages."

"And batteries."

"Before swapping us around into different bodies."

"And then banished us across the camp for some of his Death Eaters to chase."

"All in all, not the most pleasant experience we've ever had," Fred said, again with a mildness that didn't reach his eyes.

"Bloody hell," Ron whispered.

"Close," George said glibly. "He wasn't interested in us, though. He was doing it to get to Harry."

"Why didn't he just try to kill Harry?" Hermione asked. "I mean, that's what he wants, isn't it?"

"Well, every other time he's tried to kill Harry, it hasn't worked out," Fred said. "But they did get into a fight."

"Which was why he needed us as hostages," George said.

Ron's eyes widened. "Wait," he said. "You're saying that _Harry_ is stronger than _You Know Who?!"_

"Easily," Fred said. "We had front row seats to their first round."

"Of course, it was mostly a psychic fight, which looks like a lot of staring –"

"And a couple of bad cases of constipation."

"And it feels like a nasty headache."

"But at the end of it, You Know Who was bleeding."

"And Harry wasn't."

"And You Know Who had to use us as hostages."

"And batteries."

"As for the second round, well, after a short while, the sudden absence of You Know Who –"

"And the Death Eaters that were chasing all of us freezing up and shooting red sparks into the air –"

"They told their own story."

Hermione gaped. "The _Prophet_ had a lot on Death Eaters being arrested by MI13, but nothing about any of them going on trial," she managed.

"This lot were separate from the rest," Fred said.

"And they weren't in any state to go on trial afterwards," George said darkly. "Not that we were really all that bothered about that."

"Apparently You Know Who was controlling them," Fred said, reading Ron and Hermione's puzzled expressions. "Harry took control instead, and one way or another, he destroyed their minds doing it."

Ron just stared at them.

"So _that_ was what she meant," Hermione said softly.

"What who meant?" George asked suspiciously.

Hermione grimaced. "Carol," she said. "She said that, well, Harry was capable of things. Scary things." She looked over at the fire. "She said that he had darkness in him, that everything bad that happened to him, that should have twisted him, he locked it all away. And she said that sometimes it got out."

Ron said something rude and disbelieving. "Well, she's wrong, then, isn't she?" he said.

"I wouldn't be so sure about that, Ron," Fred said slowly. "Carol is nobody's fool, and where Harry's concerned, she tends to know her stuff."

"Oh yeah? How would she know? She hasn't known him five minutes!" Ron snapped indignantly.

"True," George allowed.

"But most of the time they've known each other, someone's been trying to kill them both," Fred remarked.

"Which gives her a certain degree of insight."

Ron opened his mouth to point out (with some justice) that the same could be said for his friendship with Harry, when Hermione interrupted.

"They have a psychic connection, Ron," she said. "She's been inside his head. Sometimes, they even slip into talking mind to mind without even realising it. And…" She took a deep breath. "She's right. Harry has got a darker side to him."

"What, you're taking Skeeter's side?" Ron demanded, tips of his ears going red with anger. "Saying he's a dark lord in waiting or something like that?"

"No, Ron," Hermione snapped, her own temper cracking. "I _don't_ think that Harry's some dark lord in waiting. What I _do_ think is that he's gone through more than anyone ever should, and it has had an effect on him, because however much of him is some kind of demigod, he is still human where it counts, he is not invincible, and he can still be hurt!"

"So what if he gets hurt?" Ron demanded. "How does that mean he's got darkness in him?"

"I'd say more anger than anything else," Fred said. "But Hermione's right."

"Harry's been through a lot. He's been hurt."

"And when you get hurt, it leaves a mark on you."

"Trust us. We know," George said. "Over the summer, Mister Stark scheduled therapy appointments for us."

"They're like mind-healers, but for muggles. Mostly what they do is talk," Fred said. "They helped us come to terms with what happened to dad."

"One of the things they helped us realise is that people respond to getting hurt differently," George continued. "And one of the things Harry's always done is lock things, and pain, away."

"A bit like you have, actually," Fred added.

Ron began going red again.

"What they're getting at," Hermione said hastily. "What Carol was getting at, is that if you lock pain away, it just gets worse. In Harry, it turns into anger, and, well… Ron, you saw what his home life with those awful Dursleys was like – you told me that they put bars on his window! You saw how Quirrell tried to kill him, how the school turned on him when everyone found out that he was a Parselmouth, how the Dementors affected him, how he cared for Luna Lovegood… remember how he reacted when he found out that her housemates were stealing her things? He put the Ravenclaw Quidditch team in the Hospital Wing, some of them in St Mungo's! And then, when HYDRA killed her, remember what happened then?"

"He set his wolves on them and turned them all to ash," George said helpfully.

"That wasn't him, apparently," Hermione contradicted him. "The ash part, anyway. And no, I don't know what it was. Carol knows, but she wouldn't say." She sighed. "Look, Ron, I was angry too when she brought it up, I thought that she couldn't know Harry as well as I do, as you do, and she was trying to scare me off. She agreed, said that I probably knew him better for everyday stuff, but… like the Twins said, most of the time they've known each other, someone's been trying to kill them. You saw the memory, Ron, of what happened at Easter on the mountain. She was there, the blonde girl."

Ron blinked. "Her?" he asked, then went somewhat pink. "Blimey."

Hermione looked puzzled for a second, then rolled her eyes heavenwards in disgust as she caught on. "Really, Ron?"

The Twins, meanwhile, were grinning. "Do my eyes deceive me, or does ickle Ronniekins have a crush, George?" Fred asked.

"I think he does, Fred," George said, as Ron went red, this time with embarassment.

"Well, we can't fault your taste, Ron, but I wouldn't get your hopes up," Fred said.

"She's only got eyes for Harry," George said.

"And he's only got eyes for her."

"Getting them to admit it is the fun part – they're in denial, you see."

"Even still, we're expecting a happy announcement any day now."

"Like a _wedding?_ " Ron asked, startled, eyes wide.

"No, Ron, like a baby," George said sarcastically.

"Though, to be fair," Fred said reflectively. "That wouldn't be particularly surprising either."

Ron nearly choked on thin air.

Hermione shook her head in mild amusement, aware that she had made a similar assumption not so long ago.

Ron, though, regained his composure and frowned. "Harry might mess up with his powers every now and then, and he gets angry," he said. "So what? Everyone does."

"But not everyone's been through what he has," Hermione said gently. "And as I was saying, Carol wasn't trying to scare me off – I'd have ignored her if she was. She was trying to tell me so we could help Harry, because he knows there's darkness in him too, darkness that we've all seen, and he's scared of it, Ron. And with good reason."

Ron frowned, looking as if he wasn't entirely convinced.

"Fascinating as that is," Fred said. "What we've been driving at, in a roundabout sort of way, is worse."

"A lot worse," George said. "You see, we were up close when Harry and You Know Who went, quite literally, head to head."

"And like everyone else, we noticed that bit of psychic disruption a few weeks ago," Fred added. "It felt fairly similar."

"Except it was stronger. A lot stronger."

"And Harry was nowhere to be seen. As far as we can tell, he was most of halfway around the world."

"Meaning that Harry – and it was Harry – was fighting someone psychic, who was stronger than You Know Who."

"Is that even possible?" Ron asked. "I mean, if Harry's stronger than You Know Who… well, there's his dad and Loki, but they're not psychic, so..." He trailed off, the implication clear.

The Twins shared a look of dark amusement. "Oh, it's possible," they said in unison.

"Very possible," Hermione said, and sighed at Ron's expression. "Honestly Ron. Harry, Lady Braddock, You Know Who, and humans in general, they don't have the monopoly on psychic powers: gods, demons, vampire kings... there are plenty of things out there that have the power to do something like that. In fact, with that much power required, it probably _wasn't_ a human."

"Well, you say that," George said slowly.

"You haven't met Jean, have you, Hermione?" Fred said.

"No," Hermione said, puzzled. "Why?"

"Well, Harry has."

"And they've bonded."

"And she's psychic too."

"He's had a busy summer."

Ron frowned. "Jean… isn't that the name of a cousin of Harry's?" he asked.

"Yep," George said. "And to hear Harry tell it, if he's to psychics what Loki is to wizards…"

"… then she's to him what Odin is to Loki."

"He might have been exaggerating, but we doubt it."

"Harry doesn't really exaggerate."

"Understated sarcasm is his coping mechanism of choice."

"That's true enough," Hermione muttered, then frowned. "You can't be sure, though," she said.

"Well, no."

"But we met her, briefly."

"And we really don't think he was exaggerating."

"And you think she did it?" Ron said, bemused.

"Well," George said. "She's capable of it."

"But considering that she's nearly as bad with him as mum is with Ginny, probably not," Fred said.

"But there's a good chance that she knows who could."

"And a better chance that she knows what happened."

"And maybe an even better chance that she knows who did it."

OoOoO

Hermione, accordingly, managed to get into contact with Jean. This took a little bit of time, but not too long – once she nerved herself up to ring Avengers Mansion, having borrowed George's phone, that was.

"Hello, Avengers Mansion, Pepper Potts speaking?" came the reply.

"Um, hello? My name is Hermione Granger, I'm a friend of Harry's, we met a few months ago," Hermione said nervously.

"Oh, of course, hello Hermione," Pepper said. "You want to know how Harry's doing."

It wasn't a question.

"Actually, Ms Potts, I… was hoping to get in contact with Jean Grey," Hermione said.

"Because you think that she might tell you more than I or anyone else directly affiliated with the Avengers will," Pepper said. It was also not a question, and Pepper chuckled into the surprised silence. "I wasn't born yesterday, Hermione."

"I, um, sorry Ms Potts," Hermione said. "It's just that Harry's one of my best friends and I'm worried about him. We're worried about him."

"Well, as you've probably already been told, he's had a bit of trouble recently, but he's recovering," Pepper said. "Anything else is for him to say, or to let others say, and he doesn't want it discussed outside of those who already know."

"Oh," Hermione said. "I see."

"It's nothing personal, Hermione, it's just that what he went through was very difficult and very painful," Pepper said gently. "He's still coming to terms with it. Jean won't tell you anything more; she's extremely protective of him, him and –" She paused. "Well, she's deeply protective of him and she won't give you any more details. Anyway, she's in Australia at the moment, meaning that she's asleep right now, and she'll be busy when she wakes up so she couldn't take your call even if I gave her your number." Her tone firmed, becoming pointed. "And frankly, I don't think that Harry would appreciate you trying to worm out more than he wants known right now, no matter how good your intentions."

Hermione blushed, embarrassed and a little ashamed. "I'm sorry, Ms Potts," she said. "Thank you for your time."

"No problem, Hermione," Pepper said. "And…" She sighed. "Harry will probably be back at school by the start of October. Don't quote me on that, but that's the best estimate we've got. Now, get some sleep."

"Yes, Ms Potts," Hermione said obediently. "And thank you."

"No problem. Good night."

"And to you," Hermione said, then paused. "Oh, and congratulations on having your baby."

Pepper chuckled softly. "Thank you," she said. "Sleep well." Then, she put down the phone.

"Anything?"

Hermione looked up at an impatient looking Ron.

"She didn't give me Jean's number," she said. "She said that Jean wouldn't tell me anything more than anyone else would, and that Harry wouldn't want us going behind his back to find out more. Besides," she added. "She's in Australia right now. The time difference means that she'll be asleep and apparently she's busy."

Ron wrinkled his nose grumpily. "So, nothing," he said.

"Pepper said that it looks like Harry'll be back at the start of October," Hermione said. "She didn't say that it would happen for sure, but that's what it looks like."

Ron gave her an uncomprehending look. "Why didn't you say that to begin with?" he asked, confused.

Hermione rolled her eyes. Honestly, _boys_.

 **And that, I think, is a suitable place to round off the chapter. Fear not, the next one will be coming soon, I'm just polishing it off. It'll be more mysterious, with more revelations, and more set in Asgard. We're going to be delving into some of Asgard's most ancient and darkest history, along with that of Stephen Strange.**

 **Anyhow, I hope that it was up to scratch (the Sorting Hat's song was a pain to write, Rita Skeeter's article was worryingly easy). See you on the flip side – reviews are replied to, and edits to the Tropes page are much appreciated.**


	19. Chapter 19: Revelations Part I

**And here we are again. Your patience, ladies and gentlemen, is rewarded – you get not one, but TWO chapters… mostly because the alternative was one chapter of about 30,000 words. Anyhow, this two parter returns Harry to Hogwarts and rounds off most everything lingering from the** _ **Forever Red**_ **arc (except Harry's psychological issues, which are here to stay). However, before Harry returns to Hogwarts, there. Will. Be. Reveals!**

 **You will find out WHAT Asgard's history with the Phoenix is! You will find out WHY Wanda hates John Constantine! And above all, you will find WHO Doctor Strange really is!**

 **Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen, this will be bigguns. (and yeah, there's lots of exposition. Not much could be done about that. Sorry. For those of you who don't like it, there's still character beats and stuff, and it's mostly plot relevant, but feel free to skim parts of it).**

 **Guest:** **… Yeah, no. I don't even like Naruto, much less care about it. Also, congratulations – I think that's actually the stupidest suggestion I've ever had.**

 **Odin's Eye:** **What did I say about copy and pasting from the Marvel Wiki?**

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, a couple of hours later the sun rose and Jean Grey, somewhat grudgingly, rose with it. In this case, it was because the other four members of the party were already awake; Professor Xavier (through academic discipline), Lorna Dane (through sheer nervousness), and Magneto and Maddie (both through habit). In the case of the latter, Jean considered it one of the less disturbing examples of nature versus nurture in terms of the differences between her and her twin, who had opted for the time being to go by the short form of her given name rather than her birth name, on the grounds that she was more used to it.

This had caused some distress with their parents, but it was a distress far mitigated by the miracle of finding that they had a daughter they'd thought had died as a newborn, and once it was explained by Professor Xavier and Mrs Carter…

Jean remembered the moment with crystal clarity; her parents – _their_ parents – slowly opening the door to the Professor's office, tears streaming down their faces, a tidal wave of emotion rolling before them, one so strong against Maddie's more refined psychic senses that her twin's knees actually buckled, with only Remy 'Gambit' LeBeau's cat-like reflexes preventing her from collapsing to the floor.

Jean hadn't noticed it before, but with his expression of gentle concern and words of soft reassurance in Maddie's ear, she realised that Remy bore a striking resemblance to Scott – scruffier, admittedly, more confident, and, she would admit in the privacy of her head, a bit sexier (though that was mostly the confidence and charm), and a couple of years older maybe, but in basic features; height, sinewy build, hair colour, sharp cheekbones and strong bone structure… it was interesting. Then, Jean had looked away, realising that she was staring. She had a boyfriend. She had a boyfriend, Duncan Matthews, who she cared for very much, who she was very happy with, who she… dammit.

She'd had to step in then, to prevent her parents from overwhelming Maddie with hugs, tears and affection. Reunions with her parents could be enough of a jolt to Jean herself at holidays, but this was on a whole other scale. Plus, Maddie had much more refined psychic senses, and she'd never really felt anything like this – true, she'd had Remy, but his affection had been feigned at first, then carefully reserved to disguise its extent from the foul Doctor Essex.

The mere thought of him made Jean's hands curl into fists and power surge into her like a volcano on the brink of eruption, a tidal wave on the edge of breaking, ready to unleash apocalyptic devastation. She closed her eyes and remembered Professor Xavier's calm words, the techniques he'd taught her back when she'd first started learning from him, on how to channel her anger, to control it rather than letting it control her. She'd been getting a lot more mileage out of those techniques these last few months; partly because she'd had far more to be angry about (and things to be really, genuinely angry about, not stupid, petty teenage drama), and partly because when her anger boiled up, it stirred up a lot more power than it had used to.

It disturbed her – not so much the anger. She'd long since been resigned to the fact that she had a fiery temper. It was something that surprised most people, even a few who thought that they knew her pretty well. Most just saw her as sweet, kind, and as sweet and kind people often are, stupid. That said, once they saw her exam results, the latter impression was revised either to 'know-it-all', 'teacher's pet', or, rarely, 'slut [who's sleeping with the teachers for good marks]', though the latter had died down somewhat.

While Jean scrupulously didn't use her powers on others (with the exceptional of the very occasional, very childish, and deeply satisfying discreet telekinetic wedgie), disapproved of violence as a solution, and, in any case, could more than look after herself even without discreetly using her powers (though she did intend to look into learning how to replicate a trick that Harry had invented, mimicking super strength by channelling telekinesis through his body) she had to admit a certain satisfaction underneath her irritation when one male purveyer of this particular rumour had refused to listen to her polite requests to cut it out, then Scott's, and said something to the effect of, "It isn't your business, is it, Summers? Or is she sucking you off too? If she is, damn, how much to get in on that action?"

This was a mistake, for he had then discovered that like her, Scott's patience had limits. And for all that he was slim to the point of being skinny, he was also six feet tall, made of sinewy muscle, and thanks to years of Logan's training, had a punch like an iron bar. Thankfully, Scott hadn't got in trouble for that, if only because the boy in question had been large, bulky and had consequently not wanted to admit that the skinny guy with shades had laid him out with a single right hook.

Additionally, by that point, she'd just started dating Duncan Matthews, star of Bayville High's Football team, who'd made it loudly clear, in public, that anyone who even looked funny at _his_ girlfriend would have trouble walking, speaking, or indeed moving in general, for the immediate future. _That_ had annoyed her. Scott's punch had been a bit annoying too, but that had the saving graces of being a) totally spontaneous and done in the heat of the moment, b) in private with none of the witnessing parties showing any desire to make a scene over it (Scott had mostly seemed embarrassed afterwards, even apologising). At worst, it was a case of endearingly misplaced chivalry combined with a momentary loss of temper. And, well, he _had_ apologised.

Duncan's declaration, on the other hand, had felt premeditated and ludicrously macho, like he was one step short of planting a flag in her butt to claim her as his. She and Duncan had had a falling out over that, and she'd complained about it to her older sister, Sara – though she'd refused to break up with him over it. Sara had, at that point, muttered something about Jean having to make her own mistakes, then jokingly asked if Scott was single. Or at least, Jean hoped that she was joking. That would just be too weird.

She smiled faintly at the memory and shook her head in amusement. That was the sort of stupid teenage drama that she'd been talking about, the sort of stuff that felt like the end of the world at the time (or, at least, severely irritating), but didn't even begin to stack up against things like the actual end of the world, demonic invasions, insane Russian supernatural spy organisations that tortured her baby cousin into insanity and helped a sociopathic monster who'd _stolen her sister_.

Aaaand there was the rage again, she thought, fighting down a spike of fury, and made a note to speak to Harry about it, maybe Maddie too. Or perhaps not… Harry, while he'd already previously offered her advice about dealing with a fiery temper and vast powers (for while she was stronger than he was, she'd had years to learn how to use her powers, developing them slowly but surely, he'd had them dropped on his head all at once and had had to adjust extremely quickly), had quite enough on his plate at the moment with the Phoenix. Then again, she'd heard that teaching helped cement lessons and gave new perspectives. It had certainly helped her cement the lessons that the Professor had taught her when she'd passed them on to Harry. Did it apply here? She'd ask the Professor about it later.

As for Maddie, she seemed perfectly cool and controlled most of the time. Until something like the aforementioned tidal wave of emotion that came with their parents meeting her for the first time came along, that was. Or even, well… basic decency. It was heartbreaking, it really was, but nothing seemed to bewilder Maddie like being treated with kindness and shown basic empathy. She was getting better about it, but still. If Jean asked her about controlling her emotions, in her desire to help, Maddie might unintentionally end up going back down paths she was trying to turn away from. And besides, the methods of emotional control that Maddie had been taught had been brutal and designed to suppress emotion, rather than channel it, which to Jean's mind only stored the problem up until later.

On consideration, it was as if one didn't have enough control, while one had too much.

Now, though, both were taking steps on the road to recovery. Harry wasn't his old self, and Jean privately worried that he never would be, that too much had happened for that to be possible, but he was near enough – his sense of humour had taken a turn for the morbid, he was prone to dark moods, some of such misery that he turned up in a corner, hunched up, tears streaming from his eyes, flinching away from all but the most careful and neutral of contact. While he no longer had the horrors of the Red Son scrolling behind his eyes during every other moment, the echoes remained, slipping through the inevitable cracks. And as Jean had learned, even echoes could be crippling, for where they were scanty, Harry's ample imagination filled in the gaps.

As for Maddie, well. She had those moments too, except that none of her darker moments were walled away. Unlike Harry, she didn't have the occasionally dubious comfort of knowing that it wasn't really _her_ who had done the things she remembered. Instead, her mental torture took the form of her steadily developing conscience, which grew more and more sophisticated with each and every day, examining her memories and the things she'd done, had been made to do, and beginning to understand just how terrible they had been. On balance, though, Jean took every tear, every smile, every crack in the mask her twin had been forced to wear for so long that she didn't even realise it was a mask, as a small victory.

And there were larger ones too. Which, Jean thought as she got dressed, was why they were in Melbourne. Looking over at the other two beds in the shared room at the hotel which they'd got (and, since they'd arrived via one of Doctor Jane Foster's Bifrost portals, technically didn't need, but the Professor had preferred it, partly for the look of the thing). She could immediately tell whose was whose at a glance: Lorna's was as messy as one would expect a teenage girl's bed to be, the location of the girl herself indicated by the sound of running water from the bathroom, while Maddie was scrupulously making hers with hospital corners and military precision.

"You don't need to do that, you know," Jean said gently.

Maddie started, looking up. As she did, as happened every time she did, Jean's heart skipped a beat at the sight of a face so like, yet so unlike, her own. In the basic details, they were identical, absolutely identical. There were differences, though, that asserted themselves after a moment. Stylistic, in the form of Jean's flowing locks versus Maddie's bob cut, and Maddie's triangular red tattoos, two of which cut across each cheek like thick claw marks, getting no end of odd looks standing at a sharp contrast to Jean's clear and unmarked skin. Though as Maddie had demonstrated, she could easily hide them, and as she had explained, Remy had found a magical tattoo artist to apply them in minutes, and they could be removed just as easily.

But there were other differences too, less easily spotted, but also less easily hidden. Maddie's face was thinner, marked by a lifetime of watchful, wary expressions. Jean's own, she'd been told, was fuller, warmer, and marked by a lifetime of smiles. So similar… yet so different.

It was Remy who had mostly aptly compared the two of them. "Y' like the same sculpture," he said. "Finished off by diff'rent artists." Then, he'd smiled one of those dazzling I-am-gorgeous-and-charming-and-you-love-me smiles, rolled his arm and wrist with surprising grace for someone who'd so recently been skewered through the upper torso with his own bo staff, and said, "An' both absolute masterpieces if ah do say so mahself."

"I know," Maddie said, after a moment. "I…" She looked back at the bed, staring at it. "It's just what I've always done." She was silent for another moment. Jean let her have it, sensing that she needed it. "But so much of what I've always done has been wrong. What if, once I truly understand what is right and what is wrong, I find that everything I have always done is wrong?" She looked up at her sister, hopelessness in her emerald green eyes. "What will I have left then?"

Jean went over and sat down on the bed next to her. "You'll have me," she said gently. "And you'll have Harry, and Remy, and Jono, and Mom and Dad, and Sara, and Julia, and Roger, and Liam. And you'll have the Professor and everyone else at the Institute too."

"But," Maddie began, then stopped. She didn't need to say any more, though, because Jean could see the thought floating at the top of her mind. 'But apart from Remy and Jono, they're _yours'_ , it said.

"No," Jean said gently. "They're _ours_." She grinned. "Except for Remy. Much as the idea of sharing him is tempting, I'm not sure what you'd make of it and I am a happily monogamous woman in a happy relationship."

Maddie cracked a smile. "I can't blame you," she said, amused, then looked a touch wistful. "Scott is nice."

"Excuse me?"

"Scott. He's your boyfriend," Maddie said innocently.

"What? No, no, _no_ , Maddie, Scott is not my boyfriend," Jean said.

Maddie arched an eyebrow. "To use a phrase I picked up from Jono," she said. "'Luv, this brain does not lie.'"

Jean blinked at the dead on impersonation of Jono's South London accent, then shook her head. "Well, it may not lie, but it is mistaken," she said firmly. "Scott and me, we're just friends. My boyfriend is called Duncan, Duncan Matthews."

Maddie looked sceptical, then shrugged. "Okay," she said. "If you don't want him, then may I?"

"Excuse me?" Jean repeated, this time in a high squeak. "But you, Remy, I -"

Maddie smiled faintly. "I care for Remy very much," she said. "And he cares for me a great deal. He is the first person who ever did. At first, it was pretense, but it became something real. I love him, and he loves me. But… he is a wanderer by nature. Normally, he would have fled for the open road the moment he saw a chance to be free of Doctor Essex. There is one place he truly considers home, and that is New Orleans. He has stayed as long as he has, with me and Doctor Essex, and now with me and at the Institute, for my sake alone. First to see me freed, and now to see me safe and well." She looked at the connecting door to the other room, where Magneto and the Professor had slept. "He does not leave partly because he fears the effect leaving will have on me. And he doesn't trust SHIELD. Or Prince Loki. Or Magneto."

Jean followed her gaze and Remy, already very high in her estimation for what he had done for Maddie, Harry, and the other Red Room prisoners, rose even further. There was definitely far more to that one than he ever allowed to meet the eye. Though, she had to admit, happily monogamous woman or not, she was also a happily heterosexual one, and the eye most certainly did not go wanting.

Then, she paused. "Loki?" she asked. "I mean, SHIELD I get, and Magneto…" She paused, glancing at the still occupied bathroom. She didn't really know Erik Lensherr, as he was really called. She knew that he was Lorna and Ms Maximoff's father (which, since Ms Maximoff was comfortably old enough to be Lorna's mother, even if she barely looked it, was particularly mind boggling), and she knew that like her, Maddie, Harry, and Ms Maximoff, he was one of the very select group of mutants whose powers naturally fell into the Omega Class. She knew that he, the Professor, Doctor McCoy, Mr Cassidy, Colonel Summers, and Doctor MacTaggert were very old friends. She also knew that he and Ms Maximoff treated each other with a kind of cautious politeness, while Logan clearly didn't trust him an inch.

She also knew, by the way even hardened Avengers, X-Men, and SHIELD Agents acted around him, feelings of wariness and tension, even sometimes fear, that sharpened whenever he entered the room, the allusions by several of the adults to a dark past, and frankly, the sheer _presence_ the man radiated, that he was dangerous in a way that went far beyond the mere extent of his powers. Plus, there was that helmet of his. And, of course, the way he watched Maddie. It wasn't predatory, malevolent, or threatening in any way, shape, or form. It was just… watchful. As if he was weighing her up, deciding what kind of threat she might present. Yes, she could believe that he could be a problem, if he wanted to be.

"But Loki's…" She trailed off. Loki was one of the Avengers, was the unspoken coda to that remark. One of the good guys. Harry's doting uncle. On the other hand, he hadn't always been, and he was very up front about that fact. She also knew, intellectually at least, that he still had a considerable capacity for ruthlessness – a streak that ran through the entire House of Odin, going by what they'd done to Russia and its satellites to bring the Red Room to its knees. And going by what Harry had said, he ran Asgard's secret service – actually, he effectively _was_ Asgard's secret service. Furthermore, while he loved his nephew dearly, and had been kindness itself to Jean… now that the subject came up, she found herself worrying what a combination of his ruthlessness and desire to protect said beloved nephew might lead to if he ever deemed Maddie a threat.

And more to the point, while she'd felt comfortable enough with the newfound scale of her powers to threaten SHIELD through the proxy of Agent Coulson if they ever even blinked the wrong way towards Maddie or Harry, and Magneto was still human for all his power, she was uncomfortably aware that while Loki wasn't a man. He was a god. A god who was in the same privileged Omega level class of supernatural power as herself, Maddie, and Magneto, who had had more than a millennium to master his vast powers and test them against beings every bit as powerful as himself and, indeed, herself, while also having become practically a byword for trickery and cunning. If she went up against SHIELD, at the very least, she could wreak one hell of a lot of damage. If she went up against Magneto, well who knew that would turn out (translation: she'd probably lose, and badly), but in theory at least, it would only take one lucky blow to telekinetically slip something through and do real damage. If she went up against Loki…

She blinked out of her thoughts at Maddie's palpable surprise. It was less than it would have been only a couple of weeks, but it was still present.

"Yes," she said, forestalling her sister's wondering question. "I would. You're my sister, Maddie. I'd take on the universe for you."

Tears welled up in Maddie's eyes again, and she looked away sharply, composing herself. Jean restrained her instinctive desire to hug her twin, having learned that on relatively minor matters, Maddie preferred to be given a moment or two to compose herself.

It was then that Jean was struck by a thought. "This bed making thing," she said. "When I said that you didn't have to, I meant that you don't _need_ to. But if you want to, then of course you can do it." She looked her sister in the eye. "The point I'm trying to make is that you have a choice. Now, and always."

Maddie met her gaze, then nodded solemnly. "Thank you," she said quietly.

Jean nodded. "Are you sure you're ready for this?" she asked.

Maddie looked away for a moment. And for all her reputation as the calmest and most level-headed of the three of her, Jean and Harry, when she looked back, the determined fire that burned in her eyes was at least equal to any her sister or cousin had ever mustered. And when she spoke, it was with a calm and inexorable rhythm.

"I can do this. I can, and I must, so I will."

"And I am glad to hear it."

Both girls jumped and whipped around to see the Professor, who sat in his chair in the doorway, opened for him by the now dressed, damp-haired and nervous looking Lorna. Over his shoulder stood Magneto, who was quietly talking to his younger daughter. His older daughter had, ultimately, decided not to come, despite having bonded with Lorna and spent nearly every spare moment that wasn't either tracking Harry, or afterwards, glued to his bedside, with her. This was on the grounds that Ms Dane was going to have several quite severe shocks in quick succession – namely rediscovering her daughter, regaining the attendant memories, and coming to terms with the realisation that she'd been made to forget her daughter, sell her house, and move to the other side of the country to ease the process of the cover-up, as well as seeing said daughter's father for the first time in fifteen years.

As Ms Maximoff had conceded, a newly rediscovered daughter and a reappearing ex rocking up on her doorstep with a bunch of telepaths to help her come to terms with a bucket-load of psychic trauma, was one thing. That newly rediscovered daughter's newly discovered half sister, who was more or less of an age with Ms Dane herself, rocking up with them was quite another, especially since Ms Maximoff and Magneto gave off the impression of being about five minutes away from a blazing row at the best of times. So Ms Maximoff had taken her father aside, and from what Jean could gather, had given him a low, menacing speech to the effect of 'be gentle with Lorna _or_ _else_.'

So far, though, he had seemingly been a model father. And as Maddie met the Professor's gaze with resolute certainty, Jean felt that things were definitely looking up.

OoOoO

A little less than an hour later, Ms Suzanna Dane opened the door of her home to a rather puzzling assembly of people. There were three teenage girls; two older with red hair and green eyes, one with tattoos and one without, who looked like sisters, maybe even twins, and one younger with green hair, brown eyes, brown eyes strangely like her own. All three were wearing jeans, the younger girl a strappy tank top, the tattooed girl a non-descript black t-shirt, her sister a white blouse. The latter had a reassuring hand on her sister's shoulder, while the younger girl shifted nervously.

With them were two older men; one bald and looking to be somewhere in early middle age, in a wheelchair and a fine suit with a benign expression on his face, the other a tall, sternly handsome man with dark iron grey hair that mirrored his steely eyes in simple yet well-made tan slacks and a white open collared button down shirt. The latter also had a hand on the younger girl's shoulder, and gave her a reassuring smile when she looked up at him for guidance. As she did, Suzanna noticed a certain resemblance between them – father and daughter, perhaps?

And there was something else about them that drew her eye, something oddly familiar about them – it was vague in the case of the man, but pronounced in the case of the girl, like the face of a stranger that you _know_ you've seen before but can't for the life of you remember where.

As she processed this, she caught the tattooed girl mutter to herself in a strangely clinical RP accent, "Good, basic recognition. That suggests the framework remains."

"Excuse me?" Suzanna said, blinking. "I'm sorry, but who are you people?"

The younger girl flinched, hard, and took half a step forward. However, the man who Suzanna vaguely recognised and was more and more certain by the second was the girl's father gave her a warning squeeze on the shoulder, and she subsided.

At the same time, the tattooed girl made to speak, but stopped, casting a half glance at the bald man, who rolled his chair forward and spoke.

"Good morning, Ms Dane," he man said, accent also British, though almost American in places. He had a warm, pleasant voice. "My name is Professor Charles Xavier. My companions include my friend, Erik Lensherr, his daughter Lorna, and my students, Jean Grey and her sister, Maddie. As for why we are here, you are at this moment wondering why you recognise Erik and Lorna, why you are certain that you have seen them before, that you know them, despite a simultaneous absolute certainty that you do not know who they are." He gave her a sympathetic smile. "I would imagine that the contradiction is beginning to give you quite the headache."

Suzanna, whose head had been beginning to feel as if it had been put in a vice that was steadily being tightened, took a wary half-step back. It was if the man had been able to read her mind. "I'm sorry," she said shortly. "Whatever you're here about, whatever you're selling, I'm not interested."

With that, she made to shut the door.

"Mum, please!"

She froze, gaze dragged once again to the green haired girl, Lorna, who was now looking at her with an expression of utmost desperation and tears in her brown eyes. "Don't you recognise me?" she begged.

"I…" Suzanna said, then her eyes widened in recognition and confusion. She recognised that voice, twice over. "You're that girl who called me," she said. "Claiming to be my daughter, or some nonsense like that." Her expression firmed. "I don't know what kind of trick you think that you're playing –"

"I think, Ms Dane, that a part of you knows as well as we do that this is no trick," Professor Xavier said. His voice was quiet, his tone gentle, yet it cut Suzanna off in mid word. "A part of you recognises Erik and Lorna, even if the rest of you does not know why. We can explain it to you. Will you please hear us out?"

"Why should I?" Suzanna asked warily.

"Because I would wager that there are a lot of things in your life that have not made sense recently," the other man, Erik said. His voice was deeper, near accent-less, and somehow resonant. "A room in your old house that you did not go into in the final weeks before you moved out, the function of which you could not put your finger on. A bedroom in this house which you do not need, yet which you felt the need to have anyway. An uncertainty as to why you moved in the first place. Clothes, books, cds and dvds that are not yours which turned up unexpectedly in the unpacking. Wash things, toothbrushes and toothpaste that belong to someone else amongst your own in the bathroom. More cutlery, glasses, and crockery than one woman living alone would need. Bank statements forwarded to your new address for savings accounts you don't know why you made. And it goes the other way, too, I'd imagine: empty spaces where things should be, things you feel are somehow missing. Pictures, perhaps. Maybe a certificate or two. Perhaps even a small trophy."

His eyes, intense and unblinking, bored into her, as his voice rolled inexorably on. "And it runs deeper than that, I think. Memories that should be there but aren't. Other memories that feel like they are missing something, as if they are incomplete. Conversations with friends that falter, as both of you stumble across a blank space in your memories, something which is supposed to contain something, something _important_ , but you don't quite know what. You're not a fool, Suzanna. You _know_ that something is wrong."

"I…" Suzanna began, before stopping, her mouth working soundlessly as flickers of thought, of imagining (of memory?), bombarded her mind.

Then, all of a sudden, it stopped, and she felt her gaze drawn to Professor Xavier, who looked her right in the eyes and said, "Erik could have been more tactful. But he is right. Something is wrong. We can help fix it."

"You mean fix me," Suzanna said slowly. "You're saying…" She let out a hopeless, disbelieving laugh. "You're saying that someone's changed my mind?"

Both red-haired sisters raised their eyebrows, looking impressed, while the tall intense man, Erik, chuckled. "I said that you were no fool," he said, with what sounded like pride in his voice. Similarly, Lorna's lips cracked into a small, tentative, proud, and almost hopeful smile. Suzanna just stared at them, baffled and bemused.

"Yes," Xavier said gently. "I am. And not just your mind. I think that quite a few others had their minds changed too, though perhaps not so comprehensively – I believe that you were made to move house to reduce the number of minds that would need altering, and the likelihood of anyone else investigating."

Suzanna's legs felt weak. "I think I need to sit down," she said faintly. She paused for a moment, regarding the group. "I suppose you'd better come in, too." Her resolve strengthened. "But if this turns out to be some sort of con, then I'll make sure that you'll wish you'd never been born."

Xavier inclined his head. "Of course," he said.

Five minutes later, they were all seated in Suzanna's living room, and Suzanna was listening to the most unbelievable story she'd ever heard. It was almost too ridiculous to be made up, and its credibility was added to when Jean and Maddie demonstrated their ability to move objects with their minds, while Erik did the same, turned the lights on and off with a thought, and in a moment of mischief, made all of Suzanna's hair stand on end, like she'd touched a Van de Graaf generator. Lorna, meanwhile, shyly presented a steel flower that she'd made, slowly floating it over to Suzanna, who stared in amazement as the girl who claimed to be her daughter made its petals open and close before her very eyes.

And Professor Xavier claimed to be a telepath, which he demonstrated by making her next words, when she spoke, come out in a flawless Parisian French accent.

"I am reluctant to do more," he said. "Telepathy is a dangerous gift, and there are few ways of demonstrating it that are not either potentially harmful, invasive, or easily enough dismissed as the products of guesswork, cold-reading, and ventriloquism."

Suzanna nodded slowly, taking this in.

"Well," she said slowly, after some time. "I suppose that with aliens in New York, HYDRA and demons in London, and Iron Man and the Avengers running around, anything's possible. But…"

"But?" Xavier prompted.

"Well, I suppose I just thought that this sort of thing didn't happen around here," Suzanna said with a helpless shrug.

"Australia has not been a thriving hub of superhuman activity, that is true," Xavier conceded, sounding faintly amused. "At least, not in the modern era." He steepled his fingers. "But mutants, like all of us except your good self, can and are being born anywhere and everywhere. I run a school for those like us, and while a number of my current staff and former students are American or Canadian, others include people from Mexico, France, Vietnam, Russia, and Kenya. The latter, Ororo Munroe, is currently one of my senior staff. Among those who are currently at my Institute and hopefully will choose to stay, at least for the time being, are people from Britain, Germany, Wakanda and Japan."

He glanced at Erik, who added, "Charles is right. I myself am Jewish, of German ancestry. The point he is correctly making is that those like us can be born anywhere, to anyone." He paused. "As Lorna was."

Suzanna nodded again. "I know that something's been done," she said eventually. "I can feel it. But, and I don't mean this personally, how do I know I can trust any of you? If my mind's already been screwed with, how can I even trust my own thoughts, my own decisions? How can I know that any of them are mine?"

"Because you would not even be capable of considering the possibility," Maddie said bluntly. "If we were manipulating your thoughts, there would be no point in allowing this discussion."

Suzanna blinked.

"Indelicately though it is put," Xavier said. "Maddie is right. In simple terms, you can tell that we are not manipulating your mind because if we were, we would not need to ask, as we are now. It is for this reason that we hope you will trust us. We could enter your mind and undo what has been done to you without any involvement or even awareness on your part. Indeed, we could have done it from the car, or even from our hotel. But we are not, because it is your mind, and mere convenience is no reason to violate it. That is one thing, one vitally important thing, that separates us from those we oppose, like the one who did this to you."

"Was he a mutant like you?" Suzanna asked.

"A mutant, yes, I think so," Xavier said. "Like me? No. I have spent my life opposing those like him and undoing the harm that they have done. I…" His gaze slid to Maddie. "Or rather, we, would like to do so here." At Suzanna's puzzled look at Maddie, he elaborated. "Maddie is thoroughly familiar with the techniques that the one who attacked your mind used on you. She is highly skilled and best suited to undo them."

"I can help you, Ms Dane," Maddie said. "Please?"

"I…" Suzanna began, then put her face in her hand and let out a long, shaky breath. "This is a lot to take in."

"We'll give you all the time you need to make your decision," Xavier said.

Suzanna looked up at him, sceptical. "It's a decision, is it?" she said. "For all your dancing around the subject, and your high-minded words about respecting other peoples' minds, Professor, from what I can tell, you're all set to go ahead and rewire my mind back to the way it's apparently meant to be. All you're doing is waiting for me to say yes."

Xavier looked pensive, as if he was marshalling his responses. At that point, however, another voice, small and disbelieving, broke in.

"You mean, you're going to say _no?"_

Everyone turned to Lorna, whose expression was on the verge of crumpling into misery and despair.

"I, honey," Suzanna began helplessly. "You have to understand…" She trailed off. Where could she even begin?

"I think I understand perfectly well," Erik said coldly, standing.

" _Erik,"_ Xavier said warningly.It was only one word, but it was harsh, at a striking contrast to his previously calm, soft tones, and full of authority. "Sit down."

The two men stared at each other for a moment, the air almost crackling with tension. Then, grudgingly, Erik sat.

"Ms Dane, I completely understand your reluctance," Xavier said calmly. "And please forgive my friend. This is, as you might imagine, a highly emotive subject." He steepled his fingers. "I hope that you will say yes. I will even freely admit that a large part of me expects you to, as the rest of my party does – after all, from our point of view, we are simply restoring your mind to the way it was. From our point of view, we are making things right. However. As we must also understand, your perspective is a different one. We have the privilege of knowing the way things were before. You, on the other hand, have only flickering shadows of memories, gaps in those recollections that remain, to make you aware that something is wrong. To use a metaphor, there is a jigsaw puzzle before us, many of the pieces of which are jumbled up. We have the full picture before us, knowing how it is all meant to fit together. You, unfortunately, do not." At this point, his gaze swung meaningfully around his companions. "If you do not consent to this, then as far as I am concerned, that will be the end of the matter. I realise that it will likely make me very unpopular with my companions, but the simple fact of the matter is that your mind is not ours to alter as we see fit. One man thinking otherwise is what led to this tragedy in the first place." His tone grew pointed, even stern. "Furthermore, as all but Lorna and yourself should know well, repairing a mind is a delicate operation. Invading and forcibly altering a mind that has already been forcibly altered tends to compound the damage already done and increase the psychic trauma."

Erik grunted sourly, while Jean looked pensive, and Maddie looked troubled.

Lorna, meanwhile, looked betrayed.

Suzanna took a deep, shuddering breath. "This is insane," she whispered. "But… it's too insane not to be true." She looked up. "All right. Do it."

OoOoO

Meanwhile, matters of the mind were being mulled over elsewhere. In the deepest caverns under the palace of Asgard, to be exact, in a vault buried beneath steel, stone, and spell, where something resided. It was, at first glance, an unprepossessing object: a small feather, to be exact, encased in gold. That appearance would lead most who saw it to wonder why it was buried so deep, bound in enchantments both ancient and new, alike in strength and fearsome complexity.

What, they might wonder, was so dangerous about something small, that some of the most daring gods among the stars treated it with such caution, even fear? Why, they might question, was Asgard's King, Lord Protector of the Nine Realms, Mightiest of Midgard's Skyfathers, regarding it with such intensity? And above all, when he looked at it, what was he thinking?

The answer to that was that he was turning over and over in his mind everything that he knew about the feather. He knew what it was and he knew what power it now contained, power that dwarfed that which it once possessed – and that original power had been sufficient that in one savage instant it had laid open a vast gash in the Earth, one that had rippled through both space and time, altering millions of years of history about it. As a result, he had a very shrewd idea about its history, including an increasingly shrewd idea about where the feather had originally come from. He even suspected that it had a mind. What that mind intended (if one even existed), however, he could not say.

This troubled him. This troubled him greatly. Especially since he had seen it in use many times in ages gone by, enough that he'd been sure that he would recognise it anywhere.

And yet he hadn't.

It had remained in disguise among his possessions for more or less as long as his sons had been alive, passing as nothing more than a memento to a friend long passed. Oh, he'd wondered about it, but he hadn't looked too closely. Sometimes he wondered if some inherent property of it had blinded him to what it was, but he refused to accept that as an excuse. The fact of the matter was that it had lain dormant in his hands for a millennium and a half, and he had not noticed anything about it beyond the ordinary.

And yes, it had been dormant. Not dead, but waiting. He'd been warned of that when it had flared into life the moment it had touched his grandson's hand, the latter's wand burning in sympathy. And where another boy might have flinched away, his grandson, then slight and small for his age, with glass spectacles over his eyes, had stared at the flickering flames with every evidence of wonder and delight.

Yet he had thought that it was merely the phoenix feather Harry had identified it as, that a little light was all it was capable of. He had therefore felt comfortable gifting it to his grandson in light of the revelation of what his mother had become. But as he had come to realise, it was capable of far more than he had previously believed, and was perhaps capable of more still. And with all it was capable of, it chose to respond to his grandson.

The why of that was clear enough. It had then chosen to respond to his changeling cousin, stolen from her crib by a monster that had once been a man, one with many bodies. One of those bodies was having a significant measure of Loki's displeasure exacted upon it. The others, meanwhile, were being hunted by Doctor Strange, and with the fey light in the man's eyes, Odin had almost felt sorry for them. Almost.

In any case, the feather – though that was not even close to what it truly was, save possibly in an allegorical sort of way – had responded to her, even more than it had to Harry. The why of that was less clear, though Odin had his theories.

Oh yes, he had many theories about where the 'feather' had come from, and one of them was looking more and more likely by the day. King Eitri's message a couple of months ago, sent in the very hour of triumph over Chthon, saw to that. The Seal of Muspelheim was cracked, and all of his attempts to repair the seal had been ineffective. At first, Odin had thought it an after-effect of Chthon's malice, and he still felt that was the most likely cause. But now, things were changing.

Years ago, the Phoenix had chosen a human woman as her primary aspect. She had infused that woman's child, his grandson, with power in return, power that when purposefully mishandled had grown into a dark inferno that had almost consumed him and everything else in the Nine Realms with him. And figuring in events more and more often was Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme, who temporal energy flowed through like lifeblood, and who was taking a closer and closer interest in Harry's life, manipulating events with – mostly – the grace of a practiced puppetmaster, all with the stated ultimate goal of defeating the creature known as Thanos.

Strange, Odin knew, was playing a dangerous game, one fit for an exceptionally dangerous man. Sorcerers and Sorceresses Supreme had challenged gods in the past. It was what they did. The best among them had even faced down Skyfathers, and some had even survived. But none could claim to match Strange's daring or his madness, wielding a combination of ancient spellwork, the Tesseract, and sheer, breathtaking arrogance to bully the Council Elite into submission, with a clear message that they would either do as he demanded, or they would suffer the dire consequences. And they were most definitely demands. Before, Strange had been willing to patiently persuade (or admittedly, manipulate) others around to his point of view, to doing what he wanted, deploying a silver tongue that challenged even Loki's. Here, all patience had vanished, and in the place of smooth words and charm were snapped demands, harsh threats, and uncompromising ultimatums.

At the time, Odin had been secretly grateful, but now, he wondered and he worried. Ever since the extent of both the Phoenix and Strange's involvement had become clear, he had delved deep into Asgard's archives, chasing rumours, half-truths, and nigh forgotten memories. He had found useful information in a number of those tales; and among them, he had also caught glimpses that had told him some very worrying things indeed.

He turned away from the feather that had once been a wand, and had before that been something else entirely, and strode out of the vault, sending a messenger spell on ahead of him.

He was all for shielding his grandson, for allowing the boy to recover from his trials, to let time heal those wounds that still remained. But as he increasingly suspected, time was a luxury they were not going to have.

It was time that the boy learned his history.

OoOoO

"Once," Odin said. "Asgard resided on the mortal plane. It then moved to its current realm, as the rest of the Nine Realms took their places, and so began the era of Yggdrasil. You know this."

Harry nodded. He had learned that the year before, had been shown how to pick out the place where Asgard had once been, to find the light from the star that had once shone on Asgard, which was only now reaching Earth.

They stood in a cool chamber of pale stone embedded in one of the near mountains. A set of stairs spiralled down below them, and off the stairs at intervals of several feet were alcoves. In each alcove was a stone statue of each King and Queen, with records of their name, their reign, and their achievements, flanked by statues of their children. The monarchs, and those of their children who would go on to rule in turn, were crowned in gold. Those who did not were crowned in mithril – a name which Harry had to repeatedly remind himself that Tolkien had learned from Loki, rather than the other way around.

The column had been bored down into the Earth, and with the ascension of each monarch, the column twisted deeper, as a new alcove was created.

These days, it went a very, very long way down.

When one stood before them, enchantments moulded images of how they had appeared in life, essentially overlaying their carved features with the colours they had had in life.

"What you do not know," Odin said, before his gaze shifted to his wife and his sons. "What none of you –"

There was a pointed cough. Odin's eye narrowed, and he eyed Strange, who smiled serenely. Several weeks of peaceful recovery, Asgardian medical care, and good food had left him looking and acting much more like his old self. This was considered to be a mixed blessing.

In any case, while the Cavern of the Kings was normally restricted to the royal family, Strange had invited himself along. The only reason that this had been accepted was that he had bluntly stated that he knew parts of this story that even Odin did not, and that when the story was told, he was going to fill in the gaps.

"Almost none of you," he amended. "What almost none of you know, is the full truth of why." He waved a hand, and with a grinding of stone, the stairs began to move.

"And there was me thinking that we'd have to walk," Harry muttered.

"We did when your uncle and I were last down here," Thor said.

"Your father and I felt that the walk was good for you," Frigga said. "And hoped that it would give you an appreciation for how far back Asgard's history reaches. A vain hope at the time, perhaps, but nevertheless."

"Why aren't we walking now, then, grandmother?" Harry asked, puzzled.

"Because you are curious, and today we focus on two of royal blood in particular," Odin answered bluntly. "Questions on the rest of your ancestors must wait."

There was a moment of silence. Then, Harry spoke again.

"It's about mum, isn't it," he said flatly.

Odin half turned to regard his grandson steadily. Not so long ago, the boy would have flushed a little in embarrassment or defiance, maybe looked away. Not so long ago, Odin would have had to look down to look at him. Now, they were near enough to being of a height, especially with Harry being on the higher step, and Harry had seen far too much to be remotely fazed by his grandfather's steady gaze. So instead, he returned it in kind, glancing away only briefly when he noted his father's arm on his shoulder, picking up the hidden message.

"Grandfather," he added, somewhat belatedly, tone a little contrite, if still mostly flat.

"It is and it is not," Odin said, as they came to a stop. They were still quite near the top. "Suffice it to say, I have come to realise that you are not the first of Asgard to be touched by the Phoenix." He turned to the alcove, and led the way inside, the short corridor and open chamber lighting up with pale, silvery light. "This is the tomb of King Vé IV, and his wife, Queen Rán, who reigned some 40,000 years ago," he said, indicating, the two main statues. Both were tall, golden crowns gleaming on their brows, and where the woman's red hair was tied back in a tight braid, in the man, it was black and fell to his shoulders, surrounding a cropped beard.

Harry stared at them, their features illuminated in the pseudo-moonlight of the chamber. Both were depicted in their prime, though a cursory glance at their dates beneath showed that they had lived to a ripe old age, and they were so fine and lifelike that he half expected them to crack a smile and step off their pedestals to greet their descendants.

Odin, however, turned away from them after only a brief moment, to one of three statues flanking them. This one was of a young woman with a silver circlet on golden-red hair. There was a somehow knowing expression on her face. "It also contains the memorial to their daughter."

"Sunniva," Loki said softly. "Goddess of Life and Fire."

"And host of the Phoenix," Odin said. "And mother of the Trimurti, the gods of Indian subcontinent by the Elder God once known as Ishvara."

"Some now refer to him as Prajapati," Strange added absently, looking around with mild interest. "Nice fellow."

Odin eyed him again, but did not comment on this interjection.

And in any case, Harry was ignoring them both. Instead, he had walked up to Sunniva's statue and was now drinking in every detail. She didn't look especially out of the ordinary, especially by Asgardian standards – if he had walked past her in the street, he would have done little more than absently note a pretty woman in a rather unusual dress whose tall and deceptively slim build denoted sinewy muscle. But she had been far from ordinary, that much he knew. She had been Asgardian royalty, like him. And she had been a Phoenix host, like him.

He stared at his ancestresses' statue for a long time, half-hoping that those frozen eyes would snap down to meet his, and that she would step off her pedestal to give her many times great-grand-nephew a little advice.

Alas, however, her statue remained statuesque.

"Why us?" he asked. It was intended to be rhetorical – certainly, he didn't expect any answer from the statue.

But he received one anyway.

"Because as she was needed then, you are needed now," Strange said. "And because you both had the strength of character required."

"Why was she needed?" Harry asked, turning to Odin and Strange.

"Midgard is the keystone of a dimensional nexus," Odin said. "It is part of what makes Yggdrasil possible." His gaze turned to Strange. "Others, however, have tried to exploit in the past."

"Indeed," Strange said. "My job is to prevent them from doing so. Of course, sometimes, a threat is so great that the universe has to solve its own problems. In this case… cue the Phoenix."

"What could be so terrible?" Thor asked.

"A dimension," Odin said. "Akin to those of the Nine Realms beyond the mortal plane, or the Nevernever, yet not – for this one was a twisted predatory thing of the Primordial Darkness, scuttling through the Void between realities like a great spider in search of prey. It latched onto our universe, and attempted to tear open a breach at the point in reality that Midgard occupies, in order to drain the light and energy of this universe, its lifeblood, to feed its endless hunger and leave only an empty shell behind. It dispatched a vast armada of servitors, heralds, to annihilate all resistance; the spider injecting poison into its prey, subduing it so it might be devoured, for it feared light and power as it craved it. That armada had a leader, the greatest and most terrible of its creatures. The records describe most of those creatures a mindless horde, but this one, they gave a name: Annihilus. Annihilus the Undying."

"So, why do I still have a bit of the Phoenix in me?" Harry asked, turning back to the statue of Sunniva.

"You are no ordinary host, grandson," Odin said. "You do not have the power of an ordinary host, though the power within you can grow."

"I'd noticed," Harry said sourly, then, after a moment, added, "Sorry."

"You have been through much," Odin said, in tones of even acknowledgement. "As I said: you are no ordinary host. As a result, I think that the purpose for which you were granted the power which you possess is no ordinary one." His eye flicked to Strange. "For it is one that our guest has already shed some light on."

Harry folded his arms and narrowed his eyes at Strange. "Has he now?"

"I have," Strange said, without a trace of shame, as he idly examined his fingernails. "I haven't told you because up to now, there was no point. In truth, there still isn't much of a point."

"Why not?"

"Because," Strange said, and suddenly those sapphire blue eyes had locked onto Harry's own, in a gaze that held Harry's and would not let it go. "There is something coming. Something that you will need to fight. And while in theory, I could have crafted you into a weapon, ensured that you were raised as the very model of a warrior, a master of all forms of combat, physical, mental, and mystical alike, focused entirely on your destined goal, that would have been both cruel and counter-productive. That which is coming claims to represent Death, with which and with whom he is intimately obsessed. But he is mistaken, for what he represents is not the necessary cessation of life to open a door onto a new beginning, not the inevitable circle of life and cycle of the universe, but something far more sinister: oblivion."

"Like Chthon?" Harry asked.

"No," Strange said. "What Chthon wanted – and still wants – was for this universe to be reduced to the primal chaos from which it arose, wherein he and those things like him could thrive. That is still something, still inhabited by living things. Even if they defy our laws of nature, physics, and comprehension, they are still _alive._ The one who is coming wants everything to become nothing. No more order, no more chaos, no more life, just the pure emptiness of the Void. He wishes to erase everything, to kill it, no, to sacrifice it, and offer it to Death as a lover's gift." He looked away. "But the wanting is immaterial: there are countless across this universe and many others who have desired similarly mad things. As was once said about the Red Skull… the sanity of his plans is immaterial. _Because. He. Can. Do it."_

There was a long moment of grim silence.

"Wonderful," Harry said flatly. "Thanks for the heads up. I'll put it in my diary – maybe I can fit him in between Voldemort and myself as a galaxy eating cosmic abomination."

Strange cocked an eyebrow. "Well, as both a medical professional and a Master of the Mystic Arts, I must say that it is nice to know that your capacity for sarcasm is undiminished and, indeed, apparently a constant of the universe," he said. "The point I was making is that for every reaction there is an equal and opposite reaction."

"Newton's Third Law," Harry said, and at his father's expression of surprise, added, "you'd be amazed what you pick up around Tony."

"Like a sense of humour?" Loki murmured under his breath.

"You're a fine one to talk," Thor retorted.

Loki was about to reply when Frigga let out a meaningful cough.

"So I'm that reaction?" Harry asked.

"You're part of it," Strange said. "So am I, and, to one extent or another, so are quite a lot of other people. In the simplest possible terms, the universe is a living thing and it does not want to die. And like someone not too far from here, it is most certainly not going to give up without a fight."

"So, if I'm apparently going to be saviour of the universe, or die trying," Harry said. "And no pressure, by the way… why didn't you arrange for me to be trained into some kind of living weapon?" His expression twisted. "Like the Red Room did."

"The Red Son was, as the Winter Soldier before, a perfect example of why such an approach would be flawed as well as cruel," Strange said calmly. "A champion of life cannot fight if they do not know what they are fighting for. They need to understand the value of life, to feel it running through them like a livewire, to know what it is, both pleasure and pain, joy and suffering, everyday tragedies and ordinary miracles, and above all, they need to be _alive_. The Red Son might have been in a functionally living body, might have been able to verbally respond to commands, but was no more alive than your phone, which can do much the same." He tapped Harry on the chest. "And that, incidentally, is the secret to controlling the Phoenix within you. It is life and it is fire. You've already mastered fire… now try mastering life."

"I think I've already got the knack of that," Harry said. "What with not being dead yet."

"No, all that means is that you have mastered surviving," Strange said bluntly. "There is a difference." He turned away. "Surviving is an important skill, make no mistake. But it is only the start."

"So, I should, what, go out and have fun?" Harry asked incredulously. "Ignore all the… all the… all the _shit_ , that's out there, that I've been through?"

"Ignore? No," Strange said. "Nor am I expecting to turn your back on evil. Just recognise that the shit is part of the picture; there is gold in there too. Which you choose to focus on is your choice." He regarded Harry. "I am not diminishing what you have been through. Believe it or not, I have walked many miles in shoes very like yours, and I know what it is like. Nor am I saying, 'get up and get over it'. As I am well aware, getting up can be incredibly hard, and getting over it can take a very long time indeed, especially considering what you've been through. And yet, that is what you are doing, and it's amazing, it really is. As I said before, like Sunniva, you were given this burden because you are able to bear it." His expression turned grim. "Which means, I suppose, that it is darkly appropriate that this latest problem comes from one who could not."

"What do you mean, Strange?" Thor asked, as Frigga slipped an arm around her grandson and gave Strange a shrewd look, while Odin looked unsurprised, and Loki had the appearance of one doing a million calculations a minute.

"He means that it is time to speak of the First King," Odin said. "Of the founding of Yggdrasil and the War for the Dawn. Come."

They followed him back onto the stairs, which began to descend once again, faster this time, going deeper and deeper into the dark heart of the mountain, where the only real light was the gleam of crowns from alcoves and tombs. Eventually, though, they went so deep that even the crowns stopped gleaming, until finally, they came to a stop in a circular chamber with a flat floor, where only a pale witch-light guided footsteps to a midnight black chamber.

"I have never been this deep before," Thor said slowly.

"Nor have I," Loki said, in tones of vague surprise.

"That is because admission is usually only permitted for the Lord of Asgard," Odin said. "The night they ascend to the throne and receive the power of the Kings and ruling Queens, which I wield now as the Odinforce, they have, for over a million years, they come to this chamber. Here, they learn the truth about where that power comes from, and what it is meant for. They learn how and why Yggdrasil came to be." His gaze drifted to Harry. "But now… these are not usual times."

With that, he turned, and vanished into the darkness. With a glance at his father, Harry followed him in.

 **And that is the end of Part 1. Please feel free to leave your thoughts thus far (please, please do. I treasure every review), and take a breather. The next one will be about twice as long, have many more emotions in it, plus facts.**


	20. Chapter 20: Revelations Part II

**And now we come to the second part of this monster. Normally, I'd have released them separately, about a week apart at least, as normal chapters. But I promised that this would be resolved in one chapter, and a promise is a promise - if I can't do it one chapter, I can at least do it one go.**

 **Now, dig in, lads and lasses. This is the longer one. The fuller one. This is the one with the feels.**

After Wanda and I had gotten together as master (mistress?) and apprentice, and one hell of a lot more, I had been introduced to a lot of new things. One of them was the main daily newspaper of the wanded community in Britain which, as far as I could tell, was a rag that dressed half-truths, innuendo and outright lies up in fancy language that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on. Like most tabloids, in other words. However, as my experience with the _Midwestern Arcane_ , a paper that haunted supermarket checkouts, specialised in anything approximating supernatural weirdness, and had previously published some of the most accurate reporting of the spooky side of things in Chicago and its environs, such things were not to be underestimated.

In the case of the _Arcane_ , was because of a star reporter, Susan Rodriguez, who didn't let things go, and who had wangled Chicago's one and only Professional Wizard as her main source. She had also been my girlfriend. I had been about to propose. Then, my reluctance to tell her the full truth about the supernatural world, to keep her at arm's length from its power politics and the very real danger it posed, had led her into trouble: incomplete knowledge, especially in the hands of a journalist, is far more dangerous than total ignorance. It had nearly got her killed. It could be argued that what happened instead was worse.

The _Daily Prophet_ (the terrible pun did not go unnoticed, believe me), however, was more one of the more upmarket tabloids, something that – unlike the _Arcane_ – made out that it was more than it was. Wanda's opinion of it was considerably less flattering than mine, but as she pointed out, it was an unprincipled weathervane and thus a good way of finding out what the British magical world, in which Wanda had a definite interest, was thinking. Personally, I found the moving pictures fascinating, and mostly read it for the novelty value and the crossword.

What with recent events, though, we hadn't picked up the paper much recently. One morning, though, Wanda picked up the Avengers Mansion copy (they had a subscription for much the same reason as Wanda did). She skimmed through it, as per usual. Then, suddenly, she stiffened.

I raised a quizzical eyebrow. "Wanda?" I asked, puzzlement turning to worry as she slowly, shakily, sat down. "What is it?"

Without speaking, she pointed at one of the letters. She looked like someone had just walked over her grave.

I examined it. It seemed fairly innocuous, mostly casting doubt on the wisdom of the appointment of Zatanna Zatara, a young Italian woman, to the position of Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts, basically fretting about her youth and how she'd be bringing foreign ideas to the curriculum. I rolled my eyes at this. Nothing special there. Considering what I'd been told about the turnover rate in that particular position, I privately thought that, as prior evidence had shown, Dumbledore would take just about whoever he could get – not many people wanted a job where none of their predecessors had lasted more than a year for a good three and a half decades – so long as they weren't openly trying to kill the students.

I glanced at the picture beside the letter, of the woman in question. Zatanna Zatara was a very pretty young woman, looking to be in her early to mid-twenties, with a warm smile and, as far as I could tell from a moving photo, an air of competence. While one of the previous Professors in the last few years had been little more than eye candy – and apparently a fraud with a talent for PR, memory manipulation, and very little else – I got the feeling that this one wasn't. Since the letter likely wasn't what was alarming Wanda, it most likely had something to do with her.

"Is it about this Zatanna person?" I hazarded.

Wanda nodded slowly. "When she was a child," she said. "Her parents, Giovanni and Sindella Zatara, Italian practitioners, were part of the Order of the Phoenix, the group that fought Voldemort." She shook her head slowly. "Albus, what are you _doing?_ " she asked herself.

"Um. Still not any more enlightened," I said. And I wasn't. Then, a flash of intuition hit me. Wanda didn't talk all that much about her days with the Order of the Phoenix, but when she did, it was usually fondly. Except where one person was involved. "This is about Constantine isn't it?" I said. "And what he did, what he tricked you into doing. Zatanna's father is the one he tricked you into sending to his death."

Wanda looked surprised, then chuckled slightly. "This is what I get for dating a detective," she said to herself. "Yes, Harry, you're right. He puppeteered Giovanni Zatara, a man who trusted him, a widower with a young daughter, to his grave. You see, Giovanni and Sindella, were researchers, researchers of magic, and they were believed to have cracked the division between wandless and wanded magic. With their methods, it was not simply a matter of overcoming natural tendencies to learn both styles separately. They had created a truly unified version of the Art."

My jaw dropped. This… this was huge. This was _beyond_ huge.

The wanded/wandless division went back millennia and came down to an essential trade-off: wandless magic was more flexible and could be shaped to the Wizard's will. It was a fundamentally more intuitive discipline, one that connected practitioners more closely to the earth and to magic itself, giving them longer lives, a greater sense for magical energies – most prominently, the Sight – and a much greater gift for enchantment. As a result, practitioners tend to be more specialised, drawn to whatever aspects of the Art they have an affinity for. However, it also took longer to learn, there was very little standardisation and that same sensitivity made one much more vulnerable to corruption by dark magic.

Wanded magic is a more rigid discipline, and if you want to cast a spell, you have to learn the wand movements and the pronunciation – and you can't really adapt spells. My standard force spell, for instance, can be used for standard wrecking ball like blasts, or focused into a blade to cut the link of a chain. A wanded spell does what it says on the can and no more. Plus, unless they really work on it, very few of them have magical senses worth a damn, and certainly not the Sight. But its much quicker to learn, much quicker to develop, much easier to control and standardise, and practitioners don't fry electronics wherever they go.

Wanded magic is like a key ring, which you can constantly add to. Wandless magic is like a set of lock picks, which you can adapt to pretty much any situation, but it takes rather longer and you have to learn how to adapt it and you have to do it yourself, rather than just putting a key made, tested and proven by others in the lock, turning it and going on your merry way.

If you could combine the flexibility, adaptability and sensitivity of wandless magic with the speed and standardisation of wanded magic to become, for want of a better description, magically ambidextrous, and do it naturally without having to spend laborious hours training yourself to adapt to the other discipline…

"Yes," Wanda said, reading my expression. "Naturally, Voldemort was desperate to learn the secrets of this magic, and he had attempted to torture those secrets out of Sindella. This triggered a trap, a spell woven into her bones, one that turned her into a living bomb, seemingly designed by Sindella herself to prevent Voldemort from extracting her secrets. It killed over a dozen Death Eaters and badly wounded Voldemort himself. Giovanni, of course, was grieving. Then, John came forward, saying that he knew where Voldemort was holed up to heal, and how to get there. Dumbledore deemed it too risky, but Giovanni was desperate and John offered to guide him to the location, to help him get in and assassinate Voldemort. Giovanni, though, hesitated. He wasn't completely blinded by grief and rage, he knew John's reputation. So he turned to me."

By now, Wanda looked utterly bleak. "He turned to me and he asked me if he could trust John. I asked John about the details of the mission, I asked for his assurances that he would pull Giovanni out if it looked like matters were going downhill. He gave those assurances, so I told Giovanni that yes, he could trust John. I told him to trust John and in doing so, I gave John another weapon to use. Giovanni managed to get into Voldemort's stronghold, but Voldemort had healed faster than anyone had imagined, and he killed Giovanni in single combat." She sat back. "Even then, I might have forgiven John. Anyone could make a mistake, after all. Then, when we recovered Giovanni's body, I found out the truth. It had been enchanted, the same way that Sindella's had been. And the signature on the enchantment was unmistakeable."

"He enchanted them," I said quietly. "To prevent the secrets of their magic falling into the wrong hands."

"Yes," Wanda said. "John has never been especially powerful, but he is one of the few wanded wizards I have ever met with some natural gift for wandless magic. And enchantment was one area in which he excelled. The enchantment on Giovanni, and I presume on Sindella, was designed to be triggered in the event that their mental defences were broken or that they broke under torture, to release every bit of magic in their system in one violent explosion. It was very carefully constructed, very subtle and there was no evidence that either Giovanni or Sindella had ever known it was there. And when I confronted John, you know what he said? 'Casualties of war, love. Casualties of war.'

OoOoO

The chamber was, Harry thought, not so different from the others, at least at first glance. Of course, at first glance, nothing could be seen at all, not even with the best night vision.

Then, however, the pale witch-light began to seep in from outside, rolling in like a rising tide, before flowing down rivers of lines down the walls all around them, rolling down and onto the floor. All of those the lines of light soon began to coalesce at the very heart of the round chamber, before suddenly rising, revealing a statue of pale stone. It was a man, dressed in close-fitting armour, made of plates that seemed to lock perfectly into place, with nary a fraction of an inch between them. The only decoration was on the breastplate: a tree; or rather, a series of lines smoothly and neatly interwoven to _suggest_ a tree, one with six branches and three roots. And above it, seven silvery stars, arranged in an arc.

A helmet ringed with a golden circlet, the only colour present, framed his face, which had an unusual expression on its face. Most such statues went in for expressions of mildly constipated nobility and stares into the middle distance. This one though… in this one, the man looked almost afraid, yet determined, as if he had nerved himself up to do something that plainly terrified him. He looked, Harry thought, very young. Another observer would have agreed, and might have added (if he knew Harry well) that with his expression, he also looked rather a lot like Harry himself.

And in his hands was a sword. Something about it drew Harry's eye. This was unusual because it wasn't, he had to say, a particularly striking sword at first glance. Unlike the expression, it didn't have stand out features to be picked out. It didn't have an intricately designed hilt, full of clever designs weaved into a delicate basket. It didn't have a gemstone of some sort set into it. It didn't even have scrolling letters, symbols or patterns running down it. It was, in every respect, seemingly an entire ordinary longsword with a straight blade and hilt with a cruciform cross-guard.

It was nothing special. Harry had seen hundreds, thousands, like it in the palace armouries, in the gauntlets of the suits of armour at Hogwarts, even a few in some of the Avengers Tower – now Avengers Mansion – armouries.

And yet… there _was_ something.

He leaned closer, kneeling down in front of it. And that was when he saw them in the pale light: three letters, runes in fact, like none he had ever seen. They were written on the blade, just above the hilt. They were small, thin, and incised in such a fashion that they were only visible when they caught the light. But they were there.

"Hope."

Most people would just have twitched, maybe even jumped. Harry jerked upright, whirling, gathering power on instinct, and was prepared to either defend himself or unleash sufficient destruction to level a city block before registering that it was his grandfather who had spoken. Closing his eyes, he took a deep breath and dismissed the power. "Grandfather?" he asked.

"Hope," Odin said. "The word on the sword means hope." His gaze shifted to the statue. "Their last, and their best."

Harry followed his gaze. "He was the first King, then," he said.

"Of Asgard as we know it," Odin confirmed. "Though Asgards had had Kings before. Back when it was in the mortal universe… and we of Asgard were mortal with it."

Harry's head whipped around in shock. Odin looked faintly, if grimly, amused.

"Why so surprised, grandson?" he asked. "You already know well that Asgard once resided on the mortal plane. You have seen the light she cast in Midgard's night sky." His gaze turned back to the statue. "As for our once being mortal; all things begin somewhere. That is as true of gods as it is of mortals. Most pantheons, of Midgard and throughout the universe, descend from older gods, who descend from other, even older gods, and they descend from the Elder Gods. One you have met."

Harry grimaced. "Yeah, I'd like to avoid repeating that," he muttered, before looking sharply at Odin. "Where did they come from, grandfather?"

"As far as we know, they were among the first beings to form when life came into being in this universe," Odin said. "Though others came from other dimensions, other realities. Others still, we do not know. They are a mixed lot, in truth. However." He met Harry's gaze. "We of Asgard are different. We were mortal, once."

"Before Yggdrasil," Harry said catching on. "It did something to us. It made us gods, didn't it, grandfather?" As he said it, he noted with some surprise that he'd really, unconsciously referred himself as one with other Asgardians.

Approval glimmered in Odin's eye. "Yes," he said. "It did."

"What did it do to the Frost Giants, father? What did it do to me?"

Loki had spoken. He was frowning, flanked by Thor, who had briefly glanced at the statue and was now dividing his attention between father, son, and brother, and Frigga, who was standing reassuringly close to him.

"Yggdrasil changed all the worlds of the Alliance and their inhabitants," Odin said. "To a greater or lesser extent. The Aesir, and those who would become the Vanir, it made into gods. The Elves, Light and Dark alike, it made immortal. The Frost Giants it made as one with their element, giving them life and strength alike to gods."

"And me?" Loki asked.

"You were born a Frost Giant. You chose to be Asgardian," Odin said simply. "And I chose to claim you as my own. There is a power in choices, as you well know." His expression softened. "You are my son, Loki, a Prince of Asgard, and our God of Magic."

Loki regarded him for a long moment, then nodded slowly, in a way that suggested that while he was satisfied for now, he was going to hit the library and Asgard's most extensive databases as soon as this was over.

"The Dwarves were altered in a similar fashion," Odin continued. "And humanity…" He eyed Harry. "Of them I am not certain. But I believe it gave them a certain flexibility. An ability to adapt."

"What do you mean, father?" Thor asked, frowning.

"He means that it is likely no accident that humans have been so able to incorporate outside influences into their DNA," Frigga said.

"Oh, is that what it's called these days?" Harry said, before he could stop himself.

There was a moment of silence, in which Odin looked disapproving, Frigga rolled her eyes, and Strange's shoulders were clearly shaking with suppressed laughter. Then Thor and Loki turned to each other and said in unison, "Tony's fault."

Frigga smiled wryly. "That wasn't the sole point, grandson," she said. "Magical humans, many human mutants, and the Fae, are three prominent examples of humanity adapting to what is around them – in the case of magical humans, the sheer amount of magic present on Midgard led to humans able to generate, channel and manipulate it."

"The Fae are human?" Thor asked sharply.

"An offshoot," Frigga said, nodding. "One that ventured into the Nevernever, the parts that became known as Faerie many hundreds of thousands of years ago, and found it to their liking. Mortal men adapted to magic. The Fae _became_ magic."

As this was absorbed, she continued.

"More recently, two relatively frail men of your acquaintance inflicted upon themselves vast influxes of radiation and serums based on alchemical principles containing numerous dangerous chemicals, an untested genetic editing formula. Either ingredient alone would, and did, kill many other men and women. Improperly applied together, both could and did kill many other men and women. Properly applied, however, it turned one from someone who had clung to his brief life through sheer stubbornness into the peak of human potential. And it turned the other from a small, ordinary man, into one capable of transforming at will into a giant whose might is only matched by the greatest of the Greater Gods."

"I am not sure if Bruce would consider his experiments with the serum to be a case of it being properly applied," Thor said.

"True," Loki said. "But in effect, it achieved everything it was meant to and far more. From a purely technical point of view, it was a total success. In terms of what it meant for Bruce's quality of life in the years thereafter, less so, and in truth, the Hulk is only a partial success. But where it is a success, it is a spectacular one." He looked at Frigga, then Harry. "And the point that was being made was that two things that, alone or together, should logically kill their recipient did quite the opposite. The remarkable thing is not that the Super Soldier Project succeeded in so few – it is that it succeeded at all."

"Indeed," Frigga said. "As the Kree's Terrigenesis did. It often involved splicing Kree DNA into their genetic codes, and all sorts of other vile experimentation. On a hundred worlds, it produced only horrible death. On Midgard, however, it succeeded and produced the human mutant offshoot that call themselves the Inhumans, and the warrior caste of the Kree Empire that call themselves the Jaffa. It should not have worked. Nowhere else did it succeed. Except, that is, on Midgard."

"Think of humanity as reality's universal adaptor," Strange said helpfully. "Find the right socket, and any plug will do."

"That was tasteless," Loki said.

"But true," Strange said, and smiled modestly. "It's a gift."

"Tell me, Strange, are you here for any purpose other than making smart remarks?" Odin asked, in tones of dangerously frayed patience.

Strange cocked his head at him, amusement evaporating, as if he had just been reminded of something. "That I am, sire," he said, then turned to Loki. "Tell me, Prince Loki, when you look around this room, what do you see? Or perhaps, I should say… _See_."

Loki frowned at him, then his eyes shifted out of focus as he turned slowly, panning his head around the room, up and down. Halfway through, he paused, frown deepening, then did it again, more slowly this time.

"See something familiar?" Strange asked mildly.

"Brother?" Thor asked.

Loki ignored him, staring at Strange. "The enchantments… they're _yours_ ," he said, stunned. "I know you are a time traveller, but… how old _are_ you, Strange?"

"Truthfully?" Strange said. "I don't actually know. I stopped counting sometime after I hit six figures." He shrugged. "There didn't seem to be much point, after that."

There was a faintly appalled silence.

"One hundred thousand years," Frigga said slowly.

"Probably closer to five hundred thousand by now, my lady," Strange said. "I know that I am younger than the Eternals, though I am older than just about everything else in the Nine Realms." His gaze lingered on the statue. "With a few exceptions." Then, it snapped back to the assembled royal family. "I was there. I saw the rise of Surtur and the devastation and reshaping of Muspelheim, transformed from a world into a war machine. I saw an inferno rise that would consume a galaxy. I saw an alliance form, an alliance of the most advanced races in magic and technology alike, rulers of vast empires in their own right. I saw a terrible war rage, the War for the Dawn. And as the centuries passed, I saw those great empires burn, all their mighty fleets and all their wide dominions turned to ash, as the stars were scorched from the sky. For while that alliance, of Aesir, Vanir, Alfar, Jotnar, Dvergar, even the Eternals and Deviants of Midgard – and yes, those two ancient enemies stood together, for that was how much Surtur was feared – stood together and fought unrelentingly, they never stood a chance." His eyes drifted to Odin. "Because of what Surtur really was. Care to share with the class, sire?"

Everyone turned to Odin, who closed his eye briefly and sighed. "It is believed by most that Surtur and his kind were always fire elementals, mirrors of the frost giants," he said. "This is not true. Once, they were a peaceful race of beings that were, in shape, much like us; an example of the Celestials design. Like Asgard, and the other realms, they were highly advanced. Like us, they had mastered the art of merging magic and science. They were great. But their evolution had stalled, and their world, Muspelheim, was dying. They were at the end of their tether. Then, one of their most brilliant mage-scientists found a way to gain the power he needed to save his world and his people. Using forbidden rituals and arcane technology, he managed to summon a Power of the universe. As soon as they had arrived, it is said that he broke the circle, for he did not presume to bind, merely to have a chance to plead his case. And he did, with eloquence born of brilliance and desperation. The Power was touched and, against their better judgement, granted him the power required. With that power, he stabilised his world, saving his people. But."

"He didn't want to stop there," Harry said quietly.

Odin nodded. "Indeed he did not," he said. "He knew that he had only ever been loaned the power that he wielded, that he would have to give it up. But he felt that the status quo, such as it was, had led to the disaster which he had only narrowly averted. He needed to go further. So he would have to work fast. And he started making… _improvements_. He began by altering the world, to be stronger, more stable, more fertile and productive. Then, he altered the plants and animals. Then, he began his prize project: to alter his people, to elevate them into something greater. But his people were horrified by what he was doing, feared what he would do to them. And so they rose up. He had partisans of course, many of them, but they were far outnumbered. And as his enemies laid siege to his fortress, the Power came to reclaim the granted power. He begged for more time, to solve this one problem, but the Power refused, saying that he had broken their compact, going far beyond what he had said he would do. Besieged from all sides, feeling betrayed by the people he had tried to save, to elevate, and by his former benefactor, he came to a conclusion that reshaped the destiny of the universe: there was something wrong. Not just with his people, save those who supported him. No, that was merely a symptom. In his eyes, there was something wrong with the universe itself, a flaw at the very heart of creation. In his eyes, it was not _something_ that was wrong. It was _everything._ And it was his duty to fix it, even if he had to take reality apart to do so. He would take it all apart, and then build a new, better universe, according to his design and his alone."

Staring off into the middle distance, Odin continued. "So, armed with utter certainty, warped brilliance, borrowed power, and unrivalled knowledge gleamed from decades of study of the power he had been granted, he managed to sever it from his former benefactor. That benefactor fled in agony and confusion and his power assured, those few restrictions on it gone, he elevated his partisans and turned them on his enemies. Those who survived begged for mercy. And as they did, he looked down on them and said, 'do not be afraid. I am going to make you all better.' And then, he burnt their bodies away, leaving only their spirits, which he took. And around them he built bodies of a new kind, turning them into creatures of fire, mightier by far than they had ever been in their former lives. Creatures, of course, all bound one way or another, to his will. He looked upon his creation and thought it good. Good, but incomplete. So he turned his eyes to the stars and struck out. As he did, his name, he discarded, as he did his own physical form, deeming it to be simply another aspect of the universe's imperfections and thus an unfitting vessel for his will and power."

He took a deep breath.

"His creatures, the so-called fire giants, became figures of nightmare, beings of fire and darkness, that left only ash in their wake. Every being they slaughtered either had its spirit rent into pieces, or was made into one of them, an extension of their master's will, and they slaughtered many, consuming peoples, worlds, and stars alike. Some, seeing power, intoxicating, ever growing, seemingly apparently never ending, and submitted willingly, keeping something of their minds and their independence in return. The Alliance of Realms formed to stop them, and gave their enemy his name: Surtr. The Dark One. For darkness was what he brought, with only remembrances of starlight and echoes of screams left in his wake. Only one world he spared, his own of Muspelheim, for that was where it all began. And they fought, oh how they fought. Mortal though they were then, they fought like none before and none since. But they were always facing defeat, for the power of Surtur could not be denied. Nor was he idle in the face of resistance. He created the great Dragons, the Elder Wyrms, whose few survivors skulk in the dark corners of the Nine Realms and whose debased spawn, thankfully mere shadows of their ancient progenitors, live in the farther reaches of Midgard. When some among his enemies defected, he welcomed them with open arms – after all, to him, they had come to see the truth. And so he rewarded them by making them strong. The very greatest among them, mighty spirits they, became the Lords of Shadow and Flame, his Great Captains. Leaders of his hosts, second only to him in might, they were each feared across galaxies, and each singlehandedly capable of devastating worlds. And were that not enough, he made weapons, weapons of power and terror, a match for anything that Asgard and her allies could produce today. For himself, though, he made the greatest weapon of them all: a sword, forged on Muspelheim of impossible materials and raw power, invested with much of his might, that he named Twilight, for as twilight, it would bring about the end of days. And it nearly did. The Alliance was desperate; reduced to their core worlds, their fleets, armies, and empires turned to ash, and their enemy seemingly becoming stronger and his armies more numerous with every battle they fought. It was at this point that they found what they were facing."

"He was a host of the Phoenix, wasn't he?"

Everyone turned at the quiet voice, to look at Harry.

"Yes," Odin said heavily. "He was. A fallen Phoenix Host, he had been devoured by his own darkness, a darkness which now sought to devour everything else. He was the Dark Phoenix."

"Which is why he required an unusual solution," Strange said quietly, tone and expression unusually grave. "Sire, if I may? I was an eyewitness to this."

Odin nodded.

"The Alliance called a council, and concluded that since Surtur could not be defeated by force of arms, nor negotiated with, that he must be bound instead," Strange said. "That had already been tried, however, an attempt made to trick him into a black hole. It failed. But the principle was deemed to be sound. All that was required was more power and cleverer bonds. Neither alone would be enough – Surtur grew more powerful with every moment. Attempting to match power with power would be fruitless. And clever bonds would not be enough unless they had power enough to strengthen them, for Surtur could break through them. They had to be strong enough, and clever enough, to hold an almighty being with a brilliant mind. A knotty problem indeed."

He turned to look at them all. "Some had advocated in the past for the worlds of the Alliance to abandon the universe as a lost cause, to retreat to higher dimensions. This was dismissed, for the higher dimensions were still attached to the lower, and Surtur seemed set to destroy the latter if not stopped. Now, a variation on that plan was considered. As Surtur was one being who spread his ever growing might through an army that largely functioned as extensions of his will, could the Alliance not profit by doing the reverse? Their worlds were all rich in magic, and in the right alignment, connected across dimensions, they could resonate and fit together like parts of an engine. Instead of one thing divided into many, they would be many united into one. So the idea of Yggdrasil was born. That would provide the power, it was calculated – and it did, far more power than could ever be imagined. But as it provided power, it was also the prison. And that is where the plan became _really_ clever. For they had Seven Realms then: Asgard, Vanaheim, Alfheim, Svartalfheim, Jotunheim, Nidavaellir, and, at the heart, Midgard. Earth. Unprepossessing to look at, filled with monsters that preyed on the primitive inhabitants, whose potential was only hinted at through the power that their offshoots, the Eternals and Deviants, possessed. Yet it was the mostly inherently magic rich realm of the lot, a cosmic generator. In any case, they had seven. Muspelheim would make eight. For their plan to truly work, they needed nine, and they needed a very particular kind of world for their ninth. So they found another: Niflheim."

"Ah," Loki said softly, nodding in comprehension.

"Yes, clever, isn't it?" Strange said.

"It is?" Harry said.

"Niflheim is a realm of the dead," Loki said. "It is also a colossal energy sink. Any of Surtur's creatures, his fire giants, were creatures of spirit. Any that stepped in there would find their power draining away, their spirits soon trapped. Surtur himself would have that problem. And all that energy…"

"Would flow into Yggdrasil," Strange said. "Into the Odinforce, as it is now called."

"And they couldn't just go around it, could they?" Thor said shrewdly.

"No," Strange said. "Yggdrasil was arranged so that there only one two ways out of Muspelheim, once it was bound: through Niflheim, or through Nidavaellir. The latter was unfortunately unavoidable, but it was restricted to a single crack, upon which was a placed a great seal. But I am getting ahead of myself. For Surtur was not on Muspelheim, and he was not stupid. He needed to be lured there, and held there, for long enough for Muspelheim to be bound in place. Once it was, then Surtur's own power would be greatly diminished as he was cut off from his servants, it would be bound, and what remained of it would strengthen the prison that held and empower its Warden."

His eyes returned to the statue. "Of course, as ingenious as this plan was, the Alliance was very much aware that it was their last roll of the dice. If this failed, then they were doomed. It was plain enough that the power would be channelled into a single champion, one with the power to at least challenge and distract Surtur, to give him such a fight as he had never known. But that champion needed a weapon, one that could give them an additional edge. So the Alliance brought together their finest weapons' smiths, and gave them anything they asked for, anything they needed. The result, in the end, was one single, simple, sword. Normally, magical swords, weapons in general, tend to have intricate decoration and grandiose names – even Mjolnir, for all its rather practical name, has some very fine inscriptions on it. This one… well. Look at the statue."

He gestured. They all looked at it. The sword remained thoroughly plain.

"Ván, they called it: hope. Their last, and their best, a blade forged from uru and vibranium, enchanted with the finest spells that could be imagined." He smiled faintly. "I contributed a couple, as it happens." The smile faded. "It was designed to absorb energy and, hopefully, return it with interest. Absorbing it, though, was the primary aim of the game, to hopefully nullify whatever Surtur could throw at their champion. However. When it came to the matter of choosing that champion, one who would wield the power of Yggdrasil and the sword with it, something rather unexpected happened: when the sword was brought to the ash tree on Earth that had served as the symbolic framework for the creation of Yggdrasil, a cosmic ash tree, it wedged itself in the tree. And refused to come out."

"Why do I get the feeling that you had something to do with this?" Thor asked.

"Because you are becoming increasingly cynical and suspicious," Strange said, without missing a beat. "I offer my congratulations." He shook his head. "It wasn't me, however. Not this time. Enchanted items tend to have a mind of their own – as young Maddie could tell you, Mjolnir is in the process of developing one. This one, however, developed rather faster than expected, likely due to the influence of Yggdrasil itself. The short version is that only someone with the mettle to wield the power of Yggdrasil properly could draw the sword and claim that power." He sighed. "As you can imagine, there was quite an argument, but soon enough, all the leaders tried it. Nothing. Then all their greatest warriors tried it. Still nothing."

His gaze returned to the statue. "This is when Frey enters our story. Lord Odin could give you the greater story of his background, and the legends that grew up around him. However, the short version is this. He was a young man, and one of no really great ancestry. His family had produced brave, competent warriors and commanders, ones with a certain inclination towards sorcery, but no one legendary, or particularly special. Until Frey." He regarded the statue. "He was a nice young man. Quite quiet. But when he did speak, it was usually worth hearing, and people listened." He smiled sadly. "I liked him. We were friends, actually. He was part of the then King of Asgard's bodyguard, partly because he had a potent reputation for bravery and skill in combat, proven against Surtur's forces many times over, including having saved the King's daughter, Princess Aethelflaed, and partly because he and said daughter fell in love, courted in secret, then married, and it was decided that it would look rather better for the Princess to be married to a royal bodyguard than a common soldier. Nevertheless, he was easily enough overlooked, as quiet people often are, even by his father-in-law. Others would have been grateful. After all, it was no great secret that he – or she – who took up Hope and the mantle of Yggdrasil and went to Muspelheim to challenge Surtur would be making a trip that they would not return from." He sighed. "But Frey was a man of conscience, and duty. He would not allow himself to stand aside and fade into the background, not out of pride, but out of a simple belief that he had the responsibility to at least try. And when he did, the sword came out of the tree as smoothly as if it were water. The mantle settled around him, and the Alliance had their champion. He could have tried to gift it to someone else, to pass the responsibility to another. Few would have blamed him. He was hardly an experienced master mage, and for all his demonstrated skill and courage, there were others who had far more skill and experience to call upon than he. He had his whole life ahead of him and excellent prospects; a fine job, an excellent reputation only burnished by his deeds following his promotion – for the royal guard were the elite, and went where the fighting was fiercest – and a happy marriage, soon to produce its first child. He was happy, something all the more significant considering the intensity of the war that he was at the heart of. But as I said, he was also a young man of duty. And he was young. Oh so very young."

He sighed again.

"Frey got the feel for the power, with the aid of the best tutors that could be found, as quickly as he could, for time was in short supply," Strange said. "I was one of them. He was a quick learner. Then, one day soon, he had mastered it as much as he could. The very next morning he put his affairs in order, kissed his wife goodbye, and with his held high, he went to his death." He waved a hand. "I could go into detail about the duel, about how Frey drew Surtur's eye by obliterating an army, and laying low two Great Captains, putting two more to flight, and then lured him to Muspelheim, and the duel itself. I didn't really see much of it – no one did. But, well, I was trained as, among other things, a bard. Embellishment is one of the things I was taught early, and if anyone deserved an embellished and suitably heroic end, it was Frey. Frankly, though, I don't have the heart. Though he deserves to be remembered better, I must confess, to me, he is just one of too many that I could not save, no matter how and what I tried."

He looked up at the statue. "And I did try. I tried to find a way for him to survive the duel, to defeat Surtur and slip out in the nick of time. While it had to be him who took up the mantle, he had become my friend, and I had had already had my fill of heroic sacrifices. So I tried. I tried everything I knew. But there was no way out. There were only two courses for history to follow: either Surtur would be bound, or he would break free again, the final gambit would fail, and everything would burn." He looked up. "And you know what? He knew. He knew, he thanked me for trying, and then asked me if I would walk with him when he went to Muspelheim – not all the way there, he didn't want to risk me becoming trapped with him."

He laughed helplessly. "So I did. I walked him to his death. It was the least I could do and, at the same time, the most. And after that, I watched as Yggdrasil was completed, the Nine Realms formed in truth, and Aethelflaed received the mantle, while the Great Captains went into dormancy and the lesser fire giants who had not followed their master to Muspelheim or been destroyed in battle were freed of their curse, passing on to whatever afterlives awaited them. She had her baby not two months later, a fine boy. I stayed to ensure that none challenged the succession, and when one or two did, I ensured that they did not do so for long. Then, I turned away, once again hardened my heart, and strode away through the ages. I had gone to dawn of the Nine Realms to learn how they came to be, to understand Surtur's emergence, the creation of Yggdrasil, and collect as much information as I possibly could. I had learned my lessons millennia before; for I was already thousands of years old by that point. I had already seen the rise and fall of Atlantis, witnessed the arrival of the Hosts of the Celestials, and claimed the title of Sorcerer Supreme. Yes, I had long learned my lessons. But I forgot them. And so the universe chose to remind me."

He looked at them all. "The Heirs of Frey. The Lords Protector of the Nine Realms The Wardens of Muspelheim. For more than a million years, you have been there to prevent every escape attempt, every attempt to break the Seal of Muspelheim, buried deep in Nidavaellir. And there have been attempts, many attempts. Sometimes, Surtur has even been able to project something of himself beyond the seal, to send forth his creatures and his power. Sometimes, the Great Captains, who crawled away to the dark places of the Nine Realms, have awoken, briefly. While they are mighty still, if not quite what they were with their master bound, they stand and fight before some hero drives them back into the shadows where they sleep. Sometimes, they are cleverer – one of the more cunning ones decided to assist the Vanir in one of the earlier Aesir-Vanir Wars, hoping that the discord would provide the opportunity to break the seal. It nearly did. And some attempts were quite recent. When the Darkhold was loose, Surtur scented opportunity, and began to test his bonds in earnest, seeking weak places other than the Seal of Muspelheim. He wants to break free. Always. In his mind, his great work has only been delayed. And now…"

"The Seal of Muspelheim is cracked," Odin said flatly. "By Chthon's art. His manifestation, unlike any since his banishment, and the long work of the Darkhold over the year before, cracked it."

Harry's eyes widened,. "You mean that when I fixed everything, I missed –" he began, horror struck.

"No, grandson," Odin said quietly. "It was not your fault. You had much to repair, and you had no reason to know of the danger Surtur posed. And even as you did, it was my hand, and your mother's that guided you. If anything, it was my fault." He looked up at Strange. "As Strange has said, the guardianship of Muspelheim is my responsibility. And as my ancestor did, I shall own to it."

Frigga laid a hand on his shoulder, but said nothing.

"The crack?" Thor asked eventually.

"It is not enough for Surtur to break through in earnest," Odin said. "Nor can he widen it; I have made sure of that."

There was a silence.

"But he's going to get out eventually, isn't he?" Harry said, sounding defeated. "It doesn't matter if I become the Dark Phoenix or not – the original is ready and waiting for his chance." He looked up suddenly, and laughed sourly. "No, wait. It does, doesn't it? I'm half Surtur, half Frey, aren't I? Either I destroy everything and finish the job Surtur started, or I break the seal, go down to Muspelheim, and keep Surtur busy like Frey did while everyone else locks the door behind me."

There was another instant of silence, then Thor surged across the room in the blink of an eye, pinning Strange to the wall by his throat, lightning crackling along his body and lighting up the tomb in sympathy with his rage. "WAS THIS YOUR DESIRE, STRANGE?!" he roared, beside himself with fury. "WAS THIS YOUR DESIGN ALL ALONG?!"

"No," Strange wheezed. "It wasn't. I swear by my power." There was a long moment as Thor didn't respond. Then, Strange snorted. "Don't believe me?" he managed. "Then if that's the case, go ahead and kill me. My word's all I have left."

Thor dropped him, and he landed like a cat, before straightening up and giving Thor a very old, tired look. "And really, Thor, if I were you, I wouldn't bother threatening me. We both know that no prison built will hold me. I've been through enough tortures that anything you could do to me would be at best amusingly quaint and frankly, cathartic. There's nothing like a few dozen millennia of watching good people die knowing that any attempt to save them would only make matters worse to teach you the meaning of both failure and self-hatred. As for threatening me with death…" He snorted. "Frankly, at this point, it would be a relief. Though I doubt that I would be allowed to die. Not yet."

"Allowed?" Frigga asked, frowning.

"That is a tale for later," Strange said. "Now, we discuss Harry." His gaze shifted to Harry. "You are not doomed to follow the path of Surtur or Frey. Frankly, when I was making my plans to oppose Thanos, Surtur was a mere footnote. Thanos threatens all the universe. Surtur destroyed a galaxy, yes, but it is one of hundreds of thousands. Galaxies are being born and destroyed as we speak. Other galactic scale threats exist in this universe. Other universal scale threats exist, too – you met one over the summer, Chthon. In theory, Surtur could develop the might, to destroy everything and bring about his grand plan, but it would take a long time, and he would not be unopposed. Surtur is great and terrible, no doubt. But Thanos is greater and more terrible by far, even if it is not immediately apparent. And that's mainly because the bastard thinks. Surtur is brilliant, but technically brilliant. Show him a scientific problem and he'd have it solved and a new branch of mathematics by lunchtime. Thanos… is something else entirely. Also, there's the fact that Surtur genuinely believes that he is helping people, and the universe at large. Thanos has no such delusions."

He sat down on the edge of Frey's plinth and ran a hand through his hair. "The best way I can put it is that from where I stand, Surtur was not the primary objective. Instead, he was a problem to be overcome on the way," he said, and sighed. "I realise that I sound like I am diminishing what you face, and I am sorry for that. I know better than any of you how terrible Surtur is. I have seen the horrors he can wreak at first hand. Saying that he is not as dangerous as Thanos is true, but only because I would argue that nothing is. Nothing, and no one." He pinched his brow. "What you must understand is that I am not the only player in this game – and yes, before you protest, to the players involved, even the acts of gods are games, so there's no point getting upset about it. They won't care, and right now, I don't either."

The return of the stressed, snappish Strange did not go unnoticed, and the royal family all tensed up ever so slightly.

"There are others," Strange continued. "Others manipulating history. I fight enemies from all sorts of dimensions. Some of them are from the fourth dimension." He smiled mirthlessly. "Yes, I am a Doctor, and I fight in the Time War. Those of you who get the joke, please feel free to laugh. No? I didn't think so. It's not that funny."

"So this is the result of one of your enemies?" Thor asked.

"No, actually," Strange said. "Most of my enemies from the future have a vested interest in keeping Earth intact. I think it might actually be one of my allies."

"You don't know?" Odin said, eyebrow raised. "Now, there is a surprise."

"Contrary to carefully cultivated popular opinion, I do not, in fact, know everything," Strange said. "Most things, yes, and I can make a fair guess at many more. For instance, I have a rather shrewd idea at who blocked Essex from my Sight, and how. We can't do anything about that, unfortunately, since it is already being done." He waved a hand. "Don't ask. Explaining temporal physics to neophytes is difficult enough to begin with, and it would be considerably more so in this particular scenario."

"Neophytes?" Thor asked dangerously.

Strange looked up at him, eyes gleaming dangerously. "I am at least two hundred times your age, Thor Odinson," he said coldly. "Be glad that I am not calling you a child." He sighed. "As I said, it was probably one of my allies. And don't bother getting angry. Unless I am much mistaken, it is either the Phoenix, or Yggdrasil itself. Though it could be the Time Stone, I suppose. The blasted thing always has had a mind of its own."

"Lily wouldn't –"

"Lily is not all of the Phoenix, Thor," Loki said. "We have had this conversation before. Besides, this could have be set in motion long before Lily merged with the Phoenix."

"I don't care who it is," Harry said flatly. "As long as they send me a checklist of all the stupid and insane things they expect me to do, so I can get them out of the way."

"It might even be a simple cycle of the universe," Strange said, ignoring everyone else in his speculations. "Everything degrades eventually, after all, even the finest crafted prisons of rogue wannabe cosmic entities. Chthon gets out to make a mess every ten millennia or so, after all. Shuma-Gorath, Dormammu, Lucifer… all the usual suspects pop up every now and then. I suppose that if anything, Surtur is overdue for a real rampage."

"Sometimes I wonder how much of your customary irreverence is a mask, Doctor, and how much is genuine," Frigga said.

Strange stopped and eyed her, then smiled sadly. "My lady, at this point, even I'm not sure," he said, then shook himself. "Anyway, the point I was making is that I did not set Harry up to be a modern day Frey. I had my suspicions about certain things, but those certain things were set in motion long before I got involved. Moreover, I think we can all agree that whatever you think of my motives and intentions, it is entirely in my interest to prevent Harry from following either Surtur's path, or Frey's."

"That much is true," Loki remarked.

"Which is why," Strange said. "When you return to Hogwarts, Harry, you will have a new teacher: me."

There was a stunned silence.

"I know," Strange said. "I was never much of a one for students, Wanda, Mordo, and… the others excepted. I was always far too busy. And, frankly, too much of a solo act. But you," he said to Harry. "Are in need of a teacher, one without other commitments – mine I intend to delegate to Wanda. She will succeed me, and so she should start taking on a few of my other responsibilities. And I," he added, the word lingering in the air as he considered what would follow. "Am in need of a reminder. Of why I do what I do, and who I do it for."

"What are you going to teach me?" Harry asked.

"Magic," Strange said, as dry as a desert. "Magic and other things. Including how to handle the Phoenix within you and within Laevateinn. Which, incidentally, you should not use in the Nine Realms, or in the present day."

"I know, because –"

"You might go mad and destroy the solar system?" Strange said, mood swinging back towards manic. "Well, there's that. I was thinking more along the lines of widening the cracks in the Seal and unleashing Surtur early. He's going to get out eventually, but let's have it happen on our schedule rather than his, hmm?" He paused, then added, "Oh, and while your mother will very obligingly most probably resurrect you if you die, for much the same reason, I would avoid dying."

Harry just stared at him. "You know," he said distantly. "The only reason that I _know_ that this all isn't a dream is that even my subconscious doesn't hate me _this_ much."

Strange chuckled. "You get used to it."

"Oh. Lovely. Something to look forward to," Harry said flatly, then stared at Strange. "You've got it all wrapped up, don't you?" he said. "I'm going to do what you want, be what you want, because I have no choice."

"On the contrary," Strange said quietly. "You will do what _you_ want, and be who _you_ want, because you _always_ have a choice. I steer history, I arrange circumstances, but I do not change minds. You are who you choose to be. In every timeline, in every could-be and might-have-been, you are who you choose to be, Harry James Potter. Mantles of power, genetic gifts, cosmic protections… they're all window dressing. If they were all that was required to make a hero, then I could have picked anyone. You were easy enough to twine the threads of destiny around, to be sure, that is true, yet I could have chosen anyone. But I chose you. I chose you, and do you know why?"

"Why?"

"Because you are a hero not because of the powers you have, but in spite of them," Strange said. "Much of you wants nothing more than to be normal, to have a quiet, happy life with your family. And yet whenever destiny calls, you are there. You were the one who chose to run the gauntlet of a series of arcane traps to try and thwart the most powerful wanded Dark Lord in a generation. You were the one who chose to descend into the Chamber of Secrets and confront the monster, the _monsters_ , within. You were the one who chose to lead an assault on HYDRA's final base with only a few friends to back you up, despite the fact that they had laid low the Avengers in one fell swoop, and hardly a few days after your last confrontation with one of their generals had led to your brief demise. You were the one who chose to challenge Voldemort to psychic single combat for the lives of your friends. You were the one who chose to dive back into the grasp of the Red Room, all to save the soul of the cousin you had never known."

He jabbed Harry in the chest. "I grew up in _Camelot_ , Harry. I learnt magic from Merlin, swordsmanship from Sir Lancelot and the Lady Knight, and I knew King Arthur when he was simply Prince Arthur. I have travelled up and down the roads of history, I have seen all the heroes come and go, and in all my many, many years, I have not seen _any_ quite like you."

Normally, at this point, Harry would have had a smart remark (blame Tony). But this time, he was struck silent.

"You are not a paragon," Strange continued. "That is good. Paragons of virtue are strong and unshakeable only to the first glance; they are inflexible, brittle and crack under pressure. Moreover, they are often unable to understand the darkness they face. You can bend, and you can understand, and that is better, because to defeat something, you must first understand it. The Alliance of old did not understand Surtur, so the best they could do was lock him away, and kick the problem down the generations. You have knowledge that they never did, and take it from the man who knows, knowledge is power."

He leaned forward. "Yes, Surtur will come forth at some point," he said. "He was always going to, for the prophecy of Ragnarok demands it. But you, and the brief return of Chthon, threw that all up in the air. So yes, he will emerge and you will have to face him. But when you do, you will not simply be repeating an age old cycle, as gods and other intensely magical creatures are prone to doing. No, you are half human, and if there is one gift that humanity has mastered above all others, it is choice, for good or ill. You will not be a new Surtur or a new Frey, burning it all down or locking the problem away for another million years, because you are something new and something more. The forces that have shaped you for that confrontation have ensured that much. They have given you the potential to, uniquely, face Surtur and survive when it once took simply the mightiest of Earth's Skyfathers to stall him."

He stood up and cracked his knuckles. "That is good. But as I said before, surviving is simply the start." He looked Harry dead in the eye and, for the first time in a while, that wicked little smile, the one that said that its owner had it all worked out and that, moreover, if you were in his way, you were beyond screwed, spread itself across his face. And if any of the assembled wicked witches and wizards, demons, dark lords, and darker gods that menaced Earth had been there to see it, they would have shuddered.

Doctor Strange was back.

"I intend to teach you how to _win_."

OoOoO

Elsewhere, less – or to a certain perspective, possibly more – sinister discussions were taking place. Certainly, however, they were not quite as cosmically significant.

Specifically, Carol had been relating a few stories about her newer friends to her grandmother, who naturally wanted to know what he granddaughter was getting up to. Of course, Alison Carter was no ordinary grandmother. And inevitably, her questions were not merely motivated by curiosity.

Carol frowned. "Seriously, are you telepathic or something, grandma?"

"No," Alison said. "I just have the intuition of a grandmother and an old spy. Telepathy, I believe, is the province of your young man."

Carol leaned back from her grandmother. "What?"

"Tall, dark and handsome, emerald green eyes, messy hair with a streak of white in the fringe… ring any bells?" Alison asked, amused.

Carol rolled her eyes. "Grandma, he is not 'my young man'," she said.

"Of course he isn't," Alison said, tone heavy with irony. "You just put on Alan Scott's old ring and followed him into HYDRA's HQ because you thought that the apocalypse was a nice day out. And then, without the ring, you confronted him when he'd gone mad with rage and transformed himself into a threat to all life on this Earth, and a great deal beyond it, and helped talk him down."

Carol flushed. "I didn't know that the ring did… that," she said. "Also, I'd talked him down before, I figured I could do it again."

"Darling," Alison said. "That only proves my point."

"He's my friend," Carol said. "My best friend. But still just a friend."

Alison gave her a look of milky eyed innocence. "Of course, Carol," she said. "I never said that he was anything more."

"You called him 'your young man'," Carol said accusingly. "And said that he was 'tall, dark and handsome'."

"Well, he's your friend, darling," Alison said placidly. "He is also all three of those things and will only become more so as he gets older." She smirked. "Though I _do_ find it interesting that you assume that I meant romance."

Carol narrowed her eyes, then shrugged and said, "A lot of people have before. I've got into the habit of shooting them down, so has he."

Alison smirked again. "Good answer," she said. Then, she sobered. "Speaking of your young man, I just had a chat with your mother."

"Oh," Carol said.

"Yes," Alison said. "Oh."

"What did she say?"

"That when he came to dinner, he and your father were mostly cordial over dinner – Harry was the very soul of politeness, but that didn't stop him undercutting some of your father's more… old fashioned opinions every chance he got. Totally politely, of course. Then, he and your father went outside to have a private 'men's talk'. It turned into quite the argument, which ended with Harry putting your father to sleep and inviting you over to the Mansion because, according to your mother, Harry was worried that your father might take his anger out on you," Alison said. "That doesn't both me, nor did it seem to particularly bother her – apparently she and the young man in question understand each other."

"Okay," Carol said, tone leading.

"What matters to me is what I read between the lines," Alison said. "Your father invited Harry round to get his measure. They had a private discussion, about you, and both of them wound up angry. So far, so much as your mother said. Except that I know something about that boy of yours. An old friend of mine, Sean Cassidy – ah, you know the name."

Carol had started nodding. "Harry mentioned him," she said. "He was Harry's martial arts teacher, and he was in London, and in Asgard afterwards. He's got powers. How do you know him?"

Alison smiled faintly. "Sean and I, we go way back," she said. "Back to when the two of us were little more than your age."

"Wait, hang on," Carol said. "I got a look at him. He's your age? Do his powers keep him smoking hot?"

"Yes, he is, and no, they don't," Alison said. "There was an… incident, about a decade and a half ago. The more beneficial side-effects, for those who were involved in it, included rejuvenation."

"Huh," Carol said. "Neat."

"Anyway," Alison said. "I've been speaking to him. His testimony, and some other evidence I've picked up, has told me that this is a boy who's got a furious temper at the best of times – even when he hasn't been tortured by the Red Room and had his body transformed into their puppet – is fiercely protective of those he calls friends and more to the point, isn't shy of using tactics straight out of Magneto's playbook when they're threatened. Your father, meanwhile, is scared of me and your uncle without even knowing the half of what we're capable of. I think you can see where I'm going with this."

"Yeah," Carol said quietly.

"Good," Alison said. "Because I think that your father said something about you that made Harry, who had previously held his temper in the face of your father's opinions – which, lord knows, can be very difficult – very angry indeed. Angry enough to terrify your father into submission, without leaving a mark on him. And, moreover, to want you out of the house in the aftermath. And I think you know exactly what made him just that angry."

Carol bit her lip. "Promise you won't tell, grandma?"

"I can't promise that, Carol," Alison said gently. "However," she added. "Unless I feel that this absolutely has to be shared with someone else, I will keep it to myself."

So Carol told her.

Alison's face listened and when Carol finished she was silent for a long few moments. Then, she said, voice dangerously calm, "Well, I can see why he lost his temper. I would have been absolutely astonished if he hadn't done. I can also see that he has _considerably_ more restraint than he has previously been credited with." She stood up. "Carol, darling, I have to go."

"Grandma," Carol said slowly. "What are you going to do?"

"I," Alison said, moving with crisp smoothness. "I am going to have a discussion with your father, one that I should have had a very long time ago."

"Is this a discussion or a 'discussion'?" Carol asked.

"It will be the former if your father minds his manners," Alison said, with ominous calm. "It will be the latter if he doesn't."

OoOoO

"Let me make this very clear, Joe," Alison said quietly, stirring her cup of tea. "I have never liked you. I have always thought that my daughter could do much, much better. However, for better or for worse, she loves you, and you have provided for her and your three delightful children. Equally, I have no doubt that you love all of them and want what you think is best for them. Therefore, in acknowledgement of that and their love for you, I have tolerated you."

She looked up at him, eyes as cold as chips of blue ice. "However, I have just been told that when you invited Carol's young friend, Harry Thorson, over to dinner, you requested that he use his telepathic abilities to make Carol more compliant, more the daughter you wanted. He then showed great and commendable restraint in not reducing you to your component molecules. I certainly can't say that I would have been half as calm under the circumstances."

"Whatever he said, he was lying," Joe growled. "And in any case, what I discussed with him, about Carol? She's my daughter and my business, not yours, Alison."

"And she is my granddaughter, Joe," Alison said, voice icy cold. "She is most _definitely_ my business." She sipped her tea, studying him. "And he didn't say it. Not to me. He told Carol immediately afterwards when she asked why he was so angry. Your wife, my daughter, then told me that you and Harry had had an argument and that he'd used his powers to knock you out. She didn't know the root cause of the argument and wanted me to look into whether it was safe for him to be Carol's friend. Carol came clean when I asked her."

She set the mug down and her eyes narrowed. "I had hoped that he was, at the very least, mistaken in your intent. He's got a famously explosive temper, after all, and he's extremely protective of his friends, with good reason. I had hoped that he had misinterpreted what you were saying. But I don't think he did."

"What makes you think that?" Joe demanded.

"You're sweating," Alison said calmly. "More than expected in this weather and that clothing. Your eyes are dilated, nervous, and you aren't meeting my gaze. Also…" She grabbed his wrist, turned it over and felt the pulse point. "Your heart is racing." She turned a cold, pitiless gaze on him. "You've been caught and you know it."

"I swear, if you weren't my wife's mother," Joe began angrily, making to wrench his arm away.

Alison twisted her wrist in a fast, savage motion, and Joe went white, gasping in pain as his entire arm was twisted to just short of breaking point. With her other hand, she calmly raised her mug of tea and sipped it.

"Don't bluster, Joe," she said coolly. "I have always found it one of your _least_ likeable qualities and I am _not_ in the mood to indulge you." She picked up the mug again, sipping the remains of her tea, and partially reversed the twist of Joe's arm, easing the tension in his arm. "Now, I am going to ask questions, and you are going to answer them, swiftly and concisely. If you fail to do so, I will have a sense of humour failure and you will have a broken arm and several torn ligaments. Is this understood?"

"Yes," Joe managed.

"Good," Alison said. "Now. Did you ask Harry Thorson to influence Carol's behaviour so it was more to your liking?"

"Well," Joe began.

Alison twisted her wrist and Joe yelped. "Yes or no, Joe," she said.

"Yes," he grated.

Alison nodded. "Did you openly ask or imply that he should use his powers to do so?" she asked.

"Yes," Joe said, after a long moment.

"Did you have any clue of the significance of what you were asking him to do, the level of violation implicit in the request?" Alison asked, then added, "Don't bother to answer that one. There's no real malice in you – another reason I have tolerated you up to now – just a collection of thoughtless prejudices and preconceptions. You obviously had no idea what you were asking."

She sighed. "You should be glad that you're talking to me. I can recognise the difference between malice and ignorance. I am not sure that either of my children can. Jack certainly can't, or at least, he wouldn't care. In fact, I can say with absolute certainty that had he heard, by now you would be facing the absolute worst fate that someone like Jack could arrange. Or he would simply have killed you. And my daughter… well, she and I haven't always seen eye to eye, but if there's one thing she does, it's love her children, every bit of them. If she knew at the time what you'd really asked – apparently Harry was a little vague on the details when she confronted him about it – then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion and you would be without a home." She regarded him coolly. "However, while I can recognise the difference between malice and ignorance, your ignorance has become as dangerous as malice, perhaps even more so."

Joe simply glared at her.

"Now," Alison said. "I've had a little discussion with your company, and they agree that your good work merits a promotion. Out of state."

Joe's eyes widened in disbelief and Alison smiled a cold smile. "What, you don't believe me?" she asked, then released his arm. "Call them."

Joe stared at her, weighing her up, then slowly reached for his phone and dialled his boss. "Hello?" he said. "Hey, sorry to bother you, I – what?"

His boss spoke, at some length.

"But, my family –"

There was a very final reply.

"Yes. I understand. Sorry to bother you. And yeah, thanks for the promotion," Joe said, before ending the call, and glaring at his mother-in-law. "How the fuck did you do that?"

"You never really enquired much about my past," Alison observed, finishing her tea. "You never really cared. You accepted the story that I worked in a government job that frequently required me to travel, and left it at."

"What are you getting at, Alison?" Joe demanded.

Alison reached into her pocket, pulled out her wallet and pulled out a card, flicking it over, still sipping her tea.

Joe fumbled the catch, looked at the card and went pale. "SHIELD?" he managed. "You were an Agent of SHIELD?"

"Are. And Deputy Director, actually," Alison said. "I was running black ops missions before you were born, sonny. I went toe to toe with the Black Widow back in the bad old days. I dandled Tony Stark on my knee. Half the Chiefs of Staff owe me favours and the other half know to damn well pay attention when I call, even if they don't like what they hear. Even though I'm only now in the process of returning to service, it wasn't at all hard for me to talk your company's president around to my point of view." She smiled frostily. "Such an _accommodating_ man."

For a long time, Joe had felt a certain unease around his mother-in-law, never knowing quite what to make of her, only knowing on some level that there was much more to her than met the eye. Now, he had a much better idea of why his instincts had always told him to be careful around this woman.

However, like his daughter, he didn't in the least like being pushed around.

"I know you never liked me, but this is cold, even for you, you conniving bitch," he spat. "You won't separate me from _my_ family."

"I won't," Alison agreed. "I fully expect you to maintain contact with your wife and your children. Your company has been most accommodating – you will have paid leave around all major holidays and enough unpaid leave that you will be able to make it for birthdays and other significant events, like graduations. If you do not, barring your family expressing a desire not to see you again, or some reasonable impediment, I will want to know why. Unless you or she files for divorce, or the two of you have an informal separation, I expect you to remain faithful to your wife, in the avoidance of causing her emotional distress. You will also support your family. With your increased salary, even with travel expenses, it should be easy. And if you fail in either, then I will show you just how big a bitch I can _really_ be."

"What if I refuse to take the job?" Joe asked, thrusting out his jaw. "What if I refuse to play your game?"

"Then I will make you wish that you had," Alison said, without losing her calm for an instant.

Joe scoffed.

Alison smiled. It was the sort of smile that would have given Stephen Strange a run for his money.

"Oh, you don't believe me?" she said. "Well. Don't you have a short memory." She sipped at her tea. "Think back a few minutes. I made your company president, a man I have never met, do what I want, and I did it this morning. You know I did, because your boss made it clear to you just now, and I'm sure you would be allowed to check your company's records that will show that your promotion went through just before lunch. I did that after my morning run, during breakfast. _Imagine what I could do if I was actually trying._ "

She let that hang in the air.

"Now that is sorted out, let me firstly make clear that the only thing that might stop me doing exactly what I want to you is the intervention my daughter, your lady wife," Alison said. "And before you get your hopes up, she knows that we having this little chat, and _exactly_ what you tried to do. She also accepts that, for far too long, we have all turned a blind eye. Why? Well, that is the question, isn't it? I suppose it was because that I thought that you were simply old fashioned, all mouth and no trousers, and harmless enough in your own way. Besides, it was perfectly apparent that you do love your children… in your own way. So long as they are what you want them to be, of course."

"How dare you –"

"Very easily," Alison said, then looked reflective. "I suppose another reason was that I wasn't a very good parent myself. Those in glass houses, I thought, should not throw stones. And you were good with them when they were young. You're still good with little Joe. It's only now that Carol and Steven are starting to try and be their own people, people very different from what you want them to be – one a brave, brash warrior-maiden in the making, the other a very fine artist and designer. I daresay that you would have been delighted if they had been the other way around. But you were not. Instead of being proud of them, encouraging them, you started trying to force square pegs into round holes, and round pegs into square holes. Carol, of course, reacted against it with all the fire that anyone who'd known her for five minutes would expect, while little Stevie retreated into himself, an already quiet boy becoming quieter still. Carol was stubborn enough to tough it out, and had the advantages of an uncle who was on the exact same wavelength as her and, when he was around was more than willing to step into the gap that you should have filled, and finding a best friend who was also on that wavelength."

Her lips quirked into a wry smile. "And is now even more so. They admire and encourage her, loving – yes, loving – her for who she is. The latter drew her into the Avengers' orbit, and, bunch of oddballs and orphans that they are, they were just right to encourage her all the more. And I think that myself and my other granddaughter, Sharon, helped a little too."

Her smile faded. "Stevie didn't have that. He's not the kind of firebrand who'll stick two fingers up to the world and do things his way, opinions of all others be damned. Jack was and is very fond of him, as am I, but where Carol had a family of role models and the good fortune to stumble upon a boy who's even barmier than she is, all who could attenuate the ache that a spiky demeanour covered up, Stevie did not have that. He more closely resembles his mother, and his late grandfather, than the rest of us. And Marie has tried."

Her gaze turned frosty again. "But a mother's love can only do so much when a father's will undercuts it at every turn, especially when the person we are talking about is a boy who only ever wanted his father to be proud of him, instead of dismissing the art he loved as a pursuit unfit for a 'manly man', and trying to force him into sports he often hated. He looks up to you, Joe, he always has, and all you do is knock him down, giving him a psychological death by a thousand cuts, making him more and more miserable by the day."

She sat back. "You might have been thinking that this is a reaction, an over-reaction, to one incident. It is not. It is a long overdue reaction to the building problem of you trying to force your children into being the little automatons you want them to be, cutting them down every time they didn't do quite what you wanted them to, one that has culminated in you finally trying to outright reprogram, yes, _reprogram_ ,your daughter. The young woman she was growing into turned out to be someone not to your liking, and since browbeating and emotional abuse didn't change her, you tried a more direct route. That, and your confession just now, have sealed it."

She set down her mug and looked him in the eye. "How dare you?" she said, in the sort of perfectly calm voice only achievable by those in the icy plains on the far side of berserk rage. "How dare you. _How dare you._ "

"I… I…" Joe began, but stopped, because each time the words died in his throat under that merciless blue gaze.

Alison nodded curtly. "No pathetic justifications," she said. "That is something at least." She reached down and picked up her handbag. "I don't know _exactly_ where the road you have started on would lead," she said. "For I am neither a telepath nor a seer. However, I am an old spy, and I can make a fair guess, and that leads me to conclude that while you are a manageable problem, you are too dangerous in your dull, thick-headed way to remain here. I can also make a perfectly accurate prediction, for free: if you fuck with my family, I will end you in ways that would give several gods of my acquaintance either ideas or nightmares."

She stood up. "I'd rather not do that, however," she continued, turning to go. "Even if it stays out of the courts, it will all get rather messy, and my daughter and her children will get caught up in it. I'd rather that that didn't happen. And for better or for worse, they love you."

Before she left, she looked over her shoulder and met his gaze. "So, Joe, if you love your family, as I believe you do in your own twisted way, and have any sense of self-preservation, as I sincerely hope you do, you will do the honourable thing. Pack your bags, and go quietly."

OoOoO

Across the city, the night was drawing in around Avengers Mansion, as in the early days of October, autumn banished the last vestiges of summer, and the Avengers gathered in the main parlour around a crackling fire, seats arranged in a circle around an armchair that was by the fire itself. Nor were they alone. Harry was present, as were Jane, Bucky, Pepper, Wanda, Dresden, Xavier, Dumbledore, Fury, Alison, Carol and Jean-Paul. Even Uhtred and Diana had been sent from Asgard to hear this tale, and the only reason that neither Odin nor Frigga was present was because Strange had told them in private already.

In other words, it was a good thing that the parlour was quite so large.

All those Strange felt should know – or in the cases of Jane and Pepper, would be told anyway by those who should know, and thus it was best to save time and tell them now – were included. The inclusion of the children raised a few eyebrows, but after all, these were no ordinary children. They had seen and done far more than many twice, even thrice, their age, and in Harry's case at least, would be directly impacted by what was to be said. As for the other children, as Strange himself had observed, "my newest student will only tell them anyway, and while I will authorise him to tell others, in good time, it saves effort to do it now." His expression had turned distant. "And it is a story that I do not overly like telling."

In any case, they were all gathered to hear something that they had been promised, something that had been wondered about for centuries on end: the truth about Doctor Stephen Strange.

For a long time, though, there was silence, as Strange stared into the flames, which cast deep shadows across his sharp features. Oddly for such a usually talkative group, nobody spoke.

"I am old," he said eventually. "Old enough that I have long since lost count of the years. As I have told some among you, though, by the time I stopped counting, I was over 100,000 years old."

The silence, previously attentive, was now stunned. Strange smiled faintly.

"I know," he said. "Quite something, isn't it? But, as I have found, whether it is a month, a year, or a thousand, they all come down to one thing: taking it one day at a time." He shrugged. "That said, it would take lifetimes to tell my full story. So instead, I will simply tell you how it began. I was not born hundreds of thousands of years ago. You can thank, or blame, time travel for my overly extended life. Time travel… and something else. As a result, I have lived many lives, and had many names. Stephen Strange is not my first, though it will most probably be my last." He looked away. "But all that is later in my story, one which began most of 1500 years ago, in the land that is now Wales. I was born in the Kingdom of Camelot, in the 18th year of the reign of King Uther Pendragon. I was called Gwion, Gwion ap Gwreang." His mouth twitched into another faint smile. "All those who do not speak Welsh and do not have bad colds are excused from trying to pronounce it."

The smile faded again. "More commonly, I was known as Gwion Bach – literally, little Gwion. My parents were part of one of several clans of magical folk, then commonly referred to as druids. True druids, of course, were a priesthood, not a people, and a priesthood that was by then largely extinct," he said. "More accurately, they were forerunners of today's magical communities, magical families who passed on the learning of the druids, but druids was the shorthand that everyone referred to them by, and one they generally used themselves when dealing with outsiders. It saved time. Some were settled, others were not. Those were settled were farmers, hunters and occasional craftsmen, often living far from other people. Those who were not travelled around, making a living by hunting and gathering, and trading services – potions, amulets, spiritual advice, that sort of thing – for food and money. They picked up apprentices, here and there, finding those born to non-magical people with the gift and teaching them how to use it. Oddly for wandless mages, they had a particular gift for mental magic, mainly used for communication with one another, hiding their homes when threatened, and obfuscation when pursued. Above all, though, they were healers." His expression turned wry. "Much of this I found out later, when I had already a well-developed inclination towards medicine. It seems to run in the family."

Strange considered this for a moment, then sighed. "They were, by any conventional measure, harmless," he said. "That is not to say that they could not be dangerous." His expression darkened. "Mordred was more than adequate proof of that." He sighed again. "But for the most part, they were as quiet and mild a people as you could imagine, devoted to life, abhorring dark magic, and doing their best to live in peace. But they did not always have the chance."

"Uther Pendragon was infamous for his hatred of magic," Loki said quietly. "Any practitioners he found, he tried, and executed. Sometimes, he even burned them."

"That he was, and that he did," Strange said sadly. "When it came to the druids, he rarely even waited that long. He believed that they represented a threat to his rule, that they were plotting to depose him and restore the old order of magic." He snorted. "Ironically enough, some did. But only after the Great Purge began. Attempted genocide has a way of souring people." He shook his head. "That said, most of the druids withdrew beyond Camelot's borders. Others, feeling that their duty to minister to their non-magical fellows, sort out magical problems by methods other than steel, and keep a close eye on certain magical places within Camelot's borders, remained. Even so, though, they mostly kept to themselves, harming none. For that reason, Arthur – yes, that Arthur – consequently advocated a policy of live and let live even as a Prince, back when he had no reason to like or trust magic or its practitioners… largely because the more vengeful sorts were trying to kill him on a weekly basis. And he had been raised to hate them – however, under the circumstances, he was remarkably free of hatred, and when he acted against magic, it was largely perfunctory. He even risked his own life to save a druid boy." His expression darkened. "It would have been better if he'd made like his father and drowned the brat. Merlin could have done, and if the dragon had had his way, he would have done."

"I'd have thought that you'd be the last person to want to hurt a kid," Clint said, eyes narrowed.

"Indeed," Thor said. "I know you of old, St – Gwion. You were never one to raise a hand to a child. Ever."

"Call me as you did before," Strange said. "It is the name I have used for most of my life, after all. And Gwion was one I had only briefly." His expression soured. "And while you are indeed correct, this is one child for whom I would have made an exception. With my bare hands, if need be. If you knew his name, you would know why." His gaze flickered up, crackling with hate. "Mordred."

"Wasn't he Arthur's kid?" Tony asked, after a moment.

"No," Strange said. "Though Arthur was fond of him, to begin with." He shook his head. "Mordred is not relevant here. Arthur advocated that the druids be allowed to live in peace. Uther, however, did not listen and had them slaughtered wherever they could be found."

He went silent for a long moment.

"My family were part of one of the more nomadic clans," he said. "They had retreated to the border regions of Camelot when the Great Purge began, close enough that if pursued, they could flee to Gwent, a powerful neighbouring kingdom known as Essetir in the time before the Romans, one then ruled at the time by Cenred, a man with no love for Camelot. It worked well enough – Uther knew not to seek war with Cenred, and Camelot's knights knew not to disobey their King. However, one day, they strayed deeper into Uther's realm. One day, they were caught."

He closed his eyes. "I was little more than a baby, and I pieced this all together much later. Yet if I cast my mind back, digging into my very oldest memories, then… I can hear the screams and pleas for mercy. I can smell the sharp tang of blood and fear." His hand went up to his forehead. "And I can feel my mother's tears on my brow as she put me into a basket, enchanting it as best she was able, before placing me in the nearby river, hoping that the current would carry me to safety, and perhaps, to people who would look kindly on an orphaned child."

His eyes opened again, distant and haunted, yet when he spoke, his tone was almost thoughtful. "Sometimes, in my dreams, I think I can hear her say something, just as she sets me adrift. Other times, I think I can hear her scream as she was found and hacked down. And in both cases, I do not know whether it is dream or memory." He shrugged, coming out of his reverie. "Not that it matters. I was found by a fisherman named Elphin who, as fate would have it, lived in the city of Camelot itself. I was not old enough to speak, much less say my name, so he called me Taliesin and took me home to raise as his own. He and his wife, Megan, were, and in truth, are, the only parents I have ever really known. All I had from my birth parents was a swaddling cloth, a basket, and my own magical gifts, and I didn't imagine that I was anything but the son of Elphin and Megan – after all, my colouring is hardly unusual in Wales today, nor was it in Camelot back then. They loved me dearly, as I loved them, and they raised me well. When they realised that I had magic, they taught me to keep it secret, and my foster-father made furtive inquiries, ones that could have cost him his life, to see if there was another who knew of magic in Camelot. Fate smiled on me again: just after my ninth birthday, his enquiries found the elderly but still sharp ears of Gaius, the Court Physician, and Uther's expert on magical matters. While this might seem like the worst person in the world to hear of my gifts, Gaius used his position as Uther's confidant and adviser to bend the King's will when it could be bent, and protect whoever he could. Above all, he sought to protect a young man who was also magically gifted, his ward, who was both his assistant and the manservant of Prince Arthur. That young man's name? Merlin."

He chuckled at the expressions. "Yes, I knew Merlin. I knew him very well, better than almost anyone," he said. "But that can wait for a moment. Gaius and Elphin came up with a plan. I had been behaving somewhat oddly, or so it was felt, and my foster parents had kept me shut away in hopes of concealing my magic until I learned to control it. This easily translated into an unusual illness that would require the expertise of the Court Physician himself, and while Gaius did not usually take payment, it was easy enough to say that as thanks, I would serve as his runner and assistant, fetching, carrying, and making deliveries. It was easy to believe: after all, Gaius was an old man when I was born, and getting still older. He was not as mobile as he once was, and his former assistant was mainly occupied with his duties as Prince Arthur's manservant and, increasingly, his informal yet most trusted adviser. Gaius had a spare pair of hands, Merlin had one less thing to worry about, and I had a teacher, in both magic and medicine. Additionally, it also proved rather helpful when something illegal and likely magical needed to be done behind Uther's back to protect him – though he didn't deserve it – or more usually his son – who did deserve it. After all, a man, whether young or old, even the Court Physician or the Prince's manservant, might arouse suspicion in certain places and times. A boy who was constantly dashing around on errands and carrying messages, usually from the Court Physician, but sometimes from the Prince, and even the King himself? Hardly worth notice, much less suspicion."

He smiled. "All in all, I had a rather nice childhood," he said, then the smile slanted. "Excepting the fact that I was acutely aware from an early age that if Uther ever found out what I could do, I would likely be executed, of course." He looked thoughtful. "The regular mortal peril, I suppose, could be considered a downside, but personally, I found it rather exciting."

"Uther would have executed _children?_ " Steve asked, appalled.

"Not would have, Steven. Did," Strange said bluntly. "My later investigations into the deaths of my birth family, for instance, found the battle site. Not all of the bones I found were those of adults." He waved a hand. "In any case, I and Merlin lived and learned, constantly haunted the spectre of Uther's wrath. Gaius less so, since Uther knew that he had magic, albeit to a far lesser extent than me, much less Merlin, but even he was not always safe. Oh, and yes, like most bigots, Uther was a hypocrite, and blamed his target for something that was really his fault. Well, mostly. I strongly suspect that he was manipulated by Nimueh, who had her own ambitions, but that is neither here nor there. I learned, first from Gaius, then mostly from Merlin, and also to a degree from Kilgharrah, the great dragon, one of the last of the great dragons of Albion. Most were dead, or had long since fled to Avalon. Kilgharrah, though, stuck around, seeking to guide Merlin in his destiny. He taught me a little too, hinting that I had a different destiny, one that would take me far from Camelot."

He grimaced. "Of course, at first, I didn't believe him," he said. "Uther died when I was a young man, and like the first shoots of spring, magic slowly re-emerged and flourished under Arthur's rule. Camelot's frontiers expanded, remarkably peacefully by the standards of the time. The Round Table was formed, and the Knights of Camelot, already a well-regarded fighting force, became an elite. Sir Lancelot, Sir Gwaine, Sir Percival, the Lady Knight, and many, many others, flocked to Arthur's court. Lancelot and her Ladyship actually taught me how to wield a sword in earnest, while the druids emerged from isolation and other magical practitioners were inexorably drawn to Camelot. Merlin and I learned from them all, Merlin perhaps better than I did – I was gifted, yes, but Merlin… Merlin was and remains on another level entirely. I, for my part, continued learning from Gaius, and eventually took over his duties, and when he passed away, his position as Court Physician. I even took up singing, finding I had a talent for it, and became something of a bard on the side. All I had ever dreamed of was coming about; I had a career that I loved, I had friends everywhere I looked, and I didn't have to hide my magic. Camelot was entering its Golden Age, and I couldn't imagine why I would ever want to leave."

Strange chuckled bitterly.

"Which goes to show how little I knew," he said. "I trained a successor as Court Physician, and others besides, as a simple measure of caution. After all, a single ill-timed arrow could mean the death of even the greatest – or in my case, third greatest at best – sorcerer in all Albion. And misplaced arrows or no misplaced arrows, Camelot had enemies: prominent among them, Morgana Pendragon, and Mordred. There was also the question of the succession. Still, everything seemed stable. Indeed, Camelot seemed unassailable. The might of Arthur and Merlin, the former wielding Excalibur – or as it is otherwise known, _Amoracchius_ – and the latter being simply the greatest mortal mage ever born, was unmatched, while the ever astute Queen Guinevere, Gwen, as she always insisted we who had known her when she was a maidservant call her, managed the politics of the realm with a rare deftness and skill. All was well, and in my mid thirties, I was hit by wanderlust. I loved Camelot, and it was home, even after what my investigations into my birth family had revealed. But I wanted to see the world. So I set my affairs in order, made sure that my successor and his own apprentices knew what they were doing, and set out with royal blessing to travel the world and learn its secrets." He shook his head. "I have made many decisions that I have regretted down the years. But none have haunted me more than that one."

He stared into the fire for a long time, which conveniently gave his audience time to digest what they had been told so far. Even by Strange's standards, it stretched credulity. And yet, Strange never lied. He would (and frequently did) bend the truth beyond all recognition, possibly, but lie? Never. And the Avengers and their associates had a high tolerance for strangeness. Even still, though, this took some adjusting to.

"I returned," Strange said eventually. "Some years later, having travelled far and wide. I had gone from the most desolate reaches of Lapland to the bustling metropolis of Constantinople, either of which could have swallowed Camelot without stopping to chew, from the plains of the Serengeti to the Gobi desert, from the heights of the Himalayas to the Valley of the Kings, from the great steppes of central Asia to the islands of Japan and the Aegean. I had fought the Fae and the Fallen, demons and the damned, and refined my combat magics. I had travelled to Delphi, to where the ruins of the temple of the Oracle once stood. I had absorbed everything I could, collecting every scrap of magic and enchantment, rediscovering magics that in Albion were long lost, and discovering ones it had never known, filling a dozen books with magic and medicine along the way. I had travelled, I had learned, I had fought, and I had seen so much, and I knew, I just _knew_ that there was so much more. I could hardly wait. But first, I was going to bring all this knowledge back home, to Camelot, and share it, and make Camelot's Golden Age even more glorious. I travelled back as swiftly as could, and that was swiftly indeed. I had mastered the Ways of Faerie, meaning that travel was far quicker than it was for most in that age, and for many after. But no matter how fast I travelled, I was only ever going to arrive at one time: Too Late."

He looked up at his audience, really and truly, for the first time and smiled bitterly. If you looked closely, you could see a glimmer of tears in his eyes.

"When I came home, I did not find wonder and glory. I found devastation and ruin," he said. "Arthur was dead at Mordred's hands, slaying him in turn, the flower of Albion's knighthood dying with them on the field of Camlann. Merlin had vanished in despair, after locking Morgana away. The alliance Camelot had led was crumbling, despite Gwen's best efforts to hold it together, and with no clear heir after Gwen, Camelot itself was cracking at the seams. The German ruled kingdoms of Bernicia, Deira, Wessex, East Anglia, and Mercia, whose borders Camelot under Arthur's rule and the kingdoms it had united behind it had rolled back, who had been penned back and made to sue for peace, exploited the confusion ruthlessly. In a matter of years, the work of a lifetime had been undone."

He let that hang in the air for a moment.

"I knew only one thing: I should have been there," Strange said. "If I had been, Arthur would have lived."

"You can't know that," Steve said.

"Oh, I can," Strange said. "You see, Morgana was Merlin's dark reflection, his equal and opposite. Mordred was mine. We were both dark little druid boys, orphaned by Uther. Both apprentices to practitioners whose powers were only matched by each other. And both instrumental in Camelot's fall." His expression darkened again. "He was the better swordsman, but I was the better mage, and if I had met him on the field of Camlann, I would have turned the little bastard inside out."

He stared into the fire for a long time, seeming to ruminate on memories of Mordred, before emerging once more.

"But that was not the end, or at least, not the end of the beginning. In my own despair, I fled to a certain place near Camelot, and raged at the cruel fates that had raised us so high, then brought us so low. Normally, even a sorcerer of my calibre would have had little effect with such undirected rage and misery would have had little effect. But it was a place of… temporal significance, shall we say. It was a place where the Time Stone had once rested. And I had a gift for the time magics. So for want of a better way of putting it, I think it heard me. It appeared before me. And it made me an offer; not in words, as such, but one clear enough. changed me: a gift as a Seer became my current Foresight, though it took me years to master it. A knack of shortening and extending moments and stepping between them became a talent for traversing the roads of time itself – where once I, like others, manipulated time, now I was one with it. And from that moment on, I have not aged a day." He held up a hand before his eyes and examined it in the fire-light, twisting it this way and that. "Though sometimes, I wonder. Was I granted eternal life, or was my life simply put on pause, making me a rock in the sea of time? Though, of course, even rocks are worn away, eventually." He closed his eyes. For all the new vitality that had been in him this last couple of days, looking almost like his old self, telling this story seemed to have drained much of it from him. "And after all this time… I am very worn. But."

He looked up, his expression as hard and authoritative as the statues in Cavern of Kings, and the firelight caught his eyes, making them seem like they were burning. "I will fulfil the oath I made that day," he said. "When the Time Stone empowered me: I failed once. Never again. _Never._ "

The words echoed around the room, and Strange stood, pushing himself out of the chair. "Now," he said. "You all know who I am, where I came from, and why I do what I do. So I promised, and so I said."

"You did," Steve said, standing as well. "Thank you for telling us. It must have been hard."

"Hard enough," Strange said. "But you all had a right to know." He smiled wanly. "And I hope that you will perhaps judge me a little less harshly, now."

Then, he did something very unusual. He jumped, startled.

The why of this became immediately apparent as, for the second time in the space of six months, Diana had slipped across a room in total silence, completely unobserved, and hugged a much haunted, very dangerous, and quite likely very lonely old man who most probably could not remember the last time he had been touched by someone showing care and compassion, two things that for all her own life's difficulties, Diana had in spades. Last time, it had been the Winter Soldier, and she had barely come up to his chest. Now, it was Strange, and the top of her head rested under his chin as she hugged him.

Strange blinked and then slowly returned the hug, as if he was not quite believing what was happening. After a few long moments, Diana stepped away. She didn't say anything. Her statement had, after all, already been made.

"Thank you, little one," Strange said quietly, sounding genuinely touched. Then, he turned to Wanda, who had also risen, tears in her eyes.

"You never said," she said softly.

"No, I did not, and truthfully, you earned the right to know many years ago," Strange said. "But what would it have changed? You would still have been understandably furious that I stayed silent near the end of the war with Riddle, that I did not act as I could have done, forcing you to make decisions that you have always regretted. Decisions that I wish you had never to face." He smiled faintly. "If anything, you would have been angrier, I think, saying that I should know better than to stay my hand."

Wanda flushed slightly, then sighed. "There is that," she said, then hugged him tightly. This time, Strange was not surprised, and instead hugged her back, a warm, genuine smile creeping across his face.

Eventually, they separated, and Strange turned again to face Thor and Loki.

"If either of you is planning to hug me," he said dryly. "Please be sure to restrain yourselves. I may be ageless, but I assure you, the feeling of broken ribs does not get any more pleasant over the millennia."

Thor chuckled. "Then I shall spare your ribs," he said, and his expression grew solemn. "I think I understand you better now, Stephen," he said. "I do not always agree with what you do, and frequently I dislike it. But where before I understand the reasoning behind your strategy, now I understand the heart behind it too. If nothing else, old friend, I hope that someday, when you task is done, you will find peace."

"And on that day, you will be ever welcome in the Halls of Asgard," Loki said. "Even if you do enjoy annoying our father."

"It has ever been the prerogative of the old to tease the young," Strange said cheerfully.

"And I think it has been a rather long time since father was on the receiving end," Thor said.

"Then I consider it as my positive duty to refamiliarise him with it," Strange said, before turning one last time to see someone who had thus been silent. That someone was Harry and, of course, he was not alone. Carol was hovering by one shoulder, while Bucky remained in his shadow, having accepted a new post as Harry's guard, to help him deal with his experiences as the Red Son and prevent the malevolently inclined from profiting from the fact that Harry was not yet bulletproof, and thus a second coming the Dark Phoenix.

Uhtred's pride had been somewhat offended by this, but as had been pointed out, while Uhtred was learning the ways of more honourable warfare, he did not know the ways of warfare on Midgard (yet), much less the kind of shadowy, bloody, and entirely dishonourable warfare that Harry's enemies thrived on. Bucky, by contrast, was a past master at it, and the fact that it was Bucky – formerly the infamous and legendary Winter Soldier, capable of laying low gods and kings – had done much to salve the aforementioned pride. Furthermore, his had been to tag along behind Bucky, as he did now, while Diana and Jean-Paul were not far behind. The overall effect was like the tail of some kind of human comet.

The hangers on were disregarded, though as Strange met Harry's gaze.

"You said you'd walked a few miles in shoes like mine," Harry said. "I think I see what you meant." He cocked his head. "It's like dad said. Before, I got the practical reason you did stuff, thanks to… well. London. And Chthon. Now, I really get _why_."

Strange inclined his head. "I think you do," he said quietly. "And I hope that, with what I have to teach you, and what I can do for you, the miles you have to walk in shoes like mine will be as few as possible."

Harry looked puzzled for a moment, then grimaced. "Yeah," he said. "I hope so too."

Strange nodded, then smiled. "Now, I think it is time for certain youngsters to head to bed," he said, and gently prodded Harry. "You, my young student, have a school to return to. I dare say that Hogwarts will have no idea what has hit it. I would ask if you have packed, but I think that between your father and the inestimable Ms Potts, you have packed very thoroughly indeed." He turned to go. "I will see you there."

"Aren't you coming with us?" Harry asked.

Strange looked over his shoulder and smiled. "Consider this your first lesson, Harry. When dealing with a time traveller, you need to think not in three dimensions, but four."

"What does that mean?" Harry asked.

"It means, my young student, that who says I am not already there?"

OoOoO

And indeed he was. Had Ron and Hermione known this at dinnertime the next day, it would have explained several things: for starters, the total lack of surprise on the face of the apparently entirely ordinary new teacher Professor Bach at what followed.

What followed, as it happened, was this.

The students tucked in to a hearty dinner, easy chatter flowing around the tables with a thunderstorm raging overhead. Then, before all but the quickest eaters had cleared even half their plates, the doors to the Great Hall slammed open, loud and hard enough that more than a few students looked up at the ceiling, thinking it was thunder.

Then, their eyes were drawn downwards, by an indefinable presence that nevertheless demanded the attention of people as inexorably as light demanded that of moths. That same presence rolled over the Hall like the ripples of a stone thrown into a pond, causing all the chatter to wither and die in the gaping void of the growing silence.

For in the doorway was none other than the much speculated about Harry Thorson, with a strange dark haired young man at his shoulder. He seemed taller than he had been, more assured. And then, of course, there were the strange, thick white locks in his fringe, standing out from the rest of his hair like snow on stone.

There was a long moment.

Then, Harry arched an eyebrow and spoke.

"Sorry. Am I late?"

 **And Harry is back at Hogwarts, having decided that since his arrival is going to be much talked about one way or another, he might as well make a good entrance (plus, if they're talking about his entrance, then they're not talking about where he's been, and what happened to him). And it only took 20 chapters for it to happen, too.**

 **Anyhow, lots of reveals to chew over – Harry's not the first Asgardian Phoenix, Surtur was that previously mentioned Dark Phoenix who ate a galaxy (not all in one go, admittedly) and the Nine Realms were formed to stop him, and Doctor Strange, now one of Harry's teachers, is really Taliesin, bard and mage of Welsh myth-history, and formerly Court Physician at Arthur's court. And pretending to be a harmless new Hogwarts Professor, most probably for his own amusement. If it makes you feel any better, almost no one figured it out without serious prompting. Oh, and no, he's not 'Ambrose Penn', either, though it is the kind of alias he'd pick.**

 **Oh, and Carol's not going to have to worry about her dad for a while. I thought when I first wrote it that Ali's reaction was both over-the-top and in-character, but when I considered the emotional abuse that Carol and her little brothers would likely have faced, it seemed fitting. What with the arc in Mr Danvers' entirely well-intentioned attempts (we are all the hero of our own story, and he genuinely believes that he is doing what is best for his family) to get his elder children to be who he wants them to be, from emotional abuse to attempts at arranging outright mind-control, it actually seems very appropriate that the children's mother and grandmother would want him as far away from them as possible. After all, as Alison points out, there's no telling what he could try next – and the likely options are not pleasant.**

 **In the meantime, you'll be relieved to hear that that's the last of the exposition heavy filler chapters for a while. Harry will hang out with Ron and Hermione over the next chapter or two, with the matter of just what happened to him and his unwillingness to talk about it hanging over affairs – he's not quite as stable and functional as he seems, when removed from the comforting framework of friends/family who really know what he's been through, and know when to back off and give him space. While Ron and Hermione do, Hogwarts is a school full of teenagers, and thus an entirely different kettle of fish. And take it from someone who was one only a few years ago, teenagers are a) curious, b) idiots. Oh, and he'll also be chasing up the oddity that is Draco Malfoy, and taking his first lessons from Strange. Sinister, meanwhile, will appear too, imprisoned as he is.**

 **And after that, we'll be getting on to the Triwizard Tournament. Which Harry will still be involved in. Yeah, you can bet he's not going to be pleased about that.**


	21. Chapter 21: Recovery's Road

**And here we are again. Yep, new chapter, in reasonable time I would like to think. This one's a bit more relaxed, and it's largely about Harry's recovery, but with hopefully reasonable amounts of angst – in other words, while he has a bit of a panic attack at one point, there's no long monologues about how the world is darkness and pain and life is meaningless or whatever – and he's getting back into the swing of things of normal life at Hogwarts. But as is also made clear, he's different to the person he was, attitudes clash at points, and it's not all sunshine and roses. It's still on the lighter edge of things, for the most part.**

 **Okay, I've got a message for a certain few of my guest reviewers, who may all be one person (Odin's Eye, Kaiser Dragon, Manda's Priest, possibly Thunder Dragon, assorted others who know damn well who they are, this means** _ **you**_ **).**

 **Everyone else, feel free to skip this.**

 _ **I'm going to say this and and I'm only going to say it once:**_

 _ **I love and appreciate reviews. My readers thoughts on my work are the main reason I post here. Therefore, I treasure each and every one more than I can possibly say, and reply to as many as I am physically able to.**_

 _ **However.**_

 _ **I am not even REMOTELY interested in anime or anime related ideas. Nor do I want or need reviewers posting largely chunks of the Marvel wiki or, indeed, practically copy and pasting the same reviews from chapter to chapter, even plagiarising the reviews of other people at times. If you keep doing it, I WILL start deleting your anon reviews. I do not want to do it, I do not like doing it, but if you refuse to get the message from repeated requests, I WILL do it.**_

 **For those of you to whom this does** _ **not**_ **apply, guests and those with accounts, my apologies for the brief, angry interlude. The vast majority of you are absolute fucking angels, often with lovely comments, encouragement, and very useful constructive criticism.**

 **Guest (who reviewed on chapter 19):** **It was designed as a stream of consciousness piece.**

 **Sereda Hawke** **: I intentionally modelled it off the War of Wrath, so you're not exactly wrong. Plus, in-universe,** _ **Lord of the Rings**_ **and its associated works are fiction based on reality. As for Owlman, Strange would probably be contemptuous along the lines of Batman's "We both looked into the abyss, but** _ **you blinked"**_ **line. Then he'd kill him.**

 **Enku:** **I'm no fan of the Inheritance Cycle.**

 **Guest:** **That is true, and I both love and cherish** _ **The Once and Future King**_ **. It is, in my opinion, possibly the best adaptation of Arthurian lore ever. The Book of Merlyn is one of the very few books ever to make me cry. However, the tv series is easier to adapt to COS and holds a special place in my heart.**

 **Michael** **: Not quite. Harry doesn't try talking to the Goblet, though he might be tempted to blow it up. Mostly he just winds up in a foul mood.**

 **White Emperor:** **Godly inheritance is… odd. Especially where Asgardians and the Odinforce are concerned. Why wasn't the agelessness passed on? In part, it's related to to Yggdrasil. Also, to be frank, Odin's lived a very physically stressful life, even ignoring the effect of the Odinforce, which places a great strain on its bearer – remember the Odinsleep. That said, Theia's influence does mean that Odin and his family are going to be a bit longer lived than your average Asgardian. As for whether she's alive, that's for me to know, and you potentially to find out. Though she was no great fan of Bor, that much is definitely true.**

 **D &D Lore Nerd:** **Nope, sorry. The closest I'm likely to get is** _ **Order of the Stick**_ **references.**

 **Guest:** **Strange has his canon rogues gallery and then some, though he's likely to keep Harry well clear of them. And maybe, but I'm busy.**

Naturally, the Hall erupted with whispers and gasps as Harry strode – and with his height, build, and the certainty with which he moved there could be no other word for it – over to the Gryffindor table, boots drumming against the flagstones in a staccato rhythm. Then, he slowed. His eyes slid up and down the table, picking out gaps in the seating. One, comparatively isolated, his gaze lingered on for a long moment. Then, his gaze flickered to Ron and Hermione, who were staring up at him in astonishment and a mixture of worry and relief, and he sat down next to them, Bucky following his example.

Once he did, he looked inquiringly up and down the remaining food, ignoring the stares from across the Hall, and most prominently from those around him.

"I don't suppose there's any chicken left, is there?" he asked hopefully.

His housemates stared at him in stunned silence.

"No?" he said, then sighed, and with a brief, idle wave, set a healthy dollop of beef casserole, mashed potato, and sausages.

Bucky coughed pointedly, and Harry scowled at him, before, slowly, grudgingly, some peas floated onto his plate.

It was a very normal moment, Hermione would later reflect, one in sharp contrast to what would follow. What, in fact, immediately followed.

Which, as it happened, was Harry taking a couple of mouthfuls, rolling his eyes, and sighing at Dean Thomas, "Spit it out, Dean."

Dean jumped. "How did you know –" he began.

"I'm a telepath," Harry said, with strong undertones of 'you idiot'. Certainly, it was ruder than Hermione was used to Harry being, and a moment later, something seemed to pass wordlessly between him and Bucky, whose expression had flickered in disapproval. "Sorry," he said, in gentler, but still somewhat curt tones. "I'm a telepath. I have been for a while. I've got better at it." He shrugged. "The question was on top of your mind. I picked it up."

"Uh, right," Dean said, sharing uneasy glances with the others. "So, Harry… how was your summer?"

Harry took a mouthful, swallowed, then looked up, green eyes distant. "I died," he said. "And for the most part, it went downhill from there."

Then, he returned to his meal, before pausing. "Oh," he said. "By the way, could you please pass it around that anyone who wants to where I've been, what I've been doing, and where I got the white bit in my hair, can have this answer: none of your fucking business."

And though his tone had been mild, even the most insensitive teenage boy could detect the razor edged steely undertone. Certainly, after that, no one had asked any questions.

Bucky, Sergeant Barnes, meanwhile, sat with the air of a man comfortable in his position and content to stay where he was until he was faced with either a reason to move, or possibly an encroaching glacier at the start of the next ice age. He seemed entirely unbothered that he was surrounded by teenagers in robes, sticking out like a sore thumb, and seemed to be simply chaperoning Harry. Hermione, for her part, suspected that it was rather more.

At one point, Ron had looked poised to break the nervous silence around the table, but Harry's gaze had flicked towards him, and Ron had twitched, frowned, and subsided. A moment later, his gaze had flicked to her, and she'd heard his voice in her head.

 _Later._

Then, his gaze had dropped to his meal once again as he ate with mechanical efficiency, not a motion wasted.

And as he did, Hermione fought the urge to smile as she caught Ron's eye. Harry being followed by secrets and mysteries, to which only she and Ron were privy? Some things, it seemed, did not change.

OoOoO

'Later', as it turned out, meant a whole week later, on the top of the Astronomy Tower. Both Ron and Hermione had tried to bring up the subject before, but the only reply had been a flat, "later."

And in that time, whispered rumours had been spreading around Hogwarts. Rita Skeeter's previous article was pulled out and re-examined, and muggleborn and pureblood students pooled their knowledge from their separate worlds, all in aid of trying to figure out what had happened to Harry. His silence on the subject, as it happened, had only sparked further curiosity, a curiosity fuelled even more by some of Harry's more seemingly inexplicable acts.

On the first day after he got back to Hogwarts, he was seen dragging Draco Malfoy aside with a dangerous expression. The younger Malfoy was himself now a social pariah after what his father had done – under his command, after all, HYDRA had killed dozens of Ministry witches and wizards, many of whom had had children, grandchildren, godchildren, nieces and nephews, even cousins, at Hogwarts. It was a status he had accepted with apparent equanimity, but he had not taken any attempts at misplaced retribution that went beyond sniped comments and social isolation lying down either. After a couple of incidents where the more hot-blooded students attempted to exact 'justice' and found that – in one memorable incident – it was very hard to concentrate on hexes or, indeed, anything, when you're suddenly sharing your robes with a family of angry weasels, this mostly died down.

The new Harry, however, did not strike the Hogwarts student body as someone who would be fazed by conjured mustelids, and it was well known both that he had plenty of reason to hate HYDRA and, as the Ravenclaw Quidditch team had previously discovered, a taste for inventive revenges. So when they heard that he'd dragged Draco away for a little chat, the more vengeful types gleefully awaited news of a fittingly horrible punishment.

However, this did not materialise. After a conversation that neither Harry nor Draco felt minded to repeat, one that seemed to satisfy both parties, Harry had made it very clear that what Lucius Malfoy had done was not to be taken out on his son, and while the would-be avengers could hide from the teachers, they could not hide from him. His expression, his track record, and the fact that his eyes had turned to burning pits of golden-white flame like miniature stars while his voice echoed ominously, persuaded anyone still considering taking revenge to drop the idea like a stone. Teenagers, especially teenage witches and wizards, have enough problems without adding 'the wrath of (a) God' to the list.

However, this didn't make anyone more inclined to like Draco, especially since they got the distinct impression that, if he'd had a shrewd idea of what had happened to Harry before, he almost certainly knew what had happened now. Jealousy is a terrible thing.

This was not the only unusual meeting and conversation, either. This time, it was on the third day after his return, with Jade Scott, a 7th year student, who'd previously featured on the general gossip radar only for the usual reasons – speculation whether she was dating this or that boy, speculation on (after she turned one boy down) whether she was a lesbian, and excited discussion on her confrontation of Loki (with a select group of other students) the previous year, specifically over the fact that his invasion had led to the death of her father, the late Alan Scott.

The conversation had been largely telepathic (itself something of a source of fascination/irritation to the students), except for the end, where an irritable Harry had snapped, "It's not hers, it's definitely not yours, and last I saw, Doctor Strange had it. If you don't like that, take it up with him – I'm sure he'll be absolutely delighted to _not_ tell you," before stalking off. What the subject of conversation had been was, again, up for speculation, especially because neither party was inclined to elaborate, and where Harry had a reputation for creative revenge, Jade had a reputation for favouring the _Furnuculus_ curse and other unpleasant plant related hexes.

As for Harry in general… well, the general consensus was that he wasn't exactly nasty, or anything. Curt, yes. Blunt, somewhat. Sarcastic, even more than usual, which was saying something. However, he was increasingly standoffish, and there was a forbidding aura about him, something, ironically, that he had in common with Snape – though neither would have been pleased to hear it said.

It was a different kind of forbidding, in any case. Where Snape was considered cold, like a dagger in the dark, Harry was seen as volatile, like a bubbling potion that (if the wrong ingredient was added or step was taken) would explode without warning.

Speaking of Harry and Snape, their first confrontation on Harry's return to Hogwarts had been hotly anticipated by the students – Fred and George had been running a thriving book on exactly what would happen, and how many limbs Snape would have left afterwards.

As it was, though, most of the betters were disappointed. When his first Potions lesson rolled around, the two seemed to mostly ignore each other. The most that happened was one long moment when their gazes met. Nothing obvious happened, but anyone watching carefully would have noticed Harry's eyes narrow suddenly. If they had been listening to their mystical senses and instincts, such as they were, they would have noticed a ripple, something that most would have dismissed as a draught, even thought the dungeon door was shut and there were no windows. That ripple was followed immediately by Snape's own eyes widening, and a mixture of emotions passing across his face, one of which could only be described as deep seated pain. Then, a moment later, it was gone, curdling into a cold fury, dark eyes boring into Harry in a way that had would have made many a student tremble. Harry, however, simply smiled a cold smile and arch an eyebrow, his entire expression a challenge, saying clearer than words, 'and what?'

At that point, the air had been crackling with tension, until Bucky had cleared his throat. Under most circumstances, it would be considered an entirely ordinary sound, but for two things. First, the timing. Second, the fact that most of the time, Bucky made the Grey Lady looking noisy.

After that, a grudging détente seemed to be established, with Snape and Harry both pretending that the other didn't exist, unless they actually had to. Fred and George, needless to say, made a killing.

Though, while the ability to stare down Snape was somewhat admired, none particularly wanted to go near Harry. This was because that this confidence was considered to be a product of the previously mentioned volatility, and the constant hum of psychic power about him, which registered enough even on the limited magical senses of wanded teenagers to make the hairs on the back of their necks stand up and – if he was in a particularly bad mood – give them a case of the creeping horrors. In short, no one particularly wanted to be the one to cause the explosion. Not after what had happened when Seamus Finnegan had jokingly asked Harry to get Professor Sprout to change his Herbology mark. An inexplicable smell of wood smoke still pervaded the section of corridor they'd been in when he'd asked.

Thus, Harry was left alone, for the most part, and he seemed to prefer it that way. Or rather, he made efforts at fitting in with his peers, sometimes seeming comfortable around them for a good couple of hours at time, even, on rare occasion, seeming like his old self. As long, that was, as you remembered not to startle him, not to ask him questions about what had gone on over the summer unless they were on the most mild and prosaic things, and as long as you didn't say something stupid (while teenage boys usually have a high tolerance for stupidity, being usually guilty of it themselves, Harry had seemingly returned from his elongated summer with absolutely no tolerance for it whatsoever). Then, for whatever reason, the walls would come back up, and his body language would once again be one that those with relevant relatives quietly compared to an Auror, a professional Duellist, or someone else who's got so used to trouble that they now half-expected it around every corner. The Twins, being among the few people that Harry did willingly talk to, compared him to legendary retired Auror Alastor 'Mad-Eye' Moody, who had been a friend of sorts of their father, and among those who'd met Moody, the comparison was considered a valid one.

In summation, Harry wasn't overly eager to expand on what had happened to him. He wasn't overly eager to expand on _anything_ , even to Ron and Hermione, who he at least made the effort to talk to every time they were in a group together, something they found a little unsettling – that is, the fact that he had to try, to force himself to have a normal interaction. Indeed, when they finally gathered at the top of the Astronomy Tower to have that talk, at first he said nothing at all, resting his forearms on the parapet and gazing out over the Forbidden Forest, up towards the mountains. Bucky stood at his left hand, a half pace behind him, a position he kept at all times save when Harry was in a lesson, when he instead took up a position on the wall. Yet despite that proximity, managed to fade into the background, as close, as silent, and as unobtrusive as a shadow. Hermione supposed that being able to communicate telepathically rather reduced the necessity of speech.

While the bulk of the school's attention had been on Harry, Bucky had garnered his share of curiosity too. Most students of magical heritage had heard bedtime stories about him, albeit usually as the loyal sidekick to Albus Dumbledore and Captain America during the war against Grindelwald. Most muggleborns, meanwhile, knew the whole tale of Bucky Barnes – the publicly aired version, anyway. And all of them wondered what exactly he was doing at Hogwarts. Harry had, somewhat dryly, remarked that Bucky's job was to "keep me out of trouble."

"I think it would take a lot more than even Sergeant Barnes to keep you out of trouble," Hermione had said tartly.

There had been a very long moment, as Harry had frozen, and Bucky had winced. Then, Harry had burst out laughing. "You've got a point there," he'd admitted.

Now, though, he didn't look amused. If anything, he looked like someone about to reach into a thicket of stinging nettles.

"You've got questions," he said eventually.

"You could say that, mate," Ron said.

A sour smile flickered across Harry's face. "So does everyone in the school," he said. "I can feel it."

"Well, you can hardly blame them," Hermione said. "Harry, the world's been turned upside down these last few months, and as far as anyone can tell, you've either been in the middle of it, or you know those who were. People want answers. And…" She trailed off, not wanting to say what came to mind next.

She didn't have to.

"People saw me die," Harry said quietly.

"And then you came back and roasted those HYDRA bastards alive," Ron said, with a degree of dark relish.

Harry's jaw muscles went taut, his hands clenching into fists, knuckles standing out against his skin like chips of ice, and said nothing. Hermione, meanwhile, turned on Ron, ready to remonstrate with him, and correct him, when something unexpected happened.

For the first time since he came to Hogwarts, Bucky spoke.

"Killing isn't something that you should enjoy," he said, in a soft voice.

"I didn't," Ron began.

"You didn't have to say it," Bucky said softly. "Your tone said it for you." He met Ron's defiant gaze, and after most of a minute, Ron looked away.

"Why not?" he muttered. "What's wrong with enjoying killing monsters?"

"I thought that, when I wasn't so many years older than you," Bucky said mildly. "I'd heard all the stories from Occupied Europe, of what the Nazis – who were Grindelwald's muggle allies – were doing. Half of them were crap, which puzzled me a bit, after I went over there and found out what it was actually like. The truth was every bit as bad as the stories – at times, it was far, far worse. From what Dumbledore told me, and what I saw of the magical side of the war, it was the same their side. So I wondered why people would make things up, when the truth was horrible enough?" He shrugged. "Part of it is the way that rumours just develop, stories get told and travel. And part of it… I suppose I figured it out after we took Auschwitz, one of the concentration camps where the Nazis were systematically exterminating everyone they deemed 'lesser'. Fact was, the truth was too awful to be believed. There's a reason General Eisenhower insisted on photographers being brought up to the Camps as soon as possible, to have proof, because otherwise no one would accept it." He grimaced. "Apparently, a few people still won't. But the stories were accepted, because they were a lower grade, more… comprehensible type of evil. Enough to make you angry, but not so vast that you wouldn't believe it."

He looked out over the forest, as if collecting his thoughts. "I went to Europe believing that all the enemy were evil, that they were monsters, and that they deserved to die," he said. "And I saw a lot of monsters, some worse than I'd ever imagined, usually from HYDRA, or the SS, or others like them. But the average German soldier… most of them weren't so different from the men, and sometimes women, that I fought alongside. I lived through the Depression, and that was bad enough in the States. Thanks to the obligations of the Treaty of Versailles, that muggle Germany signed after the first World War, they had it so much worse. And by the time we faced them…"

He sighed.

"By the time we faced them, they'd been told for years that they were fighting to restore their country to its former glory, to take back what was rightfully theirs, avenging past wrongs," he said. "They'd been told that they were a great, chosen people who'd been laid low by sinister, conniving forces of 'untermenschen', lesser men, who were greedy and jealous of their wealth and glory. They were given someone to blame for every problem they had. They were told that they were the heroes of the story. Just like we were. And if you believe that you're the hero, that everyone opposed to you is the villain, then it becomes much easier to justify horror like you couldn't even imagine."

He looked Ron in the eye, and this time, Ron couldn't look away, no matter how much he might want to.

"They weren't evil men and women. But they did evil things. Because they thought that it was the right thing to do."

Ron swallowed, but jutted out his jaw defiantly, and said, "you think killing HYDRA people is evil? I've heard the stories; you've killed more of HYDRA than I could count!"

"Ron!" Hermione snapped.

Bucky smiled faintly. "You're right," he said. "Though the stories are nothing to the reality." He looked thoughtful for a moment. "Killing is sometimes necessary. And frankly, I happen to be very good at it."

Harry muttered something that, had Ron or Hermione had super soldier level hearing, would have been discernible as, "Oh, you have no idea."

"But it's not something I ever enjoy," Bucky continued. "There are people that I've been happy to see dead. I have been happy if, by killing, I have saved or protected someone. I have even been happy in a fight, sometimes, because it's exhilarating. But I don't enjoy killing itself. It's an important distinction."

Ron glowered, but it was the sort of glower that suggested that he was mulling what had been said over, even if he didn't like it all that much.

Hermione, therefore, changed the subject. "So, Harry, um… you were involved in the battle of London?"

"Yes," Harry said, before sighing. "And I got the white bit in my hair there too." He raised a hand. "Before we start, I'm not telling you everything. Some things, I can't tell you. Others, I shouldn't tell you. And others, I don't want to tell you."

"Will you at least tell us which is which?" Hermione asked.

Harry wrinkled his nose, then nodded grudgingly, and added, "Oh, and one more thing. You'll keep what I'm telling you to yourselves."

It was not a request, and Ron frowned, before Hermione laid a restraining hand on his arm.

"Of course, Harry," she said.

Harry gave her a long, disconcertingly cold look, as if he was weighing her up. Then, he nodded abruptly. And, slowly at first, he began to speak. Ron and Hermione stood spellbound, forgetting the cold, as in a low voice and short, sharp sentences, he wove a tale that beggared belief. Even edited as it most clearly was, with vast gaps, it was an epic.

But in the vast torrent of information, certain incidents stuck out, like debris in a roaring flood: Harry's temporary death and resurrection. His rematch with his killer, the man known as Daken. His possession by, and banishment of, an ancient demon-god, whose mere partial emergence had nearly ripped reality apart, with nothing but a white streak in his hair to show for it. The revelation that his mother was not so much dead, as merged with a being before whom even the greatest of gods was but a speck. His psychic duels with Voldemort at the World Cup. The true extent of the manipulations of Doctor Strange.

It was shortly after that, however, that he trailed off.

"Mate?" Ron asked carefully. "You all right?"

Harry's jaw clenched, then he shook his head sharply, apparently not trusting himself to speak.

"Harry," Hermione said gently, stepping forward, ignoring the dangerous sense of humming power that was growing around her friend. "Whatever it is, you can tell us, if you want to."

"I don't _want_ to tell you _any_ of this," Harry spat. Tears could be seen on his cheeks, and he was breathing faster and faster, at a rate just short of panic.

"Okay," Hermione said. "Okay."

"I don't want platitudes either," Harry snapped viciously, then turned to look at Bucky. Something passed between them, likely telepathically, before Harry suddenly turned back to the battlements and vaulted over the parapet.

"HARRY!" Hermione yelled, horrified, as Ron swore. But before they could say anything else, Harry shot upwards like a cork from a bottle, coming to a stop in mid-air, about twenty feet above them. He gave them a long look, and what almost seemed like the shadow of a smile poked through the mask of misery, before he twisted and shot off towards the Lake.

"Bloody _hell_ ," Ron said, after a moment, drawing out the latter word. "I didn't know he could bloody well fly. I mean, he did when HYDRA attacked, but he just said that that wasn't him, so…"

"Well, telekinesis, it makes sense," Hermione said vaguely, frowning in worry. "Where's he _going?_ "

"Not far."

They both jumped. Bucky had, once again, managed to fade into the foreground.

"He won't go far," Bucky continued, his gaze tracking his charge's progress. "We have a deal. If he feels he needs space, he can find some, so long as he stays in eyeshot."

"Because he feels trapped?" Hermione ventured.

Bucky nodded. "He asked me – telepathically – to finish off the story," he said. "He can't quite bring himself to talk about it. Having been through similar experiences to what he went through, it's something I understand a bit better than most."

He watched Harry's progress over the Lake for a couple of minutes, before speaking again, in the practical, detached tone of a reporting soldier.

"Thanks to an entirely unique combination of circumstances, Harry was kidnapped by a rogue faction of Russian Intelligence called the Red Room. All you need to know about them is that they created the Winter Soldier and they were the people who even HYDRA knew to fear. However, even they couldn't take him without a fight – as the massive scale migraines that you and just about everyone else with even a like of magical or mental talent got a couple of weeks ago demonstrated. The only reason that they could hold him was an intimate knowledge of what made him tick, an asset even more powerful than he was, and the fact that he let them. He wasn't the only one they kidnapped, either, and I don't think I have to paint a picture as to why."

He stopped, as if weighing his next words. "That fight, the one that caused the massive psychic ruckus, allowed the Avengers to home in, just as Harry intended. However, after arranging the escape of his fellow prisoners, he... went back in to the base. To try and free one last prisoner."

"He failed to save them?" Ron guessed.

"No," Bucky said. "He got them out. It just took a bit longer than expected. The Red Room had similar technology to HYDRA – they vanished deep into the Nevernever. By the time the Avengers caught up to them twelve days later, thanks to the time dilation effect, Harry had spent six months in enemy hands."

Hermione gasped.

"What did they do to him?" Ron asked, in a hushed voice.

Bucky went silent for a long moment. His answer, when it came, was both indirect and chilling.

"The kind of things that leave scars on the soul."

OoOoO

Shortly after, when it became clear that Harry wasn't likely to return before dusk, and that Bucky fully intended to wait until he did, Ron and Hermione descended from the Astronomy Tower, in silence. They had been left with much to think about.

"I didn't expect him to snap like that," Ron said eventually. "I mean, I suppose I should have done, after what happened with Seamus…"

"That was anger," Hermione said, shivering involuntarily at the memory. Sometimes, it was hard to remember that Harry wasn't all human. The memory of him whirling on Seamus, eyes burning white with incandescent fury, features shifting ever so slightly, as heat, power and a strange scent of woodsmoke rolled off him in waves, making every instinct stand up and scream, leaving even the usually unflappable Bucky looking genuinely worried, talking his charge down in a stream of swift, soothing words… that made it hard to remember that there was any human in him at all. "This was different."

"A different symptom, to be sure, but part of the same disease."

Both Ron and Hermione nearly jumped out of their skins, and whirled on the speaker. It was Draco Malfoy, who nodded to them in an almost abstract fashion, then resumed looking out the window.

"What would you know about it, Malfoy?" Ron snapped aggressively. "And what are you doing here, anyway? Spying?" His hand moved towards his wand, a threatening gesture, but one Draco ignored.

"More than you do, Weasley," he said coolly. "For one thing, it is perfectly obvious that Harry is suffering from what Muggles call Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder."

"Huh?" Ron asked, bemused.

"It is a poorly understood phenomenon in both our worlds," Draco said. "I believe that it used to be called 'Curse Shock'. After something sufficiently awful has happened to someone, sometimes people suffer from long term mental effects. You might call it a sort of mental scarring. The symptoms include…"

"Flashbacks, nightmares, physical sensations connected to traumatic memories when they're brought to the surface," Hermione said slowly. "Avoidance, emotional numbness… and anger. Irritability. Outbursts. Panic attacks." She looked back up the stairs. "Just like we've been seeing from Harry, ever since he got back."

"Considering what happened to him, I'm not surprised," Draco said, tone grim.

"Harry told you?" Hermione asked, startled.

"Not as such," Draco said. "Our confrontation was on matters related… but not quite the same. Ones he hasn't told you about."

"How do you know that?" Ron demanded.

"I know because if you did, you would recognise the incident you just mentioned as having far greater significance than merely another sign of Seamus Finnegan's uncanny ability to shove his foot so far down his throat that it could do adequate service as a tail," Draco said flatly.

"You know something," Hermione said.

"I know many things," Draco said. It wasn't smug, with a taunting air, of one dancing around a subject. It was a simple statement of fact. "I know exactly what the significance of that incident was, and I won't tell you, so don't bother asking."

"Why not?" Hermione asked, an honest question rather than an outraged demand.

"Because I knew without being told, for reasons that I won't disclose," Draco said. "Some among the faculty know – not many. Trelawney would probably have Seen it, that is, if she wasn't – "

"A fraud," Hermione said.

"I was going to say 'untrained and intent on pickling her gift'," Draco said mildly. "She's made at least one genuine prophecy. I would be very surprised if she hasn't made others." He waved a hand. "In any case. I am not warning you to flee, I am warning you to keep your eyes open, and on Harry. He will need his friends, and more than that, he will need them to be watchful."

"I think that you're watchful enough for the three of us," Hermione said evenly.

That got a quirked smile. "Perhaps. But I'm not friend enough for the three of us. We get on, but he doesn't trust me the way he does you," came the reply. "And as for what happened to him over the summer, I don't know, exactly. But I do suspect. His adventures at the World Cup were easy enough to deduce, beyond the twaddle that the Prophet puts out. As for what prevented him from returning to Hogwarts on time, which left him the way he is… I believe that whatever it was, it took place shortly after we parted ways – two hours later, I was bustled back to my safehouse by my charming escort with unusual and unseemly haste, and said safehouse went into immediate lockdown."

"Lockdown?" Ron asked, puzzled.

"A security measure," Hermione said. "Nobody enters, nobody leaves, everyone within is is on alert and weapons are readied for immediate attack."

Draco nodded. "I also took the liberty of doing a little research on the internet – it really is amazing some of the things that muggles have invented," he said. "I reasoned that anything happening to Harry would be accompanied by his father's anger, and his father's anger would be accompanied by the appearance of a significant and anomalous storm system. Lo and behold, a large storm promptly engulfed New York and its environs, before vanishing and reappearing somewhere in deepest, darkest Russia."

"So… you worked out that Harry was kidnapped and taken to Russia," Hermione said slowly.

"Why?" Ron asked. "Were you looking for your dad?"

That earned him a cold look. "My father is evil, cowardly and certifiably insane," Draco said. "He is dead to me. However, he is not is stupid. I have full confidence in the belief that he is hiding under a rock somewhere. And if you don't believe me, consider that when he was at the height of his powers earlier this summer, with Gravemoss, the Darkhold, the Winter Soldier and the Dreadnought all at his disposal, he waited until all possible opposition was apparently neutralised, almost all the Avengers in his grasp or as good as dead – or so he thought – before revealing himself and delivering his ultimatum to the muggle United Nations. He has none of that now and I have no doubt that the Avengers would all cheerfully murder him on sight. More to the point, I believe that he is very much afraid of Harry, and rightly so."

"Why?" Ron asked, puzzled.

"Because Harry is exponentially more powerful and more dangerous than you realise," Draco said. "HYDRA, prior to this summer, are the only group I know of that is both powerful enough to contain Harry and mad enough try. There are others, but none would wish to catch the Avengers' eye or incite their wrath. Yet, clearly, one of them decided to gamble, and was capable of removing Harry from under the eyes of SHIELD, MI13, and the Avengers."

"And the Ministry," Ron said.

"The Ministry lost the vast majority of its good people when HYDRA attacked, your father among them," Draco said flatly. "The remnants, such as they are, couldn't be relied upon to successfully guard Florean Fortescue's Ice Cream parlour. They are an irrelevance." He shook his head. "I have a shrewd idea of which group was behind it – the Red Room."

Hermione was, so far, reluctantly impressed.

"Little enough is known about them, beyond their name," Draco continued. "But during the time when HYDRA were using my home as a base, I heard talk of the Winter Soldier's former owners, who even the highest of HYDRA, even my father, knew to fear. And then, of course, there was the Winter Soldier himself."

"What do you mean?" Hermione asked, frowning.

"Well, I do not know much about the Winter Soldier, or the Black Widow," Draco said. "No one you are likely to meet does, except maybe the other Avengers and Harry, neither of whom is likely to discuss the matter. But it is fairly obvious that they were not born the way they are, or were. They were made." He smiled a thin smile. "So a question comes to mind: who made them?"

He turned to look back down the corridor. "I don't know the answer for sure. I can't be one hundred percent certain that it was the mysterious Red Room who took Harry. But I'm willing to be my last galleon that the answer to both those questions is the same as the answer to who took Harry. Because if nothing else, I have absolutely no doubt that even a brief encounter with the sort of creatures that could create the Winter Soldier would be more than enough to leave even Harry with scars. Which, considering certain things I know about him that I don't think you do –"

"Like what?" Ron demanded, striding forward, and looming over the shorter boy. He was tall for his age, had hit his growth spurt before Draco, and the resultant height difference, combined with palpable frustration, anger, and long simmering hatred, would have intimidated most boys into compliance or silence. "Like what, Malfoy? What is it that you know about Harry that we don't?"

Draco was not most boys and looked up at Ron. "That, Weasley," he said. "Is between Harry and myself. What I know and how I know it, is, to be blunt, none of your business. He may choose to tell you about what he and I both know, but how I know it is a secret that I hope he'll keep, right up until I decide that I want to tell you." He looked at them both. "Either way, I would ask you to watch him, because he will need watching, to support him, because he will need supporting. And most of all, I would warn you to be very, very careful around him."

"Why?" Hermione asked.

"Because, Hermione, Harry has been brushed by darkness," Draco said. "I couldn't tell you the full extent of it – even he may well not know that. And darkness is infectious."

"Are you saying that Harry's going to turn evil?" Ron scoffed. "Come off it, Malfoy. Not everyone's like you and your dad."

"I am _not_ like my father!"

The words cracked through the corridor like a whip, and Draco's eyes bored into Ron like a diamond drill, before shifting to Hermione, and then away. "I am not like my father," he repeated quietly. "And I sincerely hope that I never will be."

"You're the second person to warn me about that recently," Hermione said slowly. "To warn me to be careful around Harry, to watch out for his darker side."

"Who was the first?" Draco asked.

"His American friend, Carol, Carol Danvers," Hermione said. "She said that I had no idea how dangerous Harry was capable of being. I thought that she was trying to scare me off, but she said that she wanted the opposite. She wanted me to watch out for him." She folded her arms and frowned. "What I want to know is what you and she see in Harry that I don't."

"Did she now?" Draco murmured. "Well, she was right. And on consideration, I would imagine that she knows a great deal more about the fine detail of his situation than I do. She and Harry are comfortable speaking mind to mind, after all. I even think that they can sense each other's presence."

"Wait, what?" Hermione asked, surprised. "How…"

"There are little tells," Draco said. "You have to be looking quite closely to see them, but I was looking."

Hermione frowned. "She did suggest that she'd let him into her mind in the past, and that he'd let her into his," she said. Then eyed him carefully. He didn't know what Carol had told her, that much was fairly clear. So she decided to test him. "But what do you know about Harry? What darkness do you see?"

"Do you remember how he responded to the bullying of Luna Lovegood?" Draco asked.

"Yeah," Ron said, trying to leverage his way back into the conversation. "He used the Dangerous Dai Decoy."

Draco nodded. "He did," he said. "His actions were coldly pre-meditated, ruthlessly executed, and utterly without warning. He didn't ask for an explanation. He didn't try to persuade them to leave her alone. He just made an example. And that's not the only time. You have to read a little between the lines but… well. I was there the night that HYDRA attacked, down in the Great Hall. I was there before you. I heard something that you didn't."

"What?" Hermione asked. "What did you hear?"

"Three words," Draco said. "'Freki, Geri… _kill_.'"

Silence hung heavy in the air.

"He called them off, after a little while, and tried to get the remaining HYDRA troopers to leave," Draco said. "When they didn't comply, he then did his level best to alternatively roast them alive or beat them to death with his bare hands. Then he died. And when he came back, every single remaining HYDRA Agent and their attendant Dementors was turned to ash."

"You're lying," Ron said eventually. "About the kill thing. Harry wouldn't do that."

Draco raised his eyebrows. "Wouldn't he?" he asked. "Well, even if you don't believe me about that… I have some degree of psychic sensitivity. All witches and wizards do, some more than others, and my family rather more than most – as it turns out, a Squib relative somewhere along the line founded a dynasty that has produced more than a few very capable psychics, magical and non-magical. The Frost family, I think." He waved a hand. "In any case, after the battle, just before Harry departed, I sensed something. A psychic message of sorts, aimed at the students of Ravenclaw House, one which boiled down to this: 'It's your fault. It's your fault that she's dead.' There were two psychics present with the power to do something like that, and only one with a motive. I believe that he wanted to ensure that they never forgot what he felt was their part in Luna Lovegood's death."

He let that hang in the air.

"I can't tell you for certain what he's been up to over the summer beyond what I've already surmised, though I have my suspicions," he continued. "But where there is trouble, Harry is rarely far behind. His family was involved in the Battle of London – I doubt that he was far away. And the _Daily Prophet_ had a very interesting picture on its front page the day after the trouble at the World Cup. The Dark Mark, the symbol of the Dark Lord, hanging in the sky… and being destroyed by a gigantic, burning, bird of prey." His gaze lingered on Hermione. "Sound familiar?"

"So, what, you think that Harry fighting dark wizards is a sign he's about to turn evil?" Ron asked.

"I think that at the very least, Weasley, it should make you radically reassess your beliefs of what Harry is capable of," Draco said. "I don't know all of what he's faced, what he's been forced to do, or even what he's capable of. But I will say that whatever you think of me, you can't deny that I know what evil looks like. How it thinks. And how it fights."

"So?"

"So, Weasley, you can take it from me that you don't stop evil by asking nicely."

OoOoO

After this somewhat grim set of discussions, however, things took a turn for the lighter. Harry still had his grim moods, still moved with a grace and sureness that was just a touch too fine to be human, and still carried an air of raw power about him, things that combined to make him an unsettling figure. But, as the month went by, his smiles became less bitter, his laughter less full of mockery and self-mockery above all, and his presence became less volatile.

This was, in the opinion of most, because Harry was hanging around witches and wizards his own age and getting re-acclimatised to a moderately normal life – and perhaps because the stories had raced around the castle and the Hogwarts student body, sometimes a rather dense collective consciousness, had _very quickly_ learned that it was safest not to discuss Harry's telepathy with or around him. And these days, 'around him' was considered to be an exclusion zone of at least three corridors and two floors. Nevertheless, while most stepped carefully around him, the sense of adjustment by the student population was palpable: Harry had changed, therefore they changed how they dealt with him. And once that had been done, a kind of peace seemed to descend on Hogwarts.

His habit of vanishing into the Forbidden Forest, as the students had been warned against with particular seriousness, was puzzling, but most accepted the rumoured explanation that he went in to keep his fighting skills sharp, as he did when he trained in muggle combat with Bucky – and besides, what fears could the Forest possibly hold for the likes of him? (As it turned out, more than you would think, but that was another matter.)

His flying inspired awe and jealousy, with more than a few students staring out the windows on crisp mornings and cool evenings in hope of catching a glimpse, but it soon came to be accepted. After all, he was the son of a god with a famed gift for flying, he had strange and vast powers, and he'd always been a natural on a broom.

And while his weekend classes with Professor Bach caused rather bemused comment, along with his occasionally disappearing at other times for hours at a time, those merited little more than a shrug.

This story was true enough, in its essentials. As those closer to Harry knew, there was more to it than met the eye.

He was seeing a therapist, a Dr Danielle 'Dani' Moonstar, one of Charles Xavier's former students. Unlike most, she had followed her mentor into psychiatry, something that, as rumour had it, had something to do with an incident during her time as a student involving a sort of psychic predator in the form of a demonic bear. In any case, she was certainly very familiar with psychic trauma, something which was no small advantage when it came to actually getting Harry to talk, let alone start on detangling his many traumas and helping him deal with them.

He was also quietly discussing things with Bucky, someone who really had been in much the same shoes that he had once upon a time – after all, the Red Room had tried to mould Harry into his replacement, succeeding with the blank slate of the Red Son.

Nor was Bucky the only one he opened up to. His uncle was another, after lessons with Hermione and the Twins, ones that had now progressed beyond the elements, and onto refining ones mystical senses – or in Harry's case, teaching him how to develop his mystical senses while refraining from the temptation to just use his psychic ones, then merging the two.

So was Bruce – after all, who knew more about having to leave with a horrifyingly power alter ego who was, essentially, their bottled up rage incarnate and if unleashed under the wrong circumstances, could unleash horror (even if the Hulk had developed into a fairly civilised individual, if not provoked)?

And Professor Logan down at the Institute was another one able to advise and sympathise, what with his own experiences as a mind wiped living weapon, and having an inner terrible rage that could do unspeakable things if it got loose.

There was also Carol, of course, but it could be hard to call that opening up when you considered that he and she were generally open books to one another anyway, and both Jean and Maddie, though he tried to ease off on that – Maddie was going through her own recovery, after all, and unsurprisingly leaning very heavily on Jean in the process. That said, it did help sometimes for Harry to be telepathically around, so Maddie could remind herself that she wasn't the only one of the family who was not 'perfect', and who could relate based on experience, rather than simple empathy, something Maddie was still struggling with. That is to say, she was used to feeling it now, but she was still adjusting to the idea of people feeling empathy for her – especially when it came from Jean, whose empathy for her sister in particular knew no bounds, and was thus at times rather overwhelming.

An unexpected amount of support came from Diana for, as was often forgotten, she had her own issues with inner rage – the blood of both Hercules and Hippolya ran hot indeed – and plenty of advice to offer. This advice usually came by letter, as it turned out that Athena had, at some point, granted Hedwig the ability to pass between worlds, and inter-dimensional phone service was still a work in progress. Projecting ones astral form through Yggdrasil was a possibility, but Harry had nixed that for the time being. The Red Son incident had left him understandably less than eager to leave his body. And then there was the fact that Jean, who was older, and both a great deal more powerful and more experienced than he was (he had the Red Son memories, which contained a great deal of knowledge, but he had no intention of accessing them. In any case, they were mostly concerned with espionage, mental manipulation, and occasional assassination. Astral projection had not been considered a priority by the Red Room) and she had needed Cerebro when she had done it.

But above all, there was his father. His father, who knew more than a little about berserk rage, about wounds not just to the body, but to the soul. One quiet night, he had taken his son aside and told him a tale that very few knew; a tale about how he, a young god, but centuries old, already accounted a great warrior and arrogant with it, had been laid low and tortured by a creature that called itself the God-Butcher, how, just before his rescue, he had broken, and how the God-Butcher still sometimes haunted his dreams. It was a tale told in confidence, to show that he understood, and Harry was glad of that. It would be fair to say that close as they were already, they grew closer as father and son over the experience.

Talking, it seemed, did help. Of course, there was still the matter of persuading him to discuss matters with those who did not either already know about them, or who were not his therapist (and even that had taken a while, heavy leveraging of Harry's trust in Charles Xavier, a full background work-up from Tony, Loki, Clint, Bucky and Natasha, and both a lot of patience from Dr Moonstar and sharing her own experiences, and some very careful work to avoid triggering panic attacks). But it was progress.

OoOoO

Further progress came from Defence Against the Dark Arts or as it had become known to among some of the older male students who thought themselves witty, 'Defence Against her Delectable Arse', and unfortunately, it caught like wildfire. Its use was less common among the Gryffindors then other Houses, but that was less because of chivalry than other practical considerations.

These practical considerations took the form of the fact that the originator of the phrase, a Gryffindor Fifth Year by the name of Cormac MacLaggen had suddenly woken up one morning in the Great Hall during breakfast wearing nothing but a set of scarlet hot-pants with the word 'delectable' printed in in flashing gold letters across the backside. Furthermore, the hot-pants were also enchanted, so that their removal was impossible for three full days, any clothing put on over them immediately disintegrated, and when they finally were removed, the blood-curdling howl of a man who has suddenly undergone involuntary manscaping echoed around the castle. The perpetrator was, officially, never discovered, but everyone knew _exactly_ who was behind it whether it could be proved or not, and the phrase came to be used less within Gryffindor Tower thereafter.

However, tasteless or not, sexist or not, it was, from the point of view of the attracted-to-women demographic in the Castle (which was both larger and more varied in composition than Wizarding Society would like to admit) entirely accurate. And on consideration, it wasn't exactly surprising that an attractive young female teacher would inspire such a reaction – for the most part, the Hogwarts faculty was on the far side of middle age.

While there were those who weren't, that was a demographic that mainly consisted of Professors Snape and Trelawney, who generally weren't considered to be likely sources for teenage fantasies. Besides, Lockhart's arrival had inspired similar reactions from (mostly) the female students, and Professor Bach had garnered his share of fans, bright blue eyes that danced when he smiled and a smile that transformed pleasantly ordinary looks into something rather more charming.

In any case, perhaps inevitably, the first impression made on the students of Hogwarts by Professor Zatara was through her not inconsiderable good looks. More than one student had spent the first ten minutes of their first DADA class of the year staring in a lovelorn daze and letting her soft Italian accent roll over them. Most, however, were snapped out of it by the magic she showed them.

The script was broadly the same for each class:

First, she ostentatiously cast a few spells with her wand, such as using it to direct chalk to write the words 'Wanded' and 'Wandless' on the blackboard. She would then ask the class to list the differences (aside from the obvious), and note that most of the differences, aside from presence, or lack of presence, of a wand being the only obvious and visible one.

She then carefully put her wand down in full view, and with a casual wave and a moderately advanced transfiguration spell familiar to those , transformed her robes into an elegant black ball-gown, and then back again, before lowering the blinds with another flick and a nonsense word, and with another, sending a series of glimmering points of light up to the ceiling, where they settled like miniature stars.

That, needless to say, tended to make everyone sit up and pay attention, especially once she elaborated that the nonsense words were, in fact, self-created spells of the sort that wandless magic worked better with. Every wandless practitioner favoured a particular language for their spells, one they didn't speak. She, for her part, favoured saying her spells backwards.

Harry didn't see this, or any of the first month's lessons. But once he got back, he took to it like a duck to water. He seemed to thrive on the intuitive and flexibly structured characteristics of Professor Zatara's approach. Indeed, in the view of the staff, it ignited in him an enthusiasm in him for magic again, after months in which in Charms in particular, he'd frequently been reminded to use magic, rather than his psychic abilities.

Now, though, he seemed – for want of a better word – almost enchanted.

OoOoO

The other new class was a rather different experience, but with a similar end: those who walked in left with a rather different view of magic.

Professor Bach's class had been arranged as a trial of sorts, with each year in each house getting one taster lesson with him, four a week, to see if they might want to carry it on.

Most students simply sighed and went along with it, expecting little – the older students widely considered it a manifestation of Dumbledore's eccentricity and well known fondness for music. Those who left the classes, however, tended to be more thoughtful, if infuriatingly vague on what they'd been taught. More than a few of the girls were sighing over how _beautifully_ the young Professor Bach played the harp, and how his sapphire blue eyes _sparkled_... Ron summed up the feelings of more than few male students by miming vomiting. The girls, however, felt that turn about was fair play, considering the way that most of the male half of the school drooled over Professor Zatara, and perhaps they had a point.

Even the Twins hadn't said much about their class, preferring to infuriate their brother by being mysterious. Harry, meanwhile, seemed to know a joke that he hadn't felt like sharing with anyone, as could be discerned by the amused expression that crossed his face whenever Professor Bach was brought up.

"Now," Bach said. "First question. What is magic?"

There was a puzzled silence. The class had not been expecting this. Then, Hermione raised her hand.

Bach smiled. "Ah, Miss Granger. I have heard a lot about you, young lady, including how you are always eager to answer _every_ question," he said. "Thank you, but I would like to hear from someone else first."

Hermione wilted a little, and seeing that, Bach added gently, "It is not a criticism, as such. I, and most of your other teachers, greatly appreciate enthusiasm."

His expression manifested what Ron and Hermione thought was a suspiciously familiar smirk.

"Except two who shall remain nameless, and whose respective inability to find her glasses, thus making her inability to see what is right in front of her eyes literal as well as figurative, and whose inability to dispel from his mind a little ditty that begins '10,000 potion bottles on the wall', has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me and I would be _deeply_ offended if you suggested that they did."

That drew a ripple of shocked laughter, and Bach's grin widened. "And while of course those two _tragic_ misfortunes had nothing whatsoever, I believe that the latter will serve adequately as an example of how insidious even ordinary music can be," he said. "Now, that piece of levity aside, I repeat my question: what is magic?"

There was another moment of silence, then Dean ventured, "power?"

Bach gave him a long look, one that made its recipient squirm in his chair. It made one feel like those blue eyes were seeing right through you, and not only that, were taking note of everything they spotted on the way.

"Both correct and incorrect, Mr Thomas," he said softly. "You are correct in the sense of power as energy, for that is what magic is. You are also correct in the sense of power as the ability, or capacity, to do things that you could not do – or at least, not do so easily – without it. However, power in the more nebulous sense… that is incorrect." He stood up. "The Death Eaters and their master, Tom Riddle, who calls himself Voldemort – a name that becomes much less intimidating when you realise that it is bad French for 'fly from death', something which reveals the ultimate truth about him: he is a coward. He, and his servants, their sympathisers, and those who happen to share similar ideas but balked at the means by which the Death Eaters operated, believe that magic is power and makes them superior to muggles, ordinary humanity. Magic is Might, they said. Foolish. Where witches and wizards have magic and use it to manipulate and understand the world around them, muggles use science. As I am sure our resident demigod could tell us, when you get to a certain point, the two become one and the same."

Everyone turned to Harry, who grimaced at being put on the spot, and nodded.

"Our guest, Sergeant Barnes, could also tell you a story or two if he so wished," Bach continued. Bucky arched an eyebrow, but said nothing. "One of the things that made HYDRA so dangerous when they allied with Grindelwald, and again so recently, was their ability to merge magic and science. Only the benevolent side of things, Doctor Jane Foster created the New Bifrost, itself based on Asgardian science-magic, and the technology that forced HYDRA's last base in London into this dimension from the pocket dimension in which it resided. And the only way that they could do that, that Asgard could rise as it has, and even that we could sit in this enchanted castle, is because of one thing: knowledge. Knowledge is power, because without knowledge, knowledge of how to use it, how _not_ to use it, and above all, _why_ to use it, power is meaningless."

He looked around the room. "Now, I am sure that more than a few of you are thinking: what does this have to do with music?" he said. "With possibly a few more expletives thrown in to flavour."

Laughter rippled through the class.

"It is a fair question," Bach said. "Magic, we have established, is energy. To be specific, it is the fifth fundamental force of the physical universe, one of those which knit the cosmos together. The more magic you can muster, the more you can affect the other four forces – gravity, electromagnetism, strong nuclear force, and weak nuclear force. You can also affect the more esoteric parts of the universe – hopes, fears, dreams… even life and death, to an extent. But with magic, there is no free lunch. There is always a price to be paid. For instance, one downside of gathering a lot of magic in one place is that it tends to tear gaps in the fabric of space-time. And magic is unlike any other form of energy in one very crucial respect: it is ever so slightly alive. I wouldn't say that it has a mind of its own, as such, but while it is more than content to bend the laws of nature, there are some things that it reacts against: necromancy, for instance, and black magic in general. It has to be twisted, and once twisted, it twists the wielder, unless they are trained to let it pass them and not change them, or if they possess one or two rather rare and extremely dangerous artefacts."

He waved a hand. "I digress. Magic is energy, that can be used, harnessed, and channelled. That is done by several means – through your wands, and above all, by your spells," he said. "Wanded or wandless, taught or self-created, spells shape magic. They are the templates that your will uses to bend magic to its will. Short spells, like the summoning charm, the levitation charm, and most spells that you will be taught are limited. This limitation has its advantages: they are easier to learn, quicker to cast, even if you have mastered non-verbal magic, and far simpler. This simplicity in turn allows a certain flexibility in how you use them. You can summon almost anything with a summoning spell, for instance, within certain limits – for instance, I could summon a book from the shelf at the back of a classroom, or I could summon a quill from Mr Longbottom's desk with the same spell, only altering it slightly to specify what I wish to summon. And I hear that Mr Weasley has some experience of creative use of a levitation charm – on the club of a troll, I believe?"

Ron went pink and mumbled a yes.

Bach's eyes twinkled and he smiled. "Yes, they can be flexible," he said. "But they also carry a disadvantage: when casting them, you can only do one thing at a time. You cannot simultaneously summon something and levitate it. The best you can do is set one spell in motion, then cast another, layering them. By contrast, longer spells, like summoning rituals, do many things at once – they simultaneously serve as a beacon to the being you wish to summon, open the way for it to arrive, and bind it in place. If you do it properly."

"What happens if you don't, Professor?" Parvati asked.

"Then you have to go back and start again," Bach said mildly. "If you are very fortunate and it fizzled out, then you may repeat the ritual. If you are less fortunate, but still quite fortunate, then depending on what being you have summoned, you may have a problem on your hands."

"And… if you aren't?"

"I believe that being born is the traditional first step," Bach said dryly, then clapped his hands as the class went a little pale. "Not to worry. Summoning rituals were only an example. An example of how with a longer spell, you can perform multiple pieces of magic at once, more complex pieces of magic, especially if you include more people. That is one area in which magic and music are very much alike. Think about your favourite singers, your favourite bands, and your favourite songs. What stands out, to you?"

"They're good?" Lavender ventured.

Bach chuckled. "I'm sure you think so," he said. "Others may not agree, but that is perfectly natural – as some are more inclined towards Charms over Potions, Transfiguration over Divination, or Defence against the Dark Arts over all of them, some are more inclined to certain kinds of music than anothers. No, I'm looking for something a bit more basic, a bit more fundamental, that transcends genres, something so obvious that you might not even see it." His gaze roved across the class. "Mr Weasley?"

Ron lowered his hand, having hesitantly raised it. "They're not alone?" he guessed, drawing laughter.

Bach, however, had focused on him, arching an eyebrow. "And what do you mean by that?" he asked.

"Well… if someone's singing, there's usually someone else playing something in the background," Ron said. "More than one, even."

"Excellent," Bach said, with a smile. "Exactly right, Mr Weasley, _exactly_. Twenty points to Gryffindor."

Ron grinned, pleased.

"As Mr Weasley said, for the most part, they aren't just one person working alone, are they?" Bach said. "Even soloists usually have backing musicians, backing singers. And when done properly, instead of clashing horribly or drowning one another out, they harmonise, to create something greater than each of the parts." He shrugged. "It's the same with science, really. They are both ways of manipulating the universe; one uses words and rhythms, the other uses numbers. With sufficient detail and power, magic can travel through time, bend space, even create the Elixir of Life, while science can take people to the Moon and bring them back again, split the atom, and create castles in the sky. And that is merely the beginning of what can be done, and done, at that, with what is known here and now."

He smiled faintly. "But again, I digress. Forgive me, I am still getting used to teaching again – it has been some time, and my instinct is more to lecture than anything else," he said. "Now, what have we learned so far? That magic is energy, energy that is slightly alive, and should therefore be treted with respect. That to use it properly, you need to know how, and why. That spells are what is used to shape that energy, to bend it to your will. That the more complex a spell is, the more can be done with it simultaneously, and with greater precision. Which brings us to music. Music is powerful."

He smiled faintly.

"I see doubt on your faces. No, don't deny it, and don't feel ashamed of that doubt, either. It is perfectly natural. But think for a moment, of what music can do. It can make you laugh and it can make you cry. It can make you brave and it can make you afraid. It can make you dance and it can make you sleep. It can return lost memories and it can make sure that the memory of you never dies. It can even make you fall in love. It can do all that and so much more, without even the tiniest little bit of magic. Music is powerful as it is. So just imagine what you can do by weaving magic into it."

"Spells do not have to be spoken. They do not even have to be sung." He took a small harp from one of the shelves and stroked his long, clever fingers across the strings, drawing liquid notes that hung in the air. Then, he began to play. "It's not such a great leap, after all," he said, as the soft music slipped through the room like a cool breeze on a summer's day. "Magic instruments are recorded in myths, legends, even a few histories. Can anyone think of a few examples?"

Hermione's hand went up, even faster than usual.

"Yes, Miss Granger?"

"The myth of Orpheus, Professor," she said.

"Ah yes, Orpheus," Bach said. "Indeed. He who sang and played so beautifully in his grief that the land sorrowed with him, whose song was so haunting and sad that it made even the Furies weep. He who sang Cerberus, the hound of Hades, to sleep – something, it seems, that works even on that hound's mortal relatives to this day. He who outplayed the songs of the Sirens. He whose music was so beautiful it allowed him to almost succeed in freeing his wife, Eurydice, from the Underworld." He sighed. "If only the daft sod had done as he was told and _not_ looked back before he got out. Not that he was ever very good at listening, mind…" He waved his free hand. "In any case, his example was one that strengthened the Ancient Greek association between magic and music – they had a word that meant both singing songs and casting spells. That carried over to Latin and, in a round-about fashion, to English: the Latin 'cantare', to sing, and 'incantare', to cast a spell, to incant, become to chant, and to enchant. Any others?"

"The Pied Piper?" Dean suggested.

"Another good suggestion," Bach said. "The Pied Piper of Hamelin, who led the rats from the town with his magic pipe. And then, when the townspeople refused to pay him, he led their children away too. That little incident, I believe, partly inspired the titular instrument in _The Magic Flute_ , by Mozart, which did many similar things – entrance animals, summon people, and make them dance to the tune of its player." He smiled faintly. "There is a _reason_ we have the phrase 'to dance to someone's tune'. Even if individuals forget, the language doesn't. Not in a hurry. Any other suggestions?"

There were none, as it turned out.

Except for one.

"Taliesin," Hermione said.

Harry's head snapped around to look at his friend.

"He was a Welsh bard," she said. "Supposedly the greatest bard who ever lived. And a seer too, apparently."

Bach watched her, not saying a word, while his fingers continued to play, seamlessly shifting into that tune that Hermione had heard in Diagon Alley, that Malfoy had said was, when sped up, called 'Arthur's Triumph', and when slowed down, 'Merlin's Lament'. Right now, it was the latter.

When she mentioned this, he smiled that faint, vaguely familiar smile.

"He had it partly right," Bach said. "It was indeed composed after the Battle of Camlann, but not by Merlin. He might have been the greatest mage of all time, but he had a tin ear. Taliesin was the one who composed it, after he saw the ruin that Camlann had wrought." He cocked his head. "What made you think of him? Orpheus is quite famous, and the Pied Piper is a popular folk tale, in the muggle world at least. Taliesin, on the other hand, is rather more obscure."

"Well, Professor, you have the same name as he did," Hermione said, a little hesitantly. "Before he became Taliesin. And he was a harpist too."

Bach's smile turned wry. "Well spotted," he said. "All I will say is that my parents were optimists."

That got a chuckle, breaking the tension.

"As for instruments and magic, there are plenty of other examples," Bach said. "Of the aforementioned pipes, you have panpipes, supposedly created by Pan himself. I'd take that one with a pinch of salt, but he was certainly good enough with it, enough to challenge Apollo, the Olympian god of music, who favoured the lyre. But they mostly used it for the joy of the music itself. Among some practitioners, panpipes have found favour, with one AustralianWarden of the White Council using a set she crafted herself, using enchantments and techniques based on those used by some Aboriginal shamans on digeridoos, to challenge Kemmlerite necromancers and usurp their control over their brand of zombies. This was possible because it is a control maintained by a drummer, whose drumming substitutes a zombie's heart, and makes the necromancer's intentions feel like their own. She even managed to use them to banish shades and wraiths, though I think she moved onto bells: bells, after all, don't require you to stop and breathe, which is a necessity, even if you master circular breathing, and can be used one handed. The other hand, meanwhile, can hold one of the Wardens' famous swords, designed to cut through almost anything and unbind magic, including that which maintains the undead. And if all else fails, then a reasonably sized bell makes a rather good bludgeon. Then a young muggle writer heard about it and turned it into the basis for a best selling series. The Council were not amused."

His expression left none who saw it in any doubt that he was. He looked around the class.

"In any case, there are plenty more enchanted instruments, some divine in their origins, others mortal. You have Uaithne, the harp of the Dagda, which could inspire all sorts of emotions in those who heard its song, and flew to its owners hand when called. You have the harp of David, King of Israel, which played by itself at midnight when the North wind blew. You have the veena of Saraswati, which she wielded as the Vedic goddess of music and eloquence. You have the kantele of Vainamoinen, the ancient Finnish God of Song, a sort of harp he constructed that drew animals to him in wonder, and that he used to put the protectors of a rather valuable magical artefact to sleep as he stole it. You have the tanbura, a form of lyre, used in Zar exorcisms of evil spirits. But."

He stopped playing, and put the harp aside.

"Such instruments are merely foci, like your wand. Whether enchanted or not, it's good if you do not know how to use it," he said. "And in theory, you do not even need it. After all, did you need a wand, or other focus, to use wandless magic when you were little? No, you did not. They are merely there to control, to refine, and to focus. Orpheus did not need his lyre, nor Vainamoinen his kantele. Phoenixes do not need to play for their songs to inspire the noble and terrify the wicked. When the Fae sing, they need no instruments to enchant. And when they do, as with the Sirens, it is best to be very careful not to listen and quite possibly to run for your life. All too often, people remember the beautiful singing, and all too often they forget just what kinds of things that the Fae, especially those of Winter, like to sing about."

He left that hanging, then grinned. "Now, who here has a good singing voice?"

OoOoO

A mere couple of weeks later, as the nights closed in and Halloween drew near, after it was discovered that, among other things, Ron was developing quite a pleasant tenor voice, something happened that illustrated both how Harry was increasingly in control of his temper, and how he had changed.

Towards the end of a Divination class, Lavender had excitedly called Professor Trelawney

"Hey, Lavender, can I see Uranus too?" Ron called out.

Before anyone could respond, Harry judiciously smacked him around the head.

"Ow!" Ron yelped. "What was that for?"

"That tasteless joke you just made," Harry said, frowning. "Apologise."

"It was just a joke," Ron said, rubbing the back of his head. "And did you have to hit me?"

"Be glad Hermione isn't here, she'd probably have castrated you," Harry said flatly, and Ron went pale. "And it wasn't funny. Imagine if someone had said that to you, Hermione, or Ginny. You wouldn't like it, would you? Apologise."

By now, the entire class, Professor Trelawney included, were watching.

"Harry -"

"It upset Lavender," Harry said coldly, in a tone that brooked no disobedience. "Apologise, Ron. I'm not going to ask again."

Ron glanced at Bucky, who gave him a cool, disapproving look that made it very clear that no help was coming from there, then met Harry's implacable gaze. There was a long moment, then he looked away. "Fine," he mumbled. "Sorry."

"Not to me," Harry said, tone not changing in the slightest. "You didn't ask to see my arse."

Ron went red, then he turned around and said, "Sorry, Lavender."

He still got detention, while Harry lost twenty House points, but Lavender looked faintly mollified and Ron's apology, difficult though it's extraction might have been, prevented both his sister and his best female friend from destroying all chances of his ever reproducing.

Later, Ron confronted Harry. "What the hell was that for?" he demanded.

"Making you apologise," Harry said.

"Yeah, I got that," Ron said. "I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the way you hit me and made me apologise."

"I asked you," Harry said.

"No," Ron snapped, sounding humiliated. "You ordered me. No please, no thank you, you just told me to do it. Merlin, Harry, it was like being told off by my mum! Worse!"

Harry frowned. His immediate instinct was to say something about his having no time to protect Ron's fragile ego, and that Ron was fortunate that he was in a better mood, because earlier such a remark would have been followed by words that were less cold than, well, hot. But that wasn't fair. Ron had quite comfortably accepted their differences in fame, wealth and most recently raw power, as well as the inevitable comparisons that would be made between the two of them, and thoughtless or not, he certainly deserved better than fire and fury. And Harry had dressed him down in front of the entire class, all but compelling him to apologise.

"You're right," he said. "I could have asked you nicely and I'm sorry I didn't. But I stand by getting you to apologise in public." He sighed at Ron's continuing frown. "One of my American friends, Carol, is... she's very good looking. She looks older than she is. And she has to deal with comments like that from people who think it's just a joke, think that it's funny, almost every single day. She has for years now. Often, people making those comments, who think that that's okay, think that it's okay to try and do other things - like trying to see, or grab, her arse. I've seen the latter happen myself, twice."

As Ron opened his mouth to protest indignantly, Harry raised a hand. "I know that you never would. I know that you didn't mean anything bad by it, that you just wanted to make a joke. Point is, though, is that I've seen, I've sensed, how getting those sorts of comments feel in her memories. Jean has to deal with it too. Hermione will as well, and Ginny too. Even I've had to deal with it, once or twice. And while each crack like that isn't a massive thing, not individually, it..." He searched for words for a moment, then hit on it. "You know how you felt embarrassed and upset by me calling you out on it in front of everyone?"

Ron nodded.

"Well, that's pretty much what Lavender felt when you made that joke," Harry said. "But worse. You didn't mean it, but you embarrassed her for a cheap laugh, which embarrassed her even more. When I embarrassed you, and maybe I could have gone about it better, it was to make you apologise. It's not just a joke, Ron. It's not funny, it's not cool and it's beneath you."

Ron wrinkled his nose, but his expression was pensive. "Fine," he said.

"We cool?" Harry asked.

Ron looked a little puzzled and Harry blinked at him for a moment, before realising that Carol's very American approach to the English language was rubbing off on him. Or perhaps it was Tony's fault.

"Are we okay?" he amended.

"Yeah," Ron said. "We are." Though as he said it, Harry could feel the words, 'but if we are, why won't you really _talk_ to us?' As soon as Harry sensed it, his expression changed, and Ron went red.

"Sorry," he said. "I get that what happened was awful and…"

"No, you don't," Harry said, evenly and without rancour. "And I'm glad you don't. I get what you're trying to say." He looked away. "I…" He closed his eyes briefly and took a deep breath. "I can't talk about it. Not yet. I'm… I'm just not ready, Ron."

"Okay, mate," Ron said, nodding reluctant acceptance. "You up for a game of Chess?" he asked, and it was clear that he expected Harry to say no. Often Harry had taken the evenings for a little time alone, whether that took the form of flying, reading, calling someone, or even just sitting and meditating (it wasn't something he was particularly good at, but he was working on it).

Harry hesitated, then smiled. It was a wry smile, certainly not as bright and innocent as his smiles had been before. But it was still a smile.

"Yeah. I think I am."

 **And here we are, the end of another chapter. A bit cobbled together, I know, but I wanted not to dwell too much on Harry's recovery and settling into a new mental normal – he's never quite going to be the same, and he's still got a ways to go, but he is well on the road to recovery. As for what comes next, well, it'll most likely feature Diana and Uhtred meeting Ron and Hermione, and possibly Jean and/or Maddie too, a bit more light-hearted stuff, maybe a private lesson for Harry from Strange, and quite possibly a more substantive appearance from Zatanna – her part was quite hard to write, since most of the differences between wanded and wandless magic, aside from the obvious one, aren't exactly visible, or easily demonstrated. Also, Bach/Strange is way easier to write. That sort of thing.**

 **Maybe don't expect the next chapter for a while, because while it'll be relatively simple filler, I'm coming to the sharp end of my university term, with essays and exams, and I'm also going to figuring out the next arc, most probably titled** _ **Rites of Ascension**_ **. While hardly a behemoth like** _ **Forever Red**_ **, it'll basically be a battle fought on two fronts, as Voldemort makes his first substantive move. On one front, you've got Harry running up against Dracula, the King of the Grey Court of Vampires, the Lord of Blood from the Prophecy, while the Avengers are away. His intentions aren't immediately obvious, but suffice it to say, it's not simply about Harry and the Phoenix this time, oh no. Voldemort's been whispering in his ear and Harry's only one objective. Voldemort, meanwhile, is taking advantage of the distraction to play another game, involving his 'ally' Selene, and a certain book called the** _ **Word of Kemmler**_ **, with only Wanda and Harry Dresden standing between one of them, or their similarly nuts necromantic rivals, and Greater Godhood.**


	22. Chapter 22: Normality (Is Relative)

**Hello once more, ladies and gentlemen. Yep, I'm back, likely sooner than you expected… and you get a shorter chapter than expected. What can I say: it's a trade-off. This one's lighter, fluffier, and dare I say, funnier, though. A bit of a palate cleanser in the gloomy Winter months, after a gloomy Winter themed arc, and in between my gloomy Winter essays, presentations, and homework. Featuring a lot of Cedric Diggory, for some reason. *shrug* I've long since stopped trying to figure out my Muse, her methods, and her motivations (they probably work out as 'why not?').**

 **So, short (relatively) and sweet (hopefully). Have fun.**

 **Black Fang:** **Don't know it, not especially interested. Sorry.**

 **Goji323** **: I already have incorporated elements of the** _ **Tales of Asgard**_ **film – I drew this world's version of Algrim from there (though here, he's not a bad guy). The closest I'm likely to get to Godzilla is already made** _ **Pacific Rim**_ **references and perhaps reaching back into Greek mythology and Gaea's role as mother of monsters, e.g. Typhon, but that's unlikely. Let this be the end of the Godzilla requests, please.**

 **Occult Devotee : ****If you lot really are a group of reviewers (and I am deeply sceptical of this), it would save us all much time and effort if you got accounts. As for the cosmics, I have alluded to Galactus, the Celestials have briefly appeared, I have mentioned both Eternals and Deviants, and I have hinted at the Inhumans. And Sun Wukong may appear, in time. I've already alluded to Hanuman, and tied the Trimurti in to Sunniva, so I am expanding Eastwards.**

 **Frodo's Heir :** **Surtur is not simply sitting around, I can say that.**

 **KongKing:** **Harry's had little to do with wildlife, that's why. As for the King of the Wild… *cough* Well, I can say that it mostly definitely is** _ **not**_ **Sir Francis Drake, who to my knowledge has** _ **never**_ **been associated with the Wild Hunt.**

 **Thunder King:** **I'm not planning to make any real reference to Thunderstrike, and Harry's gifts are primarily fire related. That said, he** _ **does**_ **have some facility with lightning…**

 **X-Men4Ever:** **I have seen** _ **Logan**_ **, and it was superb. However, Harry's been tortured by the Red Room, and has six months of memories of his body being used as the Winter Soldier Mk II locked away in his head. With those and his prior experience, I think it's safe to say that he's no stranger to human darkness.**

 **Storm of Elysium : ****Fair question. To which the answer would be, 'it depends what you mean by 'affected''.**

 **BeastofRest:** **My gaming, such as it is, is limited to an occasional playthrough of certain** _ **Zelda**_ **games. I used to play others, but those days are long gone, and my regard for video game storylines is, for the most part (Assassins Creed excepted, though I'm not involving it), limited. And yes, I am familiar with Amalgam. I have no real intention to incorporate any particular elements.**

Cedric Diggory was an intelligent young man, quiet, and thoughtful in a down to earth sort of way – or at least, as down to earth as the British Wizarding World ever got. He had therefore taken the revelation that Harry, one of his fellow students and a couple of years his junior, was the son of Thor and thus a demigod with a general sort of equanimity. He had also been quietly approving of the way that Harry had continued to shun any temptation to exploit his fame and lord it over his fellow students, and the way he had taken to looking out for younger students, even those in other houses, in the case of Luna Lovegood.

Of course, his methods of doing so, while entirely legal in a very Slytherin sort of way (perhaps that shouldn't be too much of a surprise – there _were_ persistent rumours that Harry Thorson had nearly been a Slytherin, opting for Gryffindor when given the choice by the Sorting Hat), weren't totally legitimate and had left a great deal to be desired – especially since one of the Ravenclaw team targeted by Harry had been Cho Chang, with whom Cedric had been forming the beginnings of a relationship.

Nevertheless, it had been within the rules and done with noble intent (if also with typically Gryffindor lack of forethought), and Cedric had felt it incumbent to argue on his behalf, as well as being inclined to be generally approving of the younger boy, if not necessarily of his tactics.

Then HYDRA had happened. On one dark night, Luna Lovegood had died, as had a good few dozen Ministry personnel and Harry himself. Harry, however, had done the impossible, and not for the first time: he'd come back from the dead and unleashed a devastating revenge. And then he'd vanished for most of six months, appearing only intermittently in the _Daily Prophet_ after the Battle of London and the chaos at the Quidditch World Cup, during the latter of which Cedric had personally glimpsed him – he'd been surrounded by the Avengers and a group of his peers consisting of the Weasley Twins and a group of unknown others who Cedric would have guessed to be around Harry's age.

And while Cedric hadn't really seen much of what had followed, he was not in the least bit stupid, and listened a lot more carefully than his parents thought he did. He heard plenty – and in the case of that conjured phoenix shattering the Dark Mark, saw plenty too. He listened to stories with an attentive ear: stories, for instance, of half a dozen captured Death Eaters with hardly a mark on them and not a mind between them rung alarm bells. And then there were all the strange tales cropping up across Europe in the last couple of months or so, whispers of horrors emerging from Russia, meant that there was a lot to hear.

Those, and Harry's demeanour on his return to Hogwarts, all cemented one growing impression: While Harry Potter, Harry Thorson, was a decent person, the events of the summer had changed him, and sadly, not for the better. Where he'd once been someone that younger students felt relatively comfortable around, now they parted before him like the Red Sea, and for good reason. Because if there was one word that Cedric would somewhat regretfully use to describe Harry now, it was 'unpredictable'. And with the kind of power he possessed, power that beggared belief, and an aura of twitchiness that Cedric found uncomfortably reminiscent of Mad-Eye Moody, 'unpredictable' was effective short hand for 'very, very dangerous'.

True, the watchful eye and quiet words of Sergeant Barnes, his bodyguard, seemed to keep him in check. And he did seem to be getting a hold of himself more and more as time went by, slowly calming down. In other words, he seemed less like he half expected to be attacked at any given moment. But unfortunately, Cedric also judged that progress or no progress, he definitely needed to be handled with great care – and few, even including Harry himself, would have disagreed with him.

Harry's brooding presence, unpredictability, and growing reputation for creative revenge were making him if not quite the terror of the school, then certainly someone around whom people trod very lightly indeed. The smell of wood smoke could now clear a corridor faster than the sound of Filch on the warpath. And it didn't help that, as the unfortunate Seamus Finnegan had discovered, not all the triggers that set him off were strictly obvious.

Someone had to do something, and since Cedric was a Prefect, on course to be Head Boy, he rather felt that it fell to him.

However, he was not a Gryffindor, and not inclined to charge straight in. He also had to concede that he didn't really know Harry the person very well. He knew the legend of the Boy Who Lived, of course, he'd grown up with it, and inquiries with those Hufflepuffs who shared Harry's classes indicated that Harry resented it. He also knew that Harry was an extraordinarily gifted Seeker, who'd only ever lost a match thanks to outside intervention. He'd heard that he was a reasonably talented student when he applied himself, being particularly gifted in Defence Against the Dark Arts. And there was hardly a Hogwarts student who hadn't heard about Harry's abilities as a Parselmouth, let alone his more recently revealed powers, which were both rather more spectacular and considering his recently revealed heritage, rather less surprising.

As for Harry as a person, though, he hadn't got much impression other than that – until recently – he had been a fairly nice, albeit rather quiet boy who generally kept to a small circle of close friends, mostly – but not exclusively – consisting of Gryffindors (and in the case of Professors Hagrid and Lupin, former Gryffindors). Until early last year, his most notable social exploits had been mainly restricted to a long running feud with Draco Malfoy. That feud had since, puzzlingly, evaporated, and now, the two boys seemed positively cordial. The other major feud, however, with Professor Snape, one which ran on a far deeper mutual hatred, had apparently deepened and drifted into a strange kind of icy cold politeness on the far side of hatred.

Since the rediscovery of his father, Harry had become more confident, more outgoing, and more involved in classes – Professor Cassidy, for instance, had regularly deployed him as a teaching assistant. He'd functioned well in that role, gently correcting and advising, while tempering criticism with encouragement.

That said, from what Cedric had overheard around those girls who thought that he was entirely focused on work/Quidditch and thus deaf, more than a bit of the younger boy's popularity as a teacher had been owed to his good looks, sudden growth spurt, and the opportunity in a very, ahem, hands on class to have his hands on them. Cedric, for his part, had no doubt that Harry would never take advantage or be taken advantage of, due to his native sensibilities, shyness, and the eagle sharp eye of Professor Cassidy, who had made it thoroughly clear that his broad and tolerant sense of humour ended where he felt taking liberties began.

In any case, most of Harry's personal development had been to blossom under the influence of newfound family and friends. Most, that was, but not all. He had also, unfortunately, become much more obviously temperamental, though whether that was a matter of emerging Asgardian heritage, or something that had already been there and had merely been revealed by growing openness as a person, Cedric didn't know. Though from what his father and Professor Sprout had suggested, Lily Potter had had an extraordinarily explosive temper, and James/Thor had been no slouch in that department either.

Now, though, the events of the summer had poisoned that development. Quite the conundrum, Cedric felt. Recognising that his thoughts were beginning to go in circles, he shook them off and made his way down towards the side of the lake.

It was just after the last lesson of the day, as the sun began to set on a still, crisp day, casting the still dark waters of the lake into a mirror of burnished gold, speckled with diamonds of bright white light. It had become common knowledge that this was where Harry sometimes trained of an evening, if he didn't feel like vanishing into the Forbidden Forest, as recent rumour held it that he was wont to do.

Sometimes, students watched him from a distance, fascinated by the things he was learning, but not wanting to get too close. As for what was being learnt, it was wandless magic, in the main, though not exclusively, and Harry puzzled many by the close association he seemed to have with Professor Bach during those informal practices. Puzzlingly, at the same time, Sergeant Barnes also tended to be nowhere to be seen. This, since he was usually as closely attached to his charge as said charge's shadow, and about as quiet, was strange indeed. It was almost as if he handed over his responsibilities to Professor Bach on a temporary basis. Certainly, the blond Welshman was sitting under a tree thick with Autumn leaves with Sergeant Barnes nowhere to be seen, and was watching patiently as Harry, concentrating fiercely, held out his left hand, on which sat a strange, broad, two fingered ring, and rotated his right hand clockwise in a slow, measured movement.

To Cedric's astonishment, bright orange sparks were forming in the air in front of him, in a steadily widening bundle, and for a few moments, he just stopped and watched. His gaze shifted to Professor Bach, who merely raised an amused looking eyebrow.

"What do you want, Cedric?"

Cedric was not one to jump lightly, but he did twitch a little here. Harry hadn't even turned around.

"I wanted a word," he said. "If that's all right."

Harry turned to look at him then, folded his arms, and cocked his head, giving Cedric one of those strange, penetrating looks that gave him the feeling that the other boy was reading his thoughts off the inside of his eyes – which, apparently, he was entirely capable of. Though, as the unfortunate Seamus Finnegan had found out, he did not in the least like the implication that he would ferret around inside another's mind for information. This, Cedric thought, meant that he didn't enter the minds of others without permission. Or at least, he thought, so he hoped.

Then, Harry smiled an odd smile. "All right," he said. "I just have one condition."

"What's that?" Cedric asked warily.

"We do it in private," Harry said.

"Private?"

The odd smile widened, and without looking away, Harry raised his hands again. But this time, it was different – the left hand and right hand were aligned, the former stretched out in front, the latter back by his ear, as if he drawing a bowstring. Then, he spat something unclear and orange light shot from right hand to left, slamming into the ring and spreading out into the air like a cracked mirror.

As Cedric gaped, Harry flicked a sardonic salute, then stepped back into apparent nothingness. Cedric just continued gaping. Then, he squared his jaw. "If you think I'm going to be scared off, you've got another thing coming," he muttered.

"He's not trying to scare you off, you know," said an amused, lilting Welsh voice.

"Professor Bach," Cedric said. "Are you tutoring Harry?"

"Right to the point, I see," Bach said, a slight smile playing around his lips. That was something that most had noted about the new teacher. Most of the school had reserved their attention for the glamorous and, frankly, gorgeous Professor Zatara, who was part of the main faculty and whose astonishing form of magic caught the eye, even if the rest of her didn't. Professor Bach, by contrast, taught a new, optional and experimental subject, with taster sessions for most of the year groups, but little more. He was accepted to be a good teacher, one with interesting theories, and a very gifted musician, but aside from a few school-girl crushes, he was generally ignored. Cedric, though, suspected that there was a great deal more to him than met the eye. Just what that 'more' was, though, eluded him.

"As for your question," Bach continued, his amused smile suggesting that he knew exactly what Cedric was thinking. "In a manner of speaking."

"I didn't know that you were a wandless wizard," Cedric said. "If you'll forgive me, I thought that only Professor Zatara –"

"Professor Zatara and I approach the same end from opposite directions," Bach interrupted him, then shrugged. "To an extent, at least."

"I… see," Cedric said, then turned back to the glass like air before him. "If he's not trying to scare me off, what is he trying to do?"

"Be dramatic," came the dry reply. "And, perhaps, to test you."

Cedric sighed. "Of course," he said. "Fine. If that's the way you want it…"

He stepped through.

OoOoO

Harry turned as Cedric Diggory followed him through. In truth, he wasn't entirely sure why he'd stepped through and invited the older boy to follow before talking to him. Maybe part of him wanted privacy, while another wanted to test Diggory, yet another wanted to be dramatic, and still another had done it because he wanted to show Diggory how far out of the pitiful Wizarding norm he was. As might be derived from the last one, Harry's sense of irritable defensive pride, one respect in which he was very like most teenagers, was alive and well.

To be truthful, though, most of him had just felt like it. Still, he was sort of impressed that Cedric had followed him through so quickly, and without fear. Puzzlement, yes, and a degree of awe, but not fear.

"What is this place?" Cedric asked.

"The Mirror Dimension," Harry said. "According to Doctor Strange, it's a dimension created and maintained by the Sorcerer Supreme, right up close to our own, which the Sorcerer Supreme and their students – and others who know about it – use for training, temporarily trapping things and people where they can do no harm, and surveillance, apparently." He waved a hand, forming a chair of water and light. "Reality is more… suggestible here."

"Doctor Strange?" Cedric asked, blinking at that, but not Harry's casual manipulation of the elements. Familiarity, it seemed, bred indifference, if not quite contempt. "You know the Sorcerer Supreme?" Then he shook his head. "Of course you do, your godmother is his apprentice."

"Was, technically," Harry said, arching an eyebrow. "You did your research."

"My father was a colleague of your godfather's during the war against You-Know-Who," Cedric said. "I asked him and he asked his friends."

"I repeat," Harry said dryly. "You did your research. On me. Why?"

"Because we need to talk," Cedric said.

"About what?"

"About you," Cedric said. "About how you're acting. You're scaring the other students."

Harry stood up sharply, power surging to his hands, opening his mouth to snarl a tirade about how the students here couldn't even _begin_ to know the meaning of what it was to be truly afraid, had never faced _real_ terror, the sort he'd be more than happy to demonstrate for them…

Then he met Cedric's eyes.

And just for a moment, looked deep into them and reflected in those grey mirrors he saw… a tall, harsh figure, all sharp edges and ever so slightly inhuman proportions that were contorted into an expression of affronted wrath.

He saw… a pair of fey eyes were literally burning with fury as their owner's limbs moved into positions ready for a fight, the very substance of the dimension around him seething with a storm of power.

He saw… himself.

A moment was enough. The shock made him stumble back, dashing the chair of water and light into a cloud of shimmering raindrops.

"Harry?" he heard Cedric say, voice full of concern. "Are you all right?"

Harry mustered a chuckle as he got his footing, shaking off the conjured power. "I nearly went nuclear on you for _nothing_ ," he said. "And _you're_ asking _me_ how _I_ am?"

"Considering your expression and the way you went stumbling back, I didn't really think that my welfare was in danger," Cedric said wryly. "Are you all right?"

Harry nodded and sighed. "But before…" he began,

Cedric eyed him for a moment, then nodded. "I was a little afraid," he admitted. "More than a little, actually."

"And yet you're still here," Harry said, then snorted. "You should have been a Gryffindor."

"I'll take that as a compliment," Cedric said, amused, then drew his wand – slowly, Harry noticed, and carefully, before drawing a chair in midair and taking the resultant seat. He raised his wand – again, carefully – in silent offer.

"No thanks," Harry said, drawing his own wand and, with an effort, conjuring his own. "Dad was a transfiguration expert and he tutored me a bit over the summer," he explained. "I'm not sure how well I could do it in the real world, but here…"

"It did feel easier," Cedric agreed, then pocketed his wand and regarded Harry frankly. "Something happened to you," he said. "Something that left you jumpier than anyone I've met other than Mad-Eye Moody."

Harry frowned, then a memory of one of Sirius' stories flipped a card. "The Auror?" he asked.

"Ex-Auror, but yes," Cedric said. "He was…"

"Famously paranoid," Harry said flatly. "Yes, I heard. You're carefully not asking me what happened over the summer to leave me the same way."

"Well, you haven't exactly taken direct questions all that well," Cedric said dryly.

"Touché," Harry muttered. "I…" He paused.

"You don't feel ready to talk to anyone about it," Cedric said, after a few moments, and nodded. "I'm not going to try and make you talk about it." His tone turned dry. "Somehow I doubt that I could… Harry?"

Harry had twitched. "Yeah," he said curtly. "Somehow, I doubt you could either." He looked away. "I can talk about it to people who know."

"But not tell new people," Cedric said, nodding. "Not yet. Okay. I'd just like you to think about a couple of things."

Harry cocked his head attentively.

"First, I realise that you're a Gryffindor, and your instinct is to rush into things," Cedric began lightly.

Harry opened his mouth to dispute this, paused, then chuckled wryly. "Good point, well made," he said.

Cedric grinned, then sobered. "I get that right now, whatever you've been through has left your emotions in a spin," he said. "Because while I can't say I know you well, I do know that you are fundamentally a good person. And yes, you are," he added at Harry's raised eyebrow. "Before late last year, that Heir of Slytherin business aside, I'd have been hard pressed to find anyone outside of Slytherin with a bad word to say about you. And even then, the reason some people have changed their opinions for the worse is because of your tactics."

"My tact – oh," Harry said, and felt his cheeks heat up. "The Ravenclaw match."

"Yes, the 'Match of the Raining Ravenclaws'," Cedric said, smoothly sliding quotes around the applied name. "Even with that, you were trying to do what you thought was the right thing. You were trying to stand up for someone whose house had turned on them. You might be a Gryffindor, but an attitude like that would fit right in at Hufflepuff."

"I'll take that as a compliment," Harry replied dryly, and Cedric grinned. Then, he grimaced.

"The tactics, on the other hand, are a different story," he said. "But even so; you stood up for Luna Lovegood, when almost no one else did. I'm ashamed to say that I was one of the people who ignored what was going on when, as a prefect, I should have been getting involved. My point is that the way you've been behaving since you got back hasn't been normal."

"You mentioned the Ravenclaw match. How do you know that that wasn't a sign of the new normal?" Harry asked.

"Because you asked that question," Cedric said. "Because while I don't know you all that well, I think that I'm a decent judge of character, and I'm definitely a good judge of fliers, if I say myself. And because of that, I know that that incident was calculated – I was watching that match, and it was clear as day that you weren't just lashing out. You were controlling your temper and sending a message. Whether that was right or not, that's another matter. Now? You're lashing out, without warning or reason – and it is without reason. You're just reacting whenever someone pushes a touchy subject."

"What are you saying?" Harry asked quietly.

"I'm saying that you should talk," Cedric said. "Not necessarily to me, but to someone other than those people who already know." He looked Harry in the eye. "And while they may not have been through whatever happened to you, as far as I know, you didn't lose anyone over the summer. A lot of students here did; most in HYDRA's attack on the Ministry, some in the Battle of London, and a few others, here and there. Almost everyone who isn't a muggleborn knows someone who died or was injured, or who lost someone. My point, Harry, is that you're not the only one who's been through things. Whoever or whatever hurt you, and however they did it, you should stop taking it out on the other students. They don't deserve it, and they've got enough to deal with as it is."

Another hot flush ran through Harry. But this time, it was shame, and it swiftly drowned out any sparks of indignant anger and affronted outrage. Cedric was right. What the Red Room had done to him, it wasn't the fault of his fellow students. They might be unbelievably blind to things that went on outside their community. The attitudes of many of them towards those who didn't have magic – and even the nicer ones tended to settle at 'faintly condescending' – might be maddening. And they might generally seem to be so… so… so _stupid!_

But they didn't deserve to bear the brunt of his outrage. They didn't deserve to be the poor buggers on the receiving end when his temper went nuclear, even if it was one of them who accidentally poked a sore spot. Yes, they might ask stupid questions (e.g. Seamus Finnegan), but that was ignorance, not malice – certainly, it didn't deserve a near 'Wrath of the Phoenix'… or what he'd seen reflected in Cedric's eyes. There hadn't been the smell of wood smoke that time, true. But all that meant was that it had been a different kind of bad, rather than better.

Maybe, for instance, he should explain a few things to them about psychic ethics, if not exactly _why_ they were such a sore spot. Or he supposed he could reference his uncle's dabbling in mind-control, and other experiences with it, though he'd need both Clint's and his uncle's permission for that…

He put it aside for the time being.

"You're right," he said. He hesitated, chewing his lip for a moment. "I… I'm sorry."

Cedric nodded. "Apology accepted," he said. "And I'm sure that the rest of the school will probably be happy to accept it to."

"If only because the alternative is being scared witless of me wherever I go," Harry said dryly.

"True," Cedric acknowledged.

Harry nodded. "I've changed," he said. "I just want to make that clear. Even if I solved all the other issues just like that." He snapped his fingers for emphasis. "Which, frankly, probably isn't going to happen, then I'm not going to, hah, _magically_ go back to who I was before. I couldn't, even if I wanted to."

"And you don't?" Cedric asked, sounding honestly curious.

Harry was silent for a long moment. Did he want to go back? If he was given the option, would he?

"Even if I did go back," he said eventually. "It wouldn't change the way the world is. I'm not even sure if it would make me happier – good comes with the bad. It definitely wouldn't make me safer." He stood up. "I am who I am," he said. "Granted, I'm still figuring out exactly who that is, and I'll try to be less of a wanker about it, but…"

"I think I understand," Cedric said, standing up. "So... are you going to go for the Triwizard Tournament?"

"Isn't there meant to be an age line keeping people out who're under-age?" Harry asked, eyebrow raised.

"Aren't people who die meant to stay dead?" Cedric retorted, with a raised eyebrow of his own.

"… Touché," Harry admitted, fighting a smile. He could get to like Cedric. "No, I'm not going for it."

"Why not?" Cedric asked curiously. "I mean, I doubt that anyone would deny that you'd be the best candidate Hogwarts could put forward. The impartial judge, whoever they are, would almost certainly agree."

"Maybe," Harry said unhappily. "But the simple fact is that I'm powerful enough now that I'd either walk straight through the tasks, whatever they are, or if they were powerful enough to seriously challenge me, they'd probably be lethal to just about anyone else."

"What if they were tests of intellect?" Cedric suggested.

"That would be a different story," Harry said. "But even so…"

"You don't particularly care about the Tournament," Cedric said, and Harry whipped his head around to stare at the older boy in incredulity, who smiled wryly. "It's written on your face," he explained. "Whatever they've got planned, it's probably rather small butterbeer to you."

Harry grimaced. "A bit," he said. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry," Cedric said. "It's not like you chose what you've been through." His gaze darted to Harry's hair. "And to be frank, if you'll forgive me saying it, I'm rather glad I haven't been through things that would turn my hair white."

"You should be," Harry agreed, then nodded at the glittering gate back to the real world. "Shall we?"

Cedric nodded. "After you," he said.

Harry nodded and stepped through, Cedric following a moment later. As he did, Harry paused, concentrated, and waved a hand, murmuring a few liquid words. The fractured glass appearance in the air faded away, merging back into ordinary air. Cedric stared at it, then, cautiously, reached out and waved a hand through the air where the gate had been.

"Incredible," he said quietly. "Just when I think I've learnt most of everything there is to know about magic – the basics, anyway – I see something like that, which reminds me how much I have to learn."

"At this point, I just assume that there's always something new for me to learn," Harry said dryly.

Cedric nodded. "There's more in the heavens and the earth than I could ever have imagined," he said, then looked at Harry. "And there's some things that you know that I don't." He chuckled wryly. "Well, I'd imagine that there's quite a lot of things."

"I didn't," Harry began.

"You didn't have to," Cedric said, before sobering. "I have something else to ask you, actually."

"What about?" Harry asked warily.

"MI13," Cedric said. "You were Professor Cassidy's assistant last year, and it was very obvious that those 'detentions' that you, Ron Weasley, and Hermione Granger had with him were private lessons in muggle duelling. You, individually, were also Lady Braddock's student, in the mental arts I believe. They work for MI13, and even if they didn't, through the Avengers, you have better contacts than most."

Harry sighed, seeing where this was going. "And you want to know my opinions on them, and on MI13 in general, because your father works for the Ministry," he said.

"Yes," Cedric said. "I liked Professor Cassidy, and Lady Braddock seemed to be a perfectly nice woman. And Mister Worthington, Professor Cassidy's assistant, seemed all right, if a bit..."

"Miserable," Harry supplied.

"Right," Cedric said. "Miserable, but okay. But…" He looked uneasy.

"You're worried about the man they answer to," Harry said grimly, looking up at the sky. "You're worried about Peter Wisdom, and most of all, you're worried about what he wants to do, because you're not quite sure what that is. Does that sum it up?"

"More or less," Cedric said.

Harry sighed again. "I don't know Wisdom very well," he said. "I've hardly met him." He paused, thinking. "What do you know about him already?"

Cedric frowned, but went with it. "He's white, male, dark-haired, looks like he's somewhere in his thirties and is probably British," he said. "His accent, from what I've heard of it, says London, a little like Stan Shunpike on the Knight Bus, but smarter, better educated. He's a wizard, but he works for the Muggle government and prefers muggle clothing. He claims he went to Hogwarts, but dad did some asking around and apparently no one remembers a Peter Wisdom at Hogwarts – not during his time, anyway. He's confident, and powerful, a lot more powerful than the Ministry would like to admit. And…" He paused. "Dad's afraid of him. He won't admit it, but he is."

Harry was silent for a long moment. Inwardly, he was rather impressed – despite what the Twins occasionally said rather scathingly, Cedric Diggory was definitely a great deal more than a pretty face. "He's not wrong," he said eventually. "To be scared. Wisdom's dangerous. Dangerous enough that he worries my father."

"Dad also thinks he's planning to take over the Ministry," Cedric said.

"Maybe," Harry said neutrally.

"And that doesn't bother you?" Cedric asked, surprised.

"The Ministry put my godfather in Azkaban for more than a decade without trial," Harry said flatly. "He lost a third of his life, and frankly, a large chunk of his sanity. Even though he's innocent and never got a trial, legally, he's not allowed to come back to Britain, because that would mean the Ministry publically admitting that they were wrong. And the man who locked him away, Barty Crouch, still has a senior job at the Ministry. Professor Lupin, meanwhile, is a werewolf, and because of the Ministry's ridiculous laws, Hogwarts was just about the only place in this country that he could get a job. They never investigated my guardians and my situation when –"

He stopped abruptly.

"Harry?" Cedric asked.

"Well, that last one might not have been their fault," Harry said, ignoring the implied question. Essex was powerful, after all… "Either way," he said. "I don't exactly have many warm and fuzzy feelings towards them. And I wasn't particularly impressed by them at the World Cup, either. Wisdom might be a nasty piece of work, and I know for a fact that Cassidy doesn't like him very much, but he gets the job done."

"I see," Cedric said, frowning.

"I don't have anything against your dad," Harry added. "But I don't know him. The fact is, the only Ministry Wizard I knew, liked, and respected, was Arthur Weasley. And not only is he dead, he was on the point of leaving for a job where he was treated as something other than a glorified repair-man."

"Really?" Cedric asked, surprised.

Harry nodded. "Tony, Tony Stark, offered him a job," he said. "He was just about to resign from the Ministry when HYDRA attacked."

Cedric nodded, frowning, but in thought. "All right," he said. "I understand. Thank you."

"Any time," Harry said, then paused. "Well, not _any_ time, but…"

"I know what you mean," Cedric said, voice thick with amusement. "Thank you." With that, he turned and headed up to the castle.

"There goes a very decent young man," a mild Welsh accented voice said.

Harry glanced over his shoulder at 'Professor Bach'. "Yes," he agreed. "He is, isn't he?" He paused. "You've seen the way I've been these last few weeks."

"And in other statements of the blindingly obvious…"

Harry scowled at him, and Strange smiled a gentle smile.

"Why didn't I say anything?" he said. "Because I knew that you would not listen. It was something you had to sort out yourself."

"But," Harry began, preoccupied with visions of how he'd appeared in Cedric's eyes. "I could have –"

"But you did not," Strange said. "And I would have been more than prepared to step in if you did." He clapped his hands. "Now, since you seem to have successfully figured out entering the Mirror Dimension, and the Nevernever, I suggest you head inside, get some dinner, and then go to bed."

Harry eyed him. "Something horrible's going to happen tomorrow, isn't it?" he said warily.

"Horrible, no. Horribly embarrassing, possibly," Strange said.

"… I'd prefer horrible."

OoOoO

As it was, it wasn't that bad.

For one thing, Harry's somewhat improved outlook quickly communicated itself around the school. It started at breakfast when Seamus cracked a joke, before realising that he was sitting next to Harry and going a sickly shade of white that closely resembled off-milk, and the entire Gryffindor table froze as Harry looked up… and to their astonishment, started laughing. His fellow students were never quite sure how he'd react to what they felt was an innocuous joke – as Ron had found out the hard way with the 'Uranus' crack. The brief rift it had caused seemed to have been healed, but even so. It was another reason that most of Harry's year-mates were more than a little wary about cracking wise around him.

It was, to be frank, a greater laugh than a fairly ordinary joke deserved. And it wasn't as if Harry hadn't laughed at all since he'd returned to Hogwarts. It was just that when he had laughed, it had generally seemed either somewhat forced, or carried an unnervingly bitter or sardonic edge.

However, this laugh was different; a warm, rolling laugh of genuine pleasure, it stood out like a ray of sunshine on a cloudy day. Everyone had stared in astonishment as he'd turned to Seamus, who had the look of a condemned man who's just been reprieved, and his smile had faded a little, being replaced by a look that mixed shame and embarrassment.

"I'm sorry," he said, after a moment. "That I scared you, a couple of weeks back."

"I… no problem," Seamus managed, looking and sounding as startled as everyone else felt.

Harry had nodded gratefully, glanced up at Bucky, who'd given him an approving nod, then set to the rest of his breakfast, occasionally joining in the slowly restarting conversations around him. This relatively simple event significantly lightened the atmosphere around Hogwarts. While there was still a degree of entirely justified wariness, it quickly became closer to 'cautiously optimistic', and some even hoped that matters would go back to normal.

Of course, as they were soon reminded, with Harry in the castle, normal was something of a relative term.

OoOoO

Harry was carefully taking notes in Transfiguration on the subject of Cross-Species Switches when he heard Ron shift in his seat, then pause, and tap Bucky on the arm and whisper something to him.

It was, Harry vaguely noticed, one of quite a few whispers that were making their way around the class – a rare occurrence in Transfiguration, Professor McGonagall being a teacher who was held in a mixture of awe and fear by her class and tolerated no nonsense whatsoever.

Bucky then nodded, and lightly tapped the desk by Harry's hand. Harry looked met his gaze and frowned in puzzlement, a frown that deepened when he saw that Bucky was stifling a grin.

 _What is it?_ He asked.

 _See for yourself,_ came the amused reply.

Before Harry, overcome by a sudden surge of dread, could do exactly that, there was a loud rattle on the window and a muffled, joyful cry.

"Found you!"

Outside the window was a rather unusual sight, even by Hogwarts standards: a large, cheerful blond teenager in hunting leathers with long hair in a queue, an axe strapped to his back, and a grin like a banana, was hovering just outside the window. The question of just _how_ this was being achieved, since the Transfiguration classroom was fifty feet off the ground, was answered on closer inspection when a similarly cheerful, if more restrained looking girl in similar garb (minus the axe) with dark hair and smokey blue eyes became visible, apparently holding her friend up by the scruff of the neck.

The 4th year Transfiguration class stared at them in stunned disbelief. Then, everyone turned to Harry. Professor McGonagall had thus far said nothing, and continued to do so – her single raised eyebrow spoke volumes.

And Harry, mere moments after he'd raised his head, introduced it to his desk with a loud thump.

Normal service, such as it was, had resumed.

OoOoO

"How?" Harry asked flatly.

"How did we find you?" Uhtred asked. "Easily enough – Lord Heimdall was good enough to drop us within reasonable distance of the castle."

Heimdall, Harry reflected, had an unexpected sense of humour.

"And once we arrived, some of your fellow students were happy to give us directions," Diana said.

"Well, that answers two of my questions," Harry muttered, and sighed, running a hand down his face. They were now in an empty classroom, Harry having stood up, mumbling 'why me?', briefly explained to Professor McGonagall just who Uhtred and Diana were, and begged to be excused while he found out 'what the hell they're doing here'.

It had nearly been 'what the fuck they're doing here', but halfway through the word, Harry had remembered who he was talking to, seen the expression on McGonagall's face and hurriedly shifted gear mid-word. She'd considered what he'd said, and met Bucky's gaze. The two shared a moment of silent communication impenetrable even to a telepath, then she checked her watch. Seeing that it was nearly the end of the lesson, she grudgingly conceded.

"Very well, Mister Thorson," she had said. "I trust that you will not make a habit of this."

It wasn't a question, but Harry had nodded vigorously.

"Good," she had said briskly. "The homework will be twelve inches on the risks and practical applications of Cross Species Switches. Points will be given for creativity, and removed for regurgitation of the set text. You may go."

Now, having let Uhtred and Diana through a classroom located with the gracious assistance of Hogwarts herself, Harry was trying to ascertain what they were doing. In this he was not helped by Bucky, who was trying very hard to stifle his laughter and failing miserably.

Harry sighed.

"Harry?" Uhtred asked, frowning.

"I…" Harry began, then sighed again. "You didn't pick the best moment," he said eventually.

"Your teacher seemed happy to release you," Uhtred said.

"I think that willing might be a more accurate description," Diana said.

"Grudgingly willing," Harry said. "She…" He paused, trying to figure out how to explain the problem. "Imagine if you were being trained by Sif, and someone interrupted the two of you. She might be willing to let you go, but…"

"It would be embarrassing," Diana said, understanding.

Uhtred looked rather abashed. "My apologies, my lord," he said, slipping into formality in his own embarrassment.

Harry, who had closed his eyes briefly, opened one again and gave him a slightly aggrieved look.

"Harry," Uhtred amended.

"She is an important mentor to you?" Diana asked.

"Fairly, yes," Harry said. "She's my head of house – " At two politely puzzled expressions, he changed gear. "Students are divided into four houses here," he said. "One for each of the four founders, based on what they're like, and what each founder valued. They enchanted a magical hat to do it, to get an idea of what each student was like, and sort them based on that – though it does give you a choice, sort of. Professor McGonagall is the Head of Gryffindor, the house I'm in, the house that dad was in when he was James Potter, Sirius and Professor Lupin too. She fought alongside Doctor Strange, Bucky, Steve, and Peggy, Carol's great-grandmother, against HYDRA and a ridiculously powerful Dark Lord called Grindelwald during their war. She's someone they respect, someone uncle Loki respects, someone I respect."

"And we shamed you in front of her," Uhtred said soberly. "My apologies, my – Harry."

"Indeed," Diana said quietly. "I am sorry."

Harry sighed. "It's all right," he said. "A little embarrassing, but I can live with that. Besides, it's not like Strange didn't warn me yesterday."

"Doctor Strange is here?" Diana asked, surprised.

"In disguise," Harry confirmed.

"Doctor Strange is here?!"

Harry jumped, then sighed, turning to see Ron and Hermione, looking stunned. Then, he turned to Bucky, who shrugged.

"There's no reason not to tell them," he said mildly.

Harry, for the sixth time in half as many minutes, sighed again. "Fair point," he said. "And I suppose if he didn't want it known, he'd have taken steps."

"Wait," Ron said, expression having suddenly become extremely conflicted. "Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, is _here_. At Hogwarts."

"Yes," Harry said bluntly.

"In disguise."

"Again, yes."

"… He's not Professor Zatara, is he?"

Harry couldn't help himself; he burst into peals of laughter, having to grab hold of a desk for support. A couple of minutes later, he managed to pull himself together. "No," he said. "He isn't Professor Zatara. He's Professor Bach."

"Why's he pretending to be Welsh?" Ron asked, puzzled.

"Well, technically, I think he _is_ Welsh," Harry said. "Or was, a very long time ago." He turned to Uhtred and Diana. "Oh, by the way, Ron, Hermione, meet Uhtred Ullrson and Diana Herculeis. Diana, Uhtred, meet Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger."

"A pleasure," Diana said, striding over to shake Ron and Hermione's hands. Uhtred followed, giving both a warrior's arm clasp, and Harry noted with relief that Ron and Hermione's winces were those of slightly squashed arms, not pulverised arms.

"Indeed," Uhtred said. "It is an honour to meet Harry's first brave companions in battle."

"Uh… thanks?" Ron said, somewhat baffled.

"As you might have guessed," Harry said. "Uhtred is from Asgard. Diana is fostered there – she's my..." Harry paused for some quick mental arithmetic. "Third cousin on dad's side of the family." He folded his arms and eyed them. "And they decided to pay me a visit. Which, while I am happy to see them, could have been better timed. On a weekend, for instance."

"We wished to see how you were," Diana said, before looking thoughtfully at Ron. Ron, not used to being regarded thoughtfully by pretty girls who were more or less as tall as he was, was unsure what to make of this. "Do you have a sister by the name of Ginny?"

"Uh, yeah," Ron said.

Diana nodded. "She directed us to your classroom," she explained to Harry, before meeting his gaze and thinking at him, _She is the one you mentioned who suffered psychic attack at the hands of the creature Voldemort, isn't she?_

 _Yes,_ Harry replied. _She is. She's still recovering, so maybe don't bring it up, okay?_

Diana nodded again.

"Well," Hermione said. "While you're here, we might as well give you the tour."

Harry opened his mouth, closed it, then smiled wryly. "Might as well," he agreed, then his smiled widened. "You're in for a treat," he added. "I'm pretty sure that the only person who knows the history of the school better is the Headmaster, Professor Dumbledore."

Uhtred and Diana both looked impressed. They'd met Dumbledore before, knew he was held in high esteem, and had got some idea of _why_ he was held in high esteem.

Hermione, meanwhile, blushed. "Honestly, Harry, I don't know it _that_ well," she said.

"And modest too," Harry said cheerfully. "Maybe we'll run into Strange, or rather 'Professor Bach', too." He glanced at his watch and grinned. Strange had said that it might be horribly embarrassing. But, you know, maybe he could horribly embarrass other people. After all, what were friends for? "In fact, you could say that it's time to go and see the Wizard."

" _The_ Wizard?" Ron asked, bemused. " _Which_ wizard?"

"He was making a joke," Hermione said wearily.

"A joke that was old when Howard Stark made it, back when I was first at Hogwarts, during the War," Bucky remarked, as he kicked off from the wall. "And it wasn't funny then, either. It adds credence to a little theory me, Clint, and Nat have got going, though."

"What would that be?" Uhtred asked, curious.

"The Starks aren't a family," Bucky explained. "They're an infectious disease."

"Harry's not a Stark," Ron pointed out, puzzled.

"He's godfather to one," Bucky said, opening the door. "In my book, that's close enough to be infected. Besides, when he, Sirius, Loki, Tony, and Dresden wind up in a room together, they're like a bunch of long lost cousins at a family reunion." He paused. "No, wait, throw in the Twins, _then_ it's like a family reunion."

Ron shuddered. "You must have had some bloody awful family reunions," he said.

"I think I should be insulted," Harry said vaguely. "Also, you, Bucky, are not one to talk – everyone agrees that you and Clint are worse."

"We have an excuse – we're actually related."

"Related?" Hermione asked, startled.

"Clint is my grandson," Bucky said simply.

"Being related does not excuse or explain the thing with the vents."

"Vents?" Ron and Uhtred asked in wary stereo, before sharing a surprised look.

"A surprising number of air vents can fit people," Harry said. "As part of a hereditary general paranoia, both Clint and Bucky like scuttling around inside them."

"To make sure that we're the _only_ people scuttling around inside them," Bucky said. "You would not believe the number of HYDRA bases I got into by 'scuttling around inside' the vents." He eyed Harry. "A lesson you could do with learning."

"When it comes to breaking into HYDRA bases, I believe in making my own doorways," Harry said loftily. "Or using Doctor Strange as a chauffeur. One makes a statement, the other is economical."

"That is one way to put it," Diana remarked.

"And when it comes to crippling HYDRA flying fortresses, you believe in using their own dismembered undead giants as living weapons," Uhtred added cheerfully, then paused. "Or would that be unliving weapons?"

"You know, I think that that question has never previously come up," Harry said.

"You'd be amazed," Bucky said. "And wrong."

"There's a story behind that," Harry said.

"There are several."

"Will you tell them?"

"If you ask nicely."

Hermione sighed inwardly. She was glad that Harry had come out of his shell – his unpredictable and potentially explosive shell. She was glad that he seemed, for now at least, to have at least partially shaken off the darkness that had been clinging to him since he'd got back, to left it in that discarded shell.

She just wished he'd left his sense of humour with it.

 **And that ends a shorter (not actually short – come on, people, it's most of 9,000 words) chapter. Lighter, on the whole, with things looking up, and a little different from how I expected – Cedric forced himself into a much larger role than expected. Why? I suppose that Harry needed to talk to a relatively neutral party. Also, Cedric's a good dude.**

 **However.** **This is not Harry's recovery, one and done. It's still a process. That bit we saw towards the end, after his talk with Cedric? That's one of his better moods. His moods won't be swinging as low as they have, and he'll be thinking more of others, but they'll still be swinging about a bit, and he's still got wounds to heal. The difference now is that some of the metaphorical backed up pus and crap has been cleaned out of them and the bandages have been changed, so to speak.**

 **Anyhow, we'll see a bit of Uhtred and Diana and Ron and Hermione interacting – two pairs of Harry's friends who are rather more like each other than they think. We'll also find out exactly why Uhtred and Diana came to visit (it's nothing Nine Realms shaking, but it's not** _ **just**_ **on a whim). And we might see Maddie too. Maybe Essex too, and some resolution to the mystery that is Gambit. Oh, and we'll start to see build up to the next big arc.**

 **Until next time.**


	23. Chapter 23: Halfway Out of the Dark

**And here we are again. All my papers are handed in, exams are done, and I am home for the holidays. Christmas is upon on us, and Hanukkah has just passed us by, and Yule is yet to come. So, a Merry Christmas, a belated Happy Hanukkah, and a Joyful Yule to all who celebrate them. And to those who don't, season's greetings on the shortest and darkest day of the year – for which, I think, this chapter is rather appropriate: Halfway Out of the Dark. There's still a lingering darkness, and perhaps it's about to get even deeper… but there are lights burning away too. And they're getting stronger, providing an ever-growing warmth and fire that's going to chase the dark away.**

 **And yes, that, like more than a few of my better lines, was influenced/stolen by a childhood/young adulthood mainlining** _ **Doctor Who**_ **.**

 **Anyway, on the suggestion of one of my correspondents, I'm trying out shorter chapters (i.e. less than 10,000 words a pop) on the grounds that I actually get some sleep and you get chapters that aren't pre-written on a more-often-than-monthly basis. Since the upcoming arc isn't pre-written to anything close to the extent** _ **Forever Red**_ **was (with that one, when I came to chapters, I sometimes just had to fill in a gap here or there, the chapters being broadly ready. Here, it's a different story).**

 **As a result, we don't see Essex, Maddie, or as much of the resolution to something odd about Gambit (if you know your Marvel history, however, particularly some of the theories about Gambit that were later disproved, you may have a pretty good idea of what I'm hinting at) as I had originally intended. Nor will we see something involving Carol and Steve's family bonding that I had planned to include, or something to show that no, I haven't forgotten about Clark, and remind you all that I have Plans.**

 **I had also hoped that we would be up to Christmas by this point, or in reasonable striking distance, but alas, real life intervenes.**

 **So, with little further ado, I introduce you to chapter 23.**

 _ **Note: I appreciate every review I receive. However, the review section is NOT a comment section/message board. For those chatting with each other via review, keep your messages to each other between yourselves – it's becoming irritating and in future they will be deleted on sight.**_

 **Janine:** **How many chapters will the next arc be? Ideally, 3 or 4. It depends on how long I opt to make the chapters, but it should be much more compressed than the Red Room arc. For one thing, it's all happening in one night, prelude aside. Hermione's mutation is, for the time being, dormant, and will remain that way for the time being – mutations can and do pop up rather later than 15. Harry will have an interesting reaction once he figures out Hermione's actual ancestry. The Grangers were carefully selected by Lily and Wanda, and the four of them connived to hide Wanda's pregnancy and fake Mrs Granger's, before handing the newborn Hermione over. I'm glad you're enjoying it.**

Terrible jokes and Wizard of Oz references notwithstanding, the tour of the castle took place, with Harry playing a worryingly chirpy tour guide, leaning on Hermione for the factual fine detail. The 'worryingly' part was notable in Ron's expression, which Diana noticed and inquired after.

"Why do you look worried?"

As might be noticed, Diana could at times be very direct. Unlike Uhtred, however, she did so in a polite undertone.

Ron, surprised at being addressed, had taken a few moments to answer. "Well," he said. "Harry's moods."

"He seems to be in a rather good one at the moment," Diana said. "And you do not think it will last."

"I think that, especially recently, Harry's moods are a bit like broomsticks," Ron said. "If they go up pretty fast, then they're probably going to come down pretty fast too. And when that happens, it can get messy."

Aside from being ended with the understatement of the century, this might be considered an unusual display of emotional sensitivity from Ron, a young man generally considered to have the emotional range of a teaspoon. However, life with the Twins and several years of close friendship with Harry had meant that he had developed reasonably good survival instincts.

While they only really kicked in where matters of life and death were concerned (i.e. he was still capable of world class levels of tactlessness, even by the standards of teenage boys), as has previously been addressed, in the last month or so, the ability to judge Harry's moods had become something roughly analogous to being able to judge by ear the purpose of a suspicious package that has just started ticking. And while that judgement wasn't perfect, Ron was learning fast.

Diana looked thoughtful. "I see your reasoning," she said. "Though there is little enough that can be done about it, I think. He is already having treatment for it, I believe."

"He said," Ron said, before adding in the privacy of his head that it was one of the few things he actually _had_ mentioned that hadn't seemed like he was being made to at wand point.

"It is difficult for him to speak of such things," Diana said, tone one of gentle but firm rebuke.

Ron jumped and opened his mouth.

"No, I cannot read minds. However, I do read emotions, which is near enough," came a reply that sounded almost learned by rote.

"… Oh," Ron said. He'd heard, vaguely, about how some Legilimens could pick up people's thoughts without even trying, while others could actually enter people's minds. And then there was Harry, of course, whose powers beggared belief. Then again, he supposed, she was a god. Well, goddess. Like Harry. He shook his head slightly. Sometimes, his best friend's new world did his head in. "You met my sister?" he ventured.

Diana nodded. "She directed us to Harry's, and your, classroom," she said. "She was very helpful."

Ron's emotional sensitivity largely extended only to matters of life and death/personal survival. Thus, he missed the faint pinkness of Diana's cheeks and hesitation on the word 'helpful'.

Harry, however, did not, stopping mid-word, glancing over his shoulder with a very interested look on his face, eyes darting between Ron and Diana, before turning thoughtful. Ron didn't know exactly what this meant, but he felt that it was worth worrying about.

He was right about that, if for the wrong reasons.

OoOoO

Doctor Strange, it turned out, wasn't remotely surprised to see Uhtred or Diana, or that Ron and Hermione now knew who he was. This was expected. The fact that he kept not only his disguise, but his Welsh accent, however, was considered to be a bit puzzling to everyone except Harry and Bucky, who had just filed it under, "Strange being Strange," in every possible sense of the phrase.

"With the exception of your father's time here, and the events of this last year or so, this is the first time that an Asgardian has been here in centuries," he remarked. "And, I believe, the first time an Olympian has ever been here. Or an Amazon, for that matter. The climate, it seems, does not suit – too much rain."

Everyone turned to Diana, who gave a minute shrug.

"However, I also have to wonder why you are here," Strange continued.

"I was wondering that myself," Harry said. "And unlike you, I don't already know, so I'm not sure why you even bothered asking."

"Harry!" Hermione hissed reprovingly.

Harry merely rolled his eyes. "Well it wasn't to be polite," he said.

Strange arched an eyebrow. "And how do you know that?"

"Prior experience. Usually, you don't bother with politeness," Harry said. "Also, I can't remember the last time you didn't do something without an ulterior motive, even if it was just because you thought it was funny – you're the only person I know who winds up my grandfather for fun."

This was, it had to be said, accurate.

"Usually, boyo, you have only ever seen me mid or post crisis," Strange observed. "When I have little time or inclination to bother with politeness. As it is, I had several reasons." He raised four fingers, and began lowering them. "First, I am not under stress, I am rather fond of your friends, and more to the point, I am trying to be at least a little nicer than previously, so politeness is a worthy effort. Second, I see possibilities. When it comes to motives, there can be many, and while the variety of options of which could be revealed and concealed is obviously not infinite, it is hardly a binary question. Third, it helps cut to the chase." He leaned forward and prodded Harry. "Fourth, even apparently innocuous questions can be very important. Another lesson for you to learn, Master Thorson."

Harry started a little, then nodded with a thoughtful frown.

Uhtred and Diana shared a speaking look, then Uhtred looked down and shuffled his feet in apparent embarrassment. For someone who was already larger than many grown men, it was quite an incongruous sight.

Diana, meanwhile, turned to Harry, then said simply, "We enquired of your father when your birthday was – by Midgard's dominant reckoning and by Asgard's. And…"

"I," Harry began, then sighed inwardly. One unexpected 'benefit' of being Prince of Asgard had been a much larger amount of gifts than he had ever previously received. With the Dursleys, he had hardly ever received or for that matter, expected, anything, and at Hogwarts, his gifts had largely been from the Weasley family, Ron, and Hermione. More recently, others had been added to that – his family, his godfather, his godmother, Jean, the Avengers, Pepper, Jane, Darcy… the last birthday in particular had been overwhelming.

And that just took into account those he actually knew. Other gifts had swarmed in and left him almost literally buried beneath them – or wrapped up in, in the case of the sort of cats' cradle thing that Anansi had given him. Most of those given by people he didn't know were simply political gestures, politeness to Asgard and nothing more.

The former he had found pleasant if, well, a little much. The latter he had found embarrassing.

This… well. He knew that Uhtred and Diana were his friends, but he didn't want them, Uhtred especially, to feel like they had to, that it was obligation, rather than simply doing so out of a desire to give. But equally, he'd learned enough of the Asgardian frame of mind – more to the point, of Uhtred's frame of mind – to know that it could be a complicated mixture of the two, and that resisting it would get awkward, fast.

As for Diana, he was pretty sure that her motives were mainly just a desire to give. Mainly. Diana could be exceptionally hard to read in every sense of the word. Except just now, when he'd detected the feelings that he associated with a crush - specifically, a cocktail of lust, nervousness, and what might best be described as proto-love. While it might be surprising that he could pick it out and identify it so easily, it was less surprising when you remembered that Harry lived in a castle with several hundred other hormonally supercharged teenagers, all of whom had magical powers and an associated limited psychic sensitivity that, if anything, only made their emotions clearer. And while Diana was usually very good at guarding her mind, a skill that her aunt Athena had apparently taught her as part of controlling her powers, for a moment, that guard had slipped. Around Ron… while talking about Ginny. Which left open the question of which one she had the crush on.

He put that interesting little thought aside and remembered a lesson that his uncle had been sure to impress on him – Princes accept gifts gracefully, whether they liked them or not. Even if you don't think it's necessary, even if you wish that someone hadn't gone to the trouble for whatever reason, even if you find it thoroughly embarrassing, it is your duty to accept gracefully and thereby put the giver at their ease. If they were doing so out of obligation, then it made them feel that obligation was being met on the receiving end, and that their gift was appreciated. If they were doing so out of a desire to give, then it was basic politeness. When you said 'you shouldn't have', you weren't meant to sound like you actually meant it.

Harry understood all of this, and he appreciated the gesture, he really did… he just felt a little awkward that Uhtred might have felt that he needed to do it. Okay, a lot awkward. And receiving gifts in general was not something he was really used to.

"Thank you," he said, inwardly resolving to find out when Uhtred and Diana's birthdays were, fast, and remonstrating with himself for not having done so before.

Uhtred stepped forward, and drew a long package from a small bag that by all logic should not have held it. Once, Harry would have been astounded. Now, he just accepted that bags that were bigger on the inside were as much a feature of Asgardian life as they were wizarding life.

"I was not sure what you would wish for, my Prince," Uhtred said, tones turning formal, as they tended to when he got nervous. "If it is not to your liking, then –"

"Uhtred," Harry said, cutting across him in a very reasonable attempt at the gentle-but-irresistible tone that Steve had long since mastered and placing a hand on his friend's shoulder, meeting his gaze as he did so. Just because he was uncomfortable did not mean that Uhtred should be. "Whatever it is, I'll be honoured to receive it. Do you hear me? Honoured."

Uhtred actually blushed.

"Now, uh… what is it?" Harry asked, eyeing the long, straight package. In truth, he was mildly puzzled. His best bet was that it was a sword, but it lacked the cruciform hilt that he generally associated with most Asgardian swords.

Silently, Uhtred unwrapped it, drawing gasps from Ron and Hermione.

It was, in fact, a sword, nestled in a scabbard of dark reddish-brown leather. But, Harry noticed as he examined it, it was one of a different kind to the sort that he was used to. When in Asgard, or even using practise weapons back at Avengers Tower or Avengers Mansion, he was usually more familiar with swords along the lines of the 'knightly' single handed sword or the sword variously known as the 'hand-and-a-half' or, more pithily, the 'bastard sword', which could be used with either one hand or both. Both were long, straight bladed, double-edged, and had a guard in the form of a cruciform hilt. This one, by contrast, was long, but single edged, lacked a guard, and it was very slightly curved, though you had to be looking closely to see it.

There was also something weirdly familiar about it, he thought as he slowly drew it, getting further gasps as the silvery blade caught the light.

"It is not in the usual style, I know," Uhtred said, still sounding a little nervous as Harry stared at the blade, apparently transfixed. "But I consulted Lord Fandral and Lady Sif, and your lord father, and thought that your style would be better suited to a blade more of this style, so I took the sabres of Lord Fandral and Prince Faradei of Alfheim as a model, and modified to… fit."

This made Harry look up sharply. "You _made_ this?" he asked, astonished.

Uhtred nodded seriously. "Lady Sif advised that I should," he said. "Though Lord Stark stepped in to help me, after he noticed my project."

"He stepped in to supervise and to teach you," Diana corrected him. "Do not sell yourself short – he was impressed by your aptitude, and Lord Stark is not a man who is easily impressed. And from what I saw and heard, he rarely needed to correct you."

Now Uhtred blushed in earnest, and cleared his throat, changing the subject. "And the enchantments on the blade, of the usual kind, were placed by your uncle," he said. "The magical arts not an area in which I have much skill."

"Could have fooled me," Harry murmured, as he performed some experimental cuts and thrusts. If the blade wasn't perfectly balanced, then it was damn close, he thought as he held it up close. Then, he froze.

"Harry?" Hermione asked worriedly, immediately echoed by Uhtred and Diana.

Harry didn't respond, locked in place as if the air around him had suddenly become concrete.

"Harry," Bucky said softly. "Harry, look at me."

Harry dragged his eyes away from the blade, trying to force down the sudden fragments of semi-alien memories flickering behind his eyes as he met Bucky's gaze.

"May I see that sword?" Bucky asked, without changing his tone or looking away for a moment.

There was a long moment, then Harry's fingers slowly uncurled from the sword's hilt, allowing Bucky to prise it from his grasp.

"I don't understand," Uhtred said worriedly. "Is he all right?" He went pale with horror. "Has it been tampered with? I swear, I had no idea –"

"There is nothing wrong with the sword, Uhtred," Bucky said, cutting him off as he examined the blade, cut it experimentally in much the same way as Harry had, then held his arm out straight and closed one eye to look along the blade. "I think it simply has an unfortunate and unforeseeable resemblance to a kind of blade that Harry would have encountered previously. During his encounter with the Red Room."

"Ah," Diana said, in a tone the combined sympathy, comprehension, and an awareness of just how big a minefield they had unwittingly stepped into. Uhtred, for his part, just looked absolutely horrified.

"You had no way of knowing," Bucky continued, directing his words at Uhtred. "It looks like a Shashka, the Cossack's blade, and they're pretty damn rare outside of Russia. Hell, they're pretty damn rare inside of Russia. I'd be surprised if Loki noticed the resemblance, let alone you." He effortlessly flipped the sword into the air, before catching it by the hilt. "The only modern, practical usage I knew of was by the White Council's 'Brute Squad' at Archangel, and even then, those were custom made and enchanted – the Commandos crossed paths with the Brute Squad back in the War. The Red Room crossed paths with the Brute Squad too, and probably made replicas of the weapons they came across." His gaze darted back to Harry. "It brought back memories."

This left a significant gap in events, and Ron looked like he was on the verge of asking about it when Hermione touched him on the arm and shook her head sharply.

"If Loki didn't recognise it, then there's no way you could have done," Bucky continued, meeting Uhtred's gaze.

Harry blinked slowly, coming back to himself, then closed his eyes. "He's right," he said roughly, then smiled, if a little wanly. "It's beautiful, Uhtred. Thank you."

"If you wish, I can reforge it into a different shape," Uhtred began hesitantly.

"No," Harry said. He took the sword again and weighed it thoughtfully. "I'll keep it this way. It's… fitting." His smile turned wry. Part Asgard, part Earth, and with a Russian flavour that you'd never see if you didn't know to look. "Yes," he said. "Definitely fitting."

OoOoO

Meanwhile, other matters pertaining to the Red Room were being considered.

"So, Hank," Xavier said. "What leads you to call a meeting so early in the day?"

The teaching faculty of the Xavier Institute; at the moment, consisting of Charles Xavier, Hank McCoy, Ororo 'Storm' Munroe, and of course, Logan, had gathered in one of the Institute's extensive laboratories. Each had a varying expression on their face. Xavier looked politely curious, Storm looked puzzled, and Logan, having considered the locale of the meeting and the fact that it was Hank who called it, looked bored, anticipating that whatever was to be discussed would likely go straight over his head. Hank, meanwhile, looked rather agitated. He also looked like he hadn't slept.

"Well, first of all, I would like your opinions on something," he said. "Which, hopefully, will serve as proof that I am not going mad."

"'round here? Who'd notice the difference?" Logan asked rhetorically.

"Logan," Xavier said, amused. "What is this thing, Hank?"

In answer, Hank brought up a DNA helix. "On an off-chance," he said. "When I was studying the DNA of those who had been imprisoned by the Red Room – Miss Grey, Miss Dane, Miss Ashida, and Messrs Wagner, Starsmore, Abidemi, and LeBeau, as well as Mister Thorson and Miss Danvers, though their genetics are rather different to most mutants – to our own records of students past and present, to see if there was any detectable effect from Essex's experimentation on them on a genetic level."

"And is there?" Storm asked, concerned.

"None, so far as I can tell," Hank said. "Which is a relief, though considering the variability of the x-gene and my lack of samples from before their captivity, I fear that it is little more than guesswork." He frowned. "What the computer did observe, however, was rather puzzling. Remy's DNA has been tampered with, extensively."

Logan grunted. "That ain't a surprise, considering who he was with," he said. "And for how long."

"This was different, Logan," Hank said tightly. "I came up with a theory, then shared my data on Remy with Moira, asking her what she made of it, without informing of the particulars of my theory, merely saying that there was something odd about it. I likewise shared it with Doctor Banner, saying much the same. Both independently came to the same conclusion I had: Remy is much younger than he looks, or indeed, realises."

"Excuse me?" Storm asked, baffled. "What do you mean, Hank?"

"I mean that for want of a better way of putting it, Remy's DNA shows every sign of having been artificially aged," Hank said grimly. "I could not even begin to tell you how, but it has."

"He claims to have no memories before the age of seven," Xavier said slowly. "Something I confirmed during a basic psychic scan. I dismissed it before, as that is not strictly unusual, especially with orphaned children, but with this in mind, it can only mean…"

"Someone decided to play god and make themselves a mutant," Logan growled.

"Someone whose most commonly used name is almost certainly Nathaniel Essex," Hank agreed heavily. "Who, along with Arnim Zola of HYDRA infamy, is the only human known to have mastered the technology of human cloning, though I have heard rumours of another. Howsoever, it must be assumed that with the displayed skill to clone, comes the requisite mastery of ageing the clone to physical adulthood."

"Goddess above," Storm breathed. "Then why would Essex simply abandon him on the street if he had already invested that much effort?"

"Perhaps he didn't," Xavier said. "While there is no way of knowing for sure, I don't think he meant to. Essex is obsessed with control, and his willingness to artificially age Remy suggests not. Why stop at seven? A seven-year-old is of no use to him, and much of the important development, especially relating to the X-Gene, would take place either in infancy or in adolescence, so there is no reason to pause and observe development at a more natural pace. That and the fact that Remy was presumably programmed with basic language, cognitive, and mobility skills, for I doubt that Essex would have much patience to teach them himself – that patience, I think, would have been reserved for Maddie – suggest that something went wrong. I would conjecture that the process was interrupted partway through, perhaps by a power cut, and the young Remy escaped in the confusion." His expression turned grim. "And then, a decade or so later, Essex rediscovered his escaped experiment."

Hank let out a growl that would not have shamed a tiger.

"Easy, bub," Logan said. "This shit is nasty, but getting angry won't solve anything."

The rest stared at him in barely veiled incredulity.

He smirked. "Unless you've got someone to take it out on."

And just like that, normal service was resumed.

Hank sighed. "You are right, Logan," he admitted. "Though I am afraid that this leaves one very unpleasant line of questioning: where did Remy come from? Was he, like Maddie, stolen from some unsuspecting family's cradle? Or was he created whole by Essex – and if so… from what?"

There was an uneasy silence.

"All good questions, Hank," Xavier said quietly, rolling forward. "But I would amend the last one, as a nasty suspicion is growing in my mind."

"Charles?"

"Perhaps a better question would be not 'from what?'," Xavier elaborated. "But 'from _who?_ '"

OoOoO

On the other side of the world, matters were, thankfully, somewhat less portentous.

In fact, they could almost be considered rather mundane.

"So," Ron said. "You're one of Harry's Asgardian friends."

"Aye," Uhtred said. "I am his friend, and I am of Asgard."

"Okay."

"I am also his Sworn Sword," Uhtred continued.

"And, uh, what's a Sworn Sword?"

"I am my lo – Harry's loyal servant and protector," Uhtred said calmly. "'til death should take me, and I should pass to Valhalla."

"… Oh," Ron said. "So, how did you get that job, then?"

"When Harry and I first met, we began… poorly," Uhtred said. "I was blinded by jealousy, and took my defeat in a sparring match badly. I threw cruel words at him. Yet despite that, he saved my life, perhaps even my very soul, from the Disir, monsters that have haunted Asgardian nightmares since the time of my great-grandfather. Therefore, I swore service to him to repay that debt." He glanced at Ron. "Do you not have a similar system? I have heard of the phrase 'I owe you my life', but Lady Natasha informs me that it is now more of a turn of phrase than a declaration of a debt."

"Well, there's Life Debts," Ron said, a little bewildered at the way this conversation was going. "Between wizards, I mean. No one's really sure how they work, though, and they're really rare."

Uhtred nodded thoughtfully, lapsing into silence for a few moments. Ron eyed him, not entirely sure what to make of the strange Asgardian boy. He was, despite the two of them apparently being around the same age – and if anything, Ron was definitely the elder by some months – taller than the already tall Ron, which rankled a little. He was also muscular with it, and had dark blonde hair that was tied back in a long queue, as well as watchful steel grey eyes, though these latter two traits stood out rather less than the very large axe he had slung across his back.

"Harry has said that you were his first true friend," Uhtred said suddenly. "And that you met on the train that transports you to this school."

"Yeah," Ron said, deciding just to roll with it. "All the other carriages were full, and there was just him, so I asked if I could join him and he said yes…"

Uhtred nodded. "So he has said," he said. "He has also said that you have followed him into battle time after time, without fear, even when you were ill-equipped to do so, with the courage of a warrior-mage of old!" He grinned and clapped Ron on the shoulder, hard enough to jar what felt like every bone in Ron's body. "Truly, it is fitting that you were chosen for the House of the Brave, Ronald Weasley!"

"Thanks," Ron wheezed, then eyed Uhtred. "Wait, did Harry actually say all that?"

Uhtred paused. "Well, he did not put it in those exact words."

"Yeah, I didn't think so."

"But the gist was much the same," Uhtred finished. He gave Ron a serious look. "You worry that you will be set aside, overshadowed, and forgotten." He raised a hand to forestall Ron's protests. "I know because I too have worried that, and I see in your eyes the same fear that has threatened to take the heart of me."

"You have?" Ron asked, startled.

"Aye," Uhtred said. "You are not the only person in the world to have the burden of many successful older brothers, who are well known, well loved, and much admired, and to consequently fear being lost in the crowd." He regarded Harry. "The reason that Harry and I did not begin well was because I resented the admiration he received, apparently without effort or hardship, when I had fought simply to be noticed as anything more than the youngest son of my father, Lord Ullr. That resentment burned in me, all the more when he defeated me in a sparring match with what I felt was a simple, low trick, not a display of skill. The fact that Diana had bested me in wrestling only a matter of days before had not helped."

"What, her?" Ron asked, astonished, eyes darting from the tall and bulky Uhtred to the shorter and willowy Diana.

"Her," Uhtred confirmed, sounding faintly amused. "Lady Diana is far stronger than she appears. Her mother is Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, and her father is Hercules, the Lion of Olympus. She is both wise and mighty."

"Blimey," Ron said.

"Indeed," Uhtred said dryly. "But as I say, I felt anger and shame at what I felt was acclaim unjustly earned." He smiled wryly. "How wrong I was. Soon, I learned just how well that acclaim was earned, and that, if anything, it was far less than he deserved. He saved my very being, and forgave my slights as if they were nothing. Now, I am honoured to call him my friend." He met Ron's gaze. "As he is honoured to call you his."

"He is?" Ron asked, startled.

"Aye," Uhtred said. "Do not mistake his reticence to speak of certain matters for distaste, or the beginning of your friendship's end. In that case –"

"I know, whatever happened to him, it hurt him," Ron said, cutting him off. "Enough that he doesn't want to talk about it."

"It left him grievously wounded in body and mind," Uhtred said gravely. "Wounds that would destroy a lesser man. But he survived, and triumphed. Yet while the wounds of the body were healed well enough, the wounds of the mind… they run deeper. And are not healed so easily."

Ron sighed and nodded. "I know," he said, sounding more than a little frustrated.

"But you wish it was happening faster," Uhtred said.

Ron gave him a cold look. "Do _all_ of Harry's new friends read minds?" he asked bitterly. "Or is there some paper that goes out that I'm not aware of?"

Uhtred arched an eyebrow. "No," he said. "Remember, Ronald Weasley, that I am his friend too, and I was there just as his recovery was beginning. I too know the frustration of his unwillingness to open up." He regarded Harry. "You do not see it because you see him every day, but believe me when I say that the progress he has made since returning here is truly remarkable." His gaze returned to Ron. "And I do not doubt that you, as one of his dearest friends on Midgard, in the whole Nine Realms, have played a key role in that progress. And that is something for which I can never thank you enough."

Ron went red, both with shame and flattered embarrassment. "Uh," he said. "Thanks."

Uhtred nodded with a smile, before turning serious again. "He has shown reluctance to involve you in his battles, correct?"

"Yeah," Ron said. "Well, I mean, sometimes it feels like he's holding me and Hermione at arm's length." He scratched his head. "Honestly, mate, I'm not sure what I think of that."

"Oh?"

"Me and Hermione, we're not Asgardian like you and her – "

"Diana is Olympian."

"Right. We're not that, either."

"You should not worry on that score, my friend," Uhtred said easily.

"Oh. Thanks."

"Some of the finest and most courageous warriors I have met are Midgardian," Uhtred continued. "The Avengers are honoured throughout the Nine Realms, and your own deeds, as well as Lady Hermione's, cast honour on yourselves and your families."

"… Not what I meant."

Uhtred listened carefully as Ron explained as best he could that while he found Harry's various escapades utterly baffling and, increasingly, mind-bendingly terrifying, it was… nice to be included? Or at least, nice to have the option of being able to say 'no', even when he was inevitably going to say 'yes' to whatever insane thing Harry had stumbled into/intended to investigate this time.

"I see," Uhtred said, a little dubiously.

"Really?" Ron asked dourly. "Because I don't think that I do."

Uhtred shrugged. "Some things are hard to quantify in words," he said. "But I would not worry about Harry's wishes not to involve you in such affairs. It is the way he is. He is noble and courageous and worries far more for others than for himself. That worry sometimes leads him to forget that others can stand by his side of their own will." His expression soured somewhat. "Also, he thinks he is unkillable."

Ron turned, startled. "Hold on, he hasn't become arrogant like _that_ –" he began.

"No, I do not mean undefeatable," Uhtred said. "He knows well that his might and skill have limits. Just literally impossible to kill."

"Oh."

"And he might be right."

"… I see."

Uhtred sighed. "It means that he deems himself expendable," he said. "More so than anyone else. He would go through trials and pains for friends that would break mighty warriors, and consider the price a cheap one. And for family…" He shook his head slowly. "There is no limit to what he would do, to what tortures he would endure, for family."

"Sounds like some things don't change," Ron said wryly.

"I will have to take your word on that," Uhtred said, with a grin. "Now, I have heard tales of how you and Harry defeated a troll. I would hear it from you, if you are willing."

"Sure," Ron said, blinking and smiling. And as he prepared to regale Uhtred with that particular story, he decided that he rather thought he could get to like these new friends of Harry's.

OoOoO

Hermione heard a bubbling chorus of laughter from behind her, and glanced back to see Ron and Uhtred sharing a joke.

"Getting on like peas in a pod, aren't they?" Harry remarked, with a satisfied smile that was tinged with more than a little bit of relief.

"You were worried they weren't?" Hermione asked, honestly curious.

"Well, I figured that either they'd get on like they are now, or they really, really wouldn't," Harry said.

"You were worried that Ron would get jealous," Hermione translated.

Harry shrugged, and nodded. "More or less," he admitted.

"Uhtred and Ron do seem to be much alike," Diana said thoughtfully.

Hermione found herself agreeing with the other girl, who, younger though she was, was already taller than Hermione and bidding fair to match Harry's already impressive height in years to come.

"Though I think that Uhtred is not the one that you should worry about Ron being jealous of – if he is that kind."

"Then who?" Harry asked, eyebrow raised.

"Carol," Diana said simply.

Harry tripped over his own feet and narrowly avoided falling flat on his face. "Carol?!" he spluttered.

"Yes."

Harry cast an aggrieved look at Hermione, who was covering her mouth to unsuccessfully hide laughter and said in strangled tones, "Diana, you can tell better than pretty much anyone that I think about Ron and Carol in _very_ different ways."

Diana simply looked innocent in a way that was only undermined by a gleam of wicked amusement deep in her sapphire blue eyes and didn't answer.

"Oh?" Hermione asked, eyebrows raised, tone amused. "Has something happened between the two of you that I've missed?"

"What?" Harry asked, startled at this unexpected flanking attack, then his eyes widened as what Hermione had said sunk in, before waving his hands hastily. "No, no, we're just friends."

"Then if you're just friends with Carol, that raises the question about your feelings for Ron," Hermione said, clearly enjoying this far too much. "Is there something you want to tell me, Harry?"

Harry's response was mostly incoherent spluttering.

"Much as that would delight Jean-Paul, I don't think that that's the case," Diana said blithely. "And despite the fact that they have both been denying it, it is Harry and Carol –"

"We haven't been denying it," Harry said quietly, cutting across her. He had, by this point, regained some of his tattered dignity. "Well, we have, but…" He sighed explosively, rubbed his brow, and eyed the two of them. "If you could stop teasing me for two seconds, I'll explain."

Hermione, lips twitching, eyes sparkling, nodded. Diana, expression as serene as ever, but with just a hint of a smirk around the corners of her mouth, seconded the nod.

Harry accepted this, then sighed again. "Carol and me… we have feelings for each other. Feelings that are more than just friendly. And more than just…" He trailed off, going red.

"We get the picture, Harry," Hermione said dryly.

Harry nodded. "We both have those feelings and we both know it," he said. "But." He shoved his hands in his pockets. "It's complicated, but the short version is that we've both got issues. Different issues, but we both have issues. Carol's..." He glanced at Diana. "Well, I suppose that Diana probably knows what they are." He quirked a half-smile. "Mentally, she's in remarkable shape, considering. It's amazing, it really is."

The smile faded. "But because of what's gone on, what she wants, what she needs, me to be is a friend. A best friend." He looked up, expression calm and serious. "And as far as I'm concerned, that comes before anything else."

"That's…" Hermione began. "Remarkably mature, actually."

The wry smile returned. "So glad you approve," he said, more than a little sardonically.

Diana gently swatted his arm. "Be nice," she admonished him.

Harry went a little pink, and added, "Sorry. It's just, I'm not doing it for points, or anything."

"I know," Hermione said gently. "That's why I meant what I said." She touched his arm. "And what about you, Harry?" She paused as he went still. "If you don't want to discuss it, that's fine," she began.

"No," Harry said. "It's okay. I brought it up." He looked out over the lake, off into the distance. "To put it in a way that Tony likes to," he said bluntly. "I'm a hot mess. I'm like a broken mirror that's been put back together: everything's in the right place, more or less. But the cracks are still there, if you follow me. And there's still plenty of sharp edges that'll cut you if you're not careful." He smiled, this time a little wanly. "I'm getting better, and a lot of it's thanks to the lot of you," he said, nodding at the two of them, Bucky, and Ron and Uhtred, who were still engrossed in conversation, now about the chess match in first year. "But I'm still a work in progress." He paused.

"And if you ever do go down that path, you want it to be because you're whole and because you both want to," Diana said softly. "Not because Carol's trying to hold all your pieces together."

Harry cocked an eyebrow. "Are you sure that you aren't the mind reader in the family?" he asked, in a tone that was a little too flat to be as flippant and wry as it was meant.

"You're my friend," Diana said. "I don't need to be. And I don't need to be a mind reader to know you need this, too."

And then she hugged him. After a moment's thought, Hermione did too.

Because Diana was right. He did look like he needed a hug.

 **And that is that. Shorter and sweeter than I had intended, but I wanted to get a chapter out before Christmas, and to make it broadly Christmas themed (i.e. warmth, happiness, family, that sort of thing), if not actually about Christmas itself, and I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to put together something longer/a conventional Christmas special.**

 **If you are very lucky, I have enough time, and my Muse is kind, then perhaps there will be another chapter, of similar length to this one, rounding off the preliminaries for the Dracula arc, before Christmas. However, should that not be the case (and that seems rather likely), then I wish you all a very Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.**


	24. Chapter 24: Light and Shadow

**And here we are again. I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas, Happy Festivus, pleasant Hanukkah, or whatever you celebrate, and I sincerely hope that you will have a delightful New Year. However, I felt that I should contribute something to round off 2017, and take us one step closer to the next big arc (which, really, will probably have its final preludes done next chapter).**

 **This one, chapter 24, will have a bit more substance to it, and is also a fair bit longer (10,500 words, more or less), starting the lead-up to the next big arc – more on that at the end.**

 **Anyhow, we'll be seeing more of Diana, Uhtred, Ron, and Hermione (a bit less of Ron in this chapter), a bit of Carol too, and a fair bit of Steve. Oh, and one or two others that we haven't seen for a while, either.**

 _ **Another customer announcement:**_ _ **I'm not a**_ **Transformers** _ **fan, either. In fact, generally speaking, while I'm very glad that my writing inspires you to provide suggestions, do bear in mind that I have my own plans, and I very rarely do requests. In fact, almost never, and only very small ones, usually favours and nods to close friends – certainly not adding entire fandoms. That, if I do it at all, is at my own will and my own whim, and really very unlikely at this stage of the game. So, please stop begging me to add your pet fandom, give Harry your favourite power-ups/powers/spells/etc, or introduce your favourite character. I'm not going to do it. I don't want to come off as a Scrooge, but that's the way it is.**_

This was not the only thing that Diana felt that Harry needed, however.

"Once I found out what Uhtred was making for you, I decided to commission something to compliment it," she said. "I would have made something, but…"

"Thank you, Diana," Harry said. "Whatever it is, I look forward to it."

Diana miled, a little shyly, and from her pocket removed a small box. Within was a slender green metallic bracelet embossed with a golden phoenix symbol. "It's meant to go on your left arm," she said.

Harry duly put it on, then jumped as the bracelet fitted itself to his wrist.

"If you want to take it off, it'll come off," Diana explained. "And if you press the symbol, it turns into a gauntlet."

Harry paused, then obediently pressed it, starting only a little as bracelet duly flowed like a liquid, covering his left hand and forearm in smooth, close-fitting emerald metal, with the phoenix embossed on the back of his hand, and what he vaguely recognised as Asgardian defensive symbols and runes inscribed on the thicker, more solid forearm, mixed in with other symbols that he didn't recognise. Strangely, though, it didn't feel like metal, more like a close fitting glove, albeit a little heavier on the forearm, which looked more like a bracer. Slowly, he drew his wand and tapped it, being rewarded with a metallic ringing sound.

He froze. Like the sword, there was something disconcertingly familiar about it.

"It's a focus," Diana explained, sensing his disquiet and most likely guessing at its source. While she hadn't heard of the Transmode virus' alteration of Harry's left arm, and much of his left side too, including his left eye, she was an empath and nobody's fool. In any case, she stepped forward and repeated gently, "If you want to take it off, it'll come off."

Harry, slowly but surely, reached out and detached it. As promised, it came away like water flowing off glass, resolving itself back into a bracelet.

"I didn't mean to remind you of something bad," Diana said quietly, into the resulting silence.

"It's okay," Harry said. "It wasn't too much of a reminder. Similar, but very different." He smiled at her. "And better. Much better. Much, _much_ better." He looked at her inquiringly. "You designed it?"

"Auntie 'thena and Auntie Frigga helped me design it, and Mister Dresden gave me a few tips too," Diana said. "It's designed for defence, for either your magic or psychic powers."

Harry, who had been nodding as he examined the bracelet, looked up at her sharply. "For _both?_ " he asked, astonished. He knew that magic and psychic energy were similar enough, and that there was a degree of similarity, but they most definitely were not the same thing. He knew very few people capable of crafting a focus of such adaptability, and while one _was_ his uncle, there were very few others – one of which had been talking to them earlier, before vanishing to who knew where. While apparition was impossible within the school grounds, someone clearly hadn't told Strange. Or he just didn't care. Either way, he could teleport around the school as he pleased, something that gave Hermione headaches.

"It adjusts," Diana explained.

Ron let out a low, impressed whistle, one Harry felt like echoing.

"That's…" he said. "That's incredible, Diana. Thank you."

"You're welcome," Diana said with one of her rare, dazzling smiles, one that only widened as Harry hugged her.

After a few moments, they separated, and Harry examined it, fascinated, then paused, and coughed. "Er… how does it work?"

"Just run your magic or psychic powers through it," Diana said. "It does the rest. You can adjust the resultant shield from there." Her tone turned dry. "Since your durability does not come even close to matching your strength yet, and you tend to fly straight into trouble without a care for your own safety, I thought that it would be best if I gave you something that would allow you to come out the other side in one piece. And that it would help if it did not require you to think all that much about it."

Harry went red as Bucky chuckled softly and Hermione let out a suppressed snort.

"Thanks," he said, a touch wryly, then smiled. "Seriously: thanks."

"You're welcome," Diana said, then looked up across the grounds, sudden interest sparking in her eyes. Harry followed her gaze, and his smile turned a little bit wicked, mischief dancing in his eyes.

"And that, if I'm not mistaken, is Ginny Weasley having a nice afternoon walk in the limited remaining sunlight," he said. "She gave you and Uhtred directions, right?"

"Indeed she did," Uhtred chimed in.

Harry's smile widened. "Then I think I should go and say thanks, don't you?" he said.

OoOoO

They were not the only ones indulging in friendly/familial moments of comfort and joy.

Several hundred miles southwards, Steve watched as Carol sprinted off across Hampstead Heath, the boundless energy of a teenager meeting the boundless stamina of a super soldier and trailing carefree laughter behind, and smiled.

They were on Hampstead Heath, on the outskirts of Central London; a semi rural idyll in the middle of a city that, despite its recent travails, was a thriving metropolis. Somehow, Steve wasn't particularly surprised. He'd seen London bombed to a veritable ruin, and then, even in his time, begin to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes. It would take far more than the wrath of an Elder God of Chaos and the last stand of HYDRA to put it down for good – especially since, according to Loki's testimony, the city itself was actually very much alive.

Why? Because this was where Peggy Carter and, in her early youth, her daughter – _his_ daughter, _their_ daughter, Steve reminded himself – had grown up. It was also where Peggy was buried, though from what little he'd been told, he understood that her grave was as empty as his own. They were taking a visit… though also a little detour. They'd started with breakfast at the country house in the middle of the Heath which, perhaps to make up for its slightly alarming prices, sold good food in portions suitable for super-soldiers. Not that this stopped Carol snaffling his coffee, of course.

"It's nice to see her be a child for once, isn't it?"

He turned to his companion. Alison Carter, formerly Alison O'Neill, and perhaps in another life, where he'd never fallen into the ice, Alison Carter-Rogers, often startled him. Not by using half a century of accumulated espionage experience and super soldier skills to sneak up on him - though she wasn't shy of doing that, when the mood took her - but by simply... being.

Even now, several months after he'd found out that he was a father - and not just a father, but a grandfather twice over, and a great-grandfather several times more - it was still sometimes a shock to look at the elegant, sixty something woman, a mother and a grandmother, and remember that she was his daughter. His and Peggy's, something that hit him all the more in little moments, such as when she, say, just stopped and turned, presenting a profile that was so like Peggy's that even now, it hurt just a little, or when she looked at him with eyes that until this last year he'd only ever seen in a mirror, and an expression that until this last year, he hadn't seen since before he went into the ice. Those, and so many other little, little things, tiny mannerisms here and there...

In some ways, it was easier dealing with Carol, because of the generational remove, the fact that she was still a girl, still younger than he was in more than just a strict chronological sense. Also, Carol was generally fairly easy to read, being a brash, fiery teenager who wore her heart on her sleeve. Her grandmother was a very different story. Steve had read her service record, and come away with awe and more than a little paternal pride. Underneath the cool grandma facade, Alison Carter was one of the finest spies SHIELD had ever produced, a trail-blazer in the Special Agent Division, the first Agent 13. And as recent events had shown, she had lost none of her edge with age and temporary retirement - the age that, without carefully applied make-up, she had stopped showing when she was about Steve's apparent age.

"It is," Steve said. "Especially after..."

"All the things she's seen, all the things she's done," Alison said, nodding.

The two of them watched as Carol slowed down, a broad grin on her face, breathing hardly any faster than usual, clearly delighted at the opportunity just to stretch her legs and run without having to hold back. While Hampstead Heath was a public space, and popular enough even on a cold, grey late October weekend, it was also empty enough one unusually fast teenage girl wasn't going to raise any comment, beyond perhaps an indulgent smile.

"Speaking of those things," Steve said slowly. "Did they have anything to do with her father, who she doesn't get on with at all, and who most likely does not know what she's done and what she's capable of, getting a very sudden promotion that takes him away from his family?"

"Not directly," Alison said coolly. "If what you're really asking is 'did I have anything to do with it?', then the answer is 'Yes'. And were it not for the fact that my daughter and her children love my son-in-law, and love him far more than he deserves, then I would have done far worse." She looked up at Steve. "And before you get on your high horse, dad, it's best that you know why. I learned long ago not to meddle in my children's lives unless I absolutely have to, and this time, Marie gave me the go-ahead."

"Why?" Steve asked.

"You recall, earlier in the summer, when Harry went 'round for dinner at Carol's house and promptly returned to Avengers Mansion with Carol and a hastily packed overnight bag in tow?" Alison asked.

"Yes," Steve said. "I thought that it was just a spur of the moment thing." He shrugged. "I mean, they're close. Very close. To be honest, if they're both being sensible, which I think they are, I prefer to leave what they get up to together up to them."

Alison raised her eyebrows.

"At this point, in my book 'sensible' means that the clothes stay on," Steve said pointedly.

"And in mine," Alison said. "And most probably in theirs too. But that wasn't what you meant."

It wasn't a question.

"No," Steve said. "It…" He trailed off. "They're intimate. Not in a euphemistic sense, but in an emotional sense, and all the more so after what happened to Harry with the Red Room. They're best friends, and I thought that they either just wanted to hang out some more, or…"

"That one or both of them felt that they needed to be around the other that night," Alison said, nodding. "You're wrong, but not by much. It's a good guess." She folded her arms, expression hardening. "No, unless I'm very much mistaken, Harry was trying to protect her."

'From what', Steve was about to say, before he stopped. "From her father?" he asked, in a carefully flat voice. He certainly didn't sound as surprised as might have been expected. For all that many took Steve to be naïve in social affairs, he'd often been unable to play or work as a boy and a young man, and had often served as something of a babysitter for the working mothers of his neighbourhood, in between working on his art portfolio. And even before the serum, there'd been nothing wrong with his hearing. Or his mind.

Alison read his expression like a book. "Joe never laid a hand on Carol or any of his children, or Marie," she said calmly. "If he had, Marie would have walked out with the kids, and Joe? Joe would have spent a very long time wishing that he had never been born." Her own expression hardened again. "No, Joe would never raise a hand to his children. It probably never occurred to him that the psychological abuse he was enacting was for anything but their own good. And it was a nasty, slippery thing, hard to pin down to one defining instance that could be held up as a clear-cut crime. Until that evening." Her gaze followed her granddaughter. "Joe was the one who instigated Harry being invited 'round to the Danvers household. They had dinner, during which Harry apparently displayed a world-class knack for getting under Joe's skin, undercutting every single one of his rather old-fashioned – and by old-fashioned, I mean sexist – notions about the place of women. Entirely politely, of course – from how Marie told it, he's been paying very close attention to Natasha." She waved a hand. "Anyway, dinner was had, and Joe took Harry outside during the washing up, for a little 'man to man chat'. It was at that point that he asked Harry to alter Carol's mind."

"He _what?"_ Steve asked, horrified and furious in equal measure.

"Oh yes," Alison said, tone one of deceptive, detached calm. "He asked Harry to 'make Carol take the right path', to alter her to conform to more traditionally feminine ideals, to be the sort of daughter Joe wanted her to be, rather than the one she was. Harry, needless to say, refused. At some length. He then talked to Carol, and psychically knocked Joe out. At this point, the full enormity of what Joe was suggesting doesn't seem to have sunk in to either of them. They didn't seem to realise what had been asked. When Marie confronted Harry about it, while Carol was packing, his description implied that it was simply a dispute between himself and Joe that he didn't want Carol to be caught up in, hence why he knocked Joe out." Her lips thinned. "I'm willing to bet that they do now."

"So am I," Steve said grimly.

Alison saw his expression, and nodded. "Joe was fortunate, in a way," she said. "His family still love him… and he made the request before Harry's experience with the Red Room. If he had made it after, then he would be in much direr straits."

"You mean that Harry would have killed him," Steve said flatly.

Alison looked up at her father. "Yes," she said quietly. "I do." She sighed. "You understand what I did, now? And why?"

"Now, I'm wondering why he's allowed near your family at all," Steve said quietly.

"Because, for better or for worse, they still love him," Alison said plainly. "And the younger two don't know the truth about the family, much less about the request – though I think that Stevie has his suspicions. Besides, the request was made primarily out of ignorance, rather than malice. Stupid, thoughtless, and selfish, rather than evil, though such things are arguably even more dangerous if left unattended. But he is safe enough, I think, if kept at arm's length. We're planning to taper off contact between him and them in any case, and any contact he does have with them will be closely monitored by me, personally. Also, if he tries anything, Marie will dismember him."

Steve nodded, frowning.

Alison reached down, took his hand, and squeezed gently. "It's all right," she said. "Joe's far away, and knows very well why and what will happen if he steps out of line. And more to the point, Carol's fine. She can look after herself far better than most, and she's got a psychic connection to one of the most powerful psychics of all time, one with a very nasty temper at that." She half-smiled. "I almost pity the person foolish enough to mess with her mind – they'd be biting off significantly more than they bargained for. So less of the frowning, okay?"

Steve's frown lightened somewhat as he heard this, and watched Carol run. "I know," he said. "It's just a bit to take in."

"You can't believe that someone would do that to their own family in modern America?" Alison asked, eyebrow raised.

"Oh, I can believe it," Steve said. "I wish I couldn't." He folded his arms. "Even still, hearing something like that, after what happened to Bucky, what happened to Harry, even what happened to Natasha, and Clint too…" He shook his head, and smiled a half-smile almost identical to his daughter's. "Also, to be honest, I just worry. It's a reflex."

"Welcome to parenthood," Alison said dryly. "Or grandparenthood, or even great-grandparenthood, as the case may be. It's only going to get worse."

"I can hardly wait," Steve said, matching her tone.

Alison chuckled. "I used to do that, when I was her age," she said, changing the subject. "Just run, whenever I got the chance."

"Here?" Steve asked.

Alison nodded. "At first, yes," she said. "This is where I grew up, where mum and her older brother grew up, where their parents grew up, and their parents too." She smiled faintly. "The Carters have been in Hampstead for a long time." She looked out over the city of London, which sprawled out below, a patchwork of grey, cream, and brownish-red, interspersed with the occasional sparkle of glass catching the weak late autumn sunlight. "Though it was much less urban, back then." Her smile faded. "Or rather, we were. Uncle Michael was killed fighting in France before mum ever met you, and gramps and grandma passed away back in the 70s, by which time mum and I had long since moved away."

She looked out at the Heath. "But yes. I would just hare off and run as fast as I could, just because I could, to burn off some of the energy fizzing about inside me."

"I felt a little like that, after I got the serum," Steve remarked. "Straight afterwards, I was a little occupied, but..." He chuckled and shook his head. "When I was on tour with the USO, I used to be up every morning at the crack of dawn, or before, and I'd go running just to burn off some of that energy."

"And no doubt drove the poor chorus girls mad in the process," Alison said, amused. "I certainly didn't make myself popular by always being fresh as a daisy first thing in the morning, I can say that."

Steve chuckled. "Speaking of," he said. "How much further has Carol got to go? I mean," he added. "I'm no expert, but it looks like she's close to a grown woman, physically, at least. Is there going to be another growth spurt later on, or is she near where she's going to be?"

Alison looked thoughtful. "I'm not sure, truthfully. Each super soldier is a little different," she said. "And Carol's abilities were activated in a rather unusual fashion. However, if I had to guess, I'd say she's got a little way to go. She'll most probably be taller than me when all is said and done, and more muscular too, if I'm any judge. She's close enough to that already, of course." She rubbed her jaw. "If I was a betting woman, I'd say that she'd creep up another inch, inch and a half, but that the majority of her growth will be growing into her height, if you follow me. She's not exactly gangly, but." She playfully prodded Steve's bicep. "There's more muscle to come, I think." She gave him a curious look. "Why do you ask?"

Steve shuffled his feet. "Well, I was looking into setting up a training regimen," he said, a little embarrassed. "To learn how to throw her shield properly, that sort of thing." He looked down at Carol, now at the bottom of the hill, and returned a cheerful wave.

"And you wanted to know how much you might have to adjust it as she grew," Alison said, nodding. "Mum and Howard measured my progress as I was growing up, every three months; height, weight, how much I could lift, how fast and far I could run, how high and far I could jump, that sort of thing." She shrugged. "After all, if I was going to pass as normal, I needed to know how far beyond normal I could go." She looked at him. "Anyway, I kept the notes, just in case one of mine might need them, and I've since forwarded them to Tony and Doctor Banner. I'll have them send a copy to you." She smiled faintly. "And, if you wouldn't object, I might have a few suggestions for that training regimen of yours."

It was said lightly, but Steve didn't have to be a super soldier to hear the faint note of caution, of doubt, of instinctive expectation of rejection, underneath.

"Of course," he said. "After all, only one of us has actually been a teenage super soldier."

"Yes," Alison said tartly. "Some lucky persons who will remain nameless managed to avoid that particular Circle of Hell. Teenage hormones are bad enough when they're _not_ super-charged."

Steve smiled wryly. "I don't know," he said. "I think I wouldn't have minded it."

"As a parent, or experiencing it for yourself?" Alison asked, amused, before her eyes widened as she realised what she'd said.

"Either," Steve said, after a moment, ignoring the brief stab of pain. He half-smiled. "Though I think that Bucky wouldn't have been too pleased at havin' to scrounge up enough food for him and a super soldier, not just a bony little shrimp."

"No, I don't think he would have been," Alison said. "That was part of why I stopped at two children, just in case." She laid a hand on her father's arm. "Steve, I'm sorry -"

"It's okay," Steve said. "I made my peace with what happened a while back."

Alison arched a sceptical eyebrow.

"More or less," he amended. "Before I knew about you and the rest, it was more than less. Now I do, there's a whole bunch of other regrets: not bein' around to see you born, not seeing you grow up, not taking your mom dancing, not just being there... I won't lie. It stings. I miss the things and people that I knew, that I lost, and I miss the things and people that I never got the chance to know, that I lost the chance to know, even more. But." He took her hand and squeezed it, feeling strength just like his own in those long, clever fingers. "I'm here now. You're here now." He nodded down at Carol. "My family's here now." He looked at his daughter, whose eyes were damp at the corners. "I want to live for now."

Alison smiled, then pulled him into a hug. Steve hugged her back, closing his eyes briefly and holding her close. "You know," Alison said against his shoulder. "You have more of a way with words than you were ever given credit for."

"Well," Steve said, but didn't end up going any further, because he was interrupted.

"So, is this a private hug? Or can anyone join?"

Both of them turned to see Carol, boots, jeans, and even the bottom of her shirt liberally spattered with grass and drying mud. Her gaze followed her grandmother's and great-grandfather's downwards, before she looked up to meet two identical sets of raised eyebrows. She coughed.

"There was, uh, an unexpected puddle," she said awkwardly.

Steve met his daughter's gaze, and saw her eyes dancing with suppressed laughter. "Well," he said, drawing on all his acting experience to sound grave and serious. "It was a private hug, but I think we can make an exception."

"Just this once," Alison agreed, then beckoned to her granddaughter. "Come on, you mucky pup."

And as his great-granddaughter enveloped herself in the hug, with only token grumbles at being referred to as a 'mucky pup', Steve found himself content. For all, on that particular front, was well.

OoOoO

Back in the north, Harry was plotting something. Hermione _knew_ that he was plotting something, she just wasn't exactly sure _what_. However, it was definitely something: Harry had a very particular look when he was up to something, or planning to get up to something, and it was on his face now. Unusually, however, there was no sign of trouble, and Harry being up to something and trouble were usually two things that went hand in hand.

Certainly, it had started when he'd spotted Ginny – no, wait, it hadn't, Hermione inwardly corrected herself. It had started back when Ron and Diana had been talking and Harry had heard something that caught his interest and made him smile. Hermione hadn't heard it herself, because unlike some, she was operating on ordinary human senses, which forced her to speculate on exactly what it was. And now it involved Ginny, Ginny and Diana, who were chatting happily enough, if a little shyly, and going red… oh my god. They were _flirting_.

 _Figured it out, then?_

Hermione nearly jumped out of her skin. It was one thing to get used to the fact that one of your best friends was a telepathic demigod of unbelievable power…

 _And telekinetic, remember._

… and it was quite another to get used to said friend suddenly speaking directly into your brain. Without showing any other sign that they were paying attention to you.

 _Yes,_ she replied. _I think I have. Harry, are you sure?_

 _Open your Sight, if you want,_ he said. _Or, on second thoughts, don't. Looking at gods, or demigods, through the Sight can be a little startling, and Ginny's got plenty of psychic scars that she might not want you Seeing._ He paused. _I can show you how I know. Well, I say_ _ **show**_ _, but really, it's telepathic._

 _Very well,_ Hermione said, then gasped. Humanity had not evolved a language sufficient for describing the exact details of psychic input. Humanity, after all, had not really had much in the way of conscious psychic senses early on. With a relatively limited number of exceptions, it still hadn't.

However, most tended to describe the psychic realm in terms of colours and visual imagery, for humans, after all, are a very sight based species.

What did Hermione see? She saw… on Diana, warm red attraction-warmth-excitement, pink affection-caring, intertwined with well-concealed pale yellow caution-nervousness and blue worry. On Ginny, she saw the same warm red of attraction-warmth-excitement, to a very similar degree, but the pink of affection-caring was dimmer, buried under significantly greater amounts of blue worry, yellow caution-nervousness, and lots and lots of dark green confusion. But tying them together were strands of gold, ones that waxed and waned as they spoke, but more waxing than waning.

 _Diana knows what she's feeling,_ Harry said quietly. _She understands it. She knows that she's attracted to boys and girls, and she accepts that, she's comfortable with it. Ginny… well. You don't need to be an Omega class psychic to know that she's a very different story._ His mental tone turned grim. _You also don't need to be a psychic like me to know that the psychic scars she's got don't help matters._

 _Could you fix them?_ Hermione asked suddenly, before instantly regretting it.

Harry seemed to catch her train of thought, because he smiled wryly. _If I could fix everyone, I'd have started with myself, yes,_ he said. _But it's not that. The last time I dabbled in psychic surgery, with full consent from the other party – and that is very, very important – it was a much simpler case, the equivalent of clearing out a dirty cut or scrape. And even then, it had some very unexpected side-effects._

 _Like what?_ Hermione asked.

 _Like a permanent psychic connection, of sorts, and a whistle stop tour of my mind,_ Harry said. _Ginny doesn't need either. She's got enough problems in her head without having me in there too, and she's got enough nightmares without adding mine, because my head is not exactly a nice place these days. And those problems…_

 _They go back to the diary, don't they?_ Hermione said. _In Second Year. Ginny still has nightmares about it._

Harry's expression hardened, turning cold and sharp as the sword that now hung at his hip. _I'm not surprised,_ he said. _Imagine a snake, a big snake, one of those ones that crushes its prey to death. That's what Riddle's diary was doing to her mind – crushing it, pulverising the insides, to make it easier to_ _ **swallow**_ _._

Hermione shuddered, as this last was spat with a humming fury. The imagery was beyond horrible.

 _What was happening was beyond horrible. It wasn't obvious. It wasn't open. It wasn't even visible. To the outside world, she looked, and looks, like your average girl. But average girls don't survive ten months of one of the most evil_ _ **things**_ _I have ever come across slowly crushing the life and will out of them while pretending to be their friend, slowly coming to trust that thing while it…_ His fists clenched as he trailed off, and for a moment, just a moment, Hermione could smell woodsmoke.

Then, it was gone, and Harry's mental voice came out, low and measured and controlled. _Riddle's diary raped Ginny's mind. There's no other word for it, and believe me, it's not one I use lightly._ He smiled a bitter smile. _After all – I've been on the receiving end._ The bitter smile faded. _But not for that long. At most, for a little more than half, and that's very technical. Granted, my body was used for worse, but I didn't have the torture of suddenly blacking out and waking up who knew where, having done who knew what._

His gaze shifted to Ginny. _She endured all that, and came out the other side as, well. Someone sane, someone brave… and someone kind._ He shook his head, but with a smile, and this time, it was one of wonder. _She had all the problems in the world, the most miserable first year you could imagine, and yet, in her second year, she went out of her way to make friends with Luna Lovegood, the biggest oddball in her year. Why? Because she thought that she was lonely, that she needed help. That's amazing, it really is._ The smile faded again. _But she was, and is, still injured. Riddle tried, and nearly managed, to squeeze the life out of her. He crushed her mind, carved chunks off it to feed himself. In other words, what was done to her isn't exactly the sort of thing that you walk off. She's got wounds, some of them still open, and some of those are pretty damn big. The others? There's scars, and plenty of them._

 _You're trying to help her,_ Hermione said slowly. _You can't – or, rather, won't – go into her mind, not without her giving permission, and even if she did, you don't know what would happen. So you're setting her and Diana up, to help heal her._

Harry nodded, almost imperceptibly.

 _Did you plan this?_

 _No,_ Harry said. _Not in the least._

 _But you are taking advantage of it._

 _Yep._

 _And making a plan._

 _A small plan, yes,_ Harry said. At Hermione's expression, he added, _take it from me, Hermione. One of the best ways to deal with trauma is with joy, with things that remind you that the world isn't all darkness and rage, misery and pain. Diana knows about what Ginny's been through, the basics at least, I forewarned her, though she's a fairly powerful empath, she'd probably figure it out pretty quickly, and better than me at that._

 _Why better than you?_

 _Because I'm still a bit raw, a bit of a blunt instrument, and she's had a lot more practise. I'm still getting the hang of my own strength – that's how I ended up with a permanent psychic connection by accident. And it wasn't even my first one, though I think that I've had the others for much longer._ His tone softened. _Anyway, Diana's much more precise than I am. She'll be gentle, because she knows that's what Ginny will need. And believe me, she is one of the kindest people I know. She's up there with Hagrid, Jean, Pepper, and Jesus._

Hermione stared at him. "You've met Jesus," she said, in shock.

Harry raised his eyebrows.

"Oh. Sorry."

"What were you two talking about?" Ron asked, puzzled and frowning, breaking off from his conversation with Uhtred.

"Homework from Loki," Harry said casually. "Very boring." Ron looked sceptical. "Unless you like working out how to formulate spells that can be used to access specific different dimensions, that is."

"Oh," Ron said. "And where does Jesus come in?"

"I met him in a strange sort of in-between dimension," Harry explained. "I brought it up as part of theorising how to get there, or to other dimensions like it, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Hermione got stuck on the 'met Jesus' point."

"Okay," Ron said, frowning, but now in puzzlement more than anything else.

"It's understandable: the moment I figured out who he was, my reaction was a lot less polite."

"What did you say?"

"If I remember correctly… 'Jesus Fucking Christ!'"

Ron burst out laughing.

Hermione, meanwhile, just stared at Harry. He'd lied. Oh, she knew that he could lie, and quite well when it came to it, but… never like this. Never to the face of a friend, of his best friend, coming up with a convincing story with such utter ease.

 _You hang around Natasha long enough, you pick up a few tricks,_ Harry said wryly. _Also, I'm not entirely sure how Ron would respond to me setting up his sister._

 _With a girl?_

 _With anyone._

"Okay, but seriously: you've met Jesus," Ron said, now a little stuck on this point.

"Why wouldn't I? He's my first cousin, twice removed."

"Technically, he's a little bit more closely related to Harry than I am," Diana said, matter-of-factly. "We're third cousins."

"Yeah," Harry said. "I went from having almost no family tree, to having one that gets very, very, very complicated." He shrugged, and grinned. "It's a hobby." Then, his eyes darted from Ginny to Diana, then, seemingly satisfied, he turned around. "Now… who else wants to go see Hagrid? I haven't seen him in a while, and I owe him a visit." He turned to Diana and Uhtred. "I've mentioned Hagrid to the two of you, right? Well, in case I haven't, he's the Care of Magical Creatures teacher and groundskeeper here and, occasionally questionable taste in pets aside – yes, Uhtred, he did own the giant talking spiders that founded a colony in the Forest, no, you may not go and find them – he is one of the best and kindest people I have ever known."

OoOoO

Hagrid, as it happened, was delighted to receive them, even as he gently reproached Harry for not having to come to see him earlier.

"Ye've been in and out of the Forest for the last month, with Professor Dumbledore's permission, o' course, an' I've hardly seen hide or hair of you. It's like ye've been avoidin' me. Even in lessons, ye've been keepin' out o' the way."

"Yeah, sorry about that, Hagrid," Harry said, embarrassed. "I…"

Hagrid's beetle black eyes focused on him, then crinkled as he smiled kindly. "Ah, it's alrigh', Harry," he said, patting Harry on the shoulder with a dustbin lid sized hand. "I know that ye've had yer own problems to deal with."

Harry snorted. "Just a bit," he said wryly. "Dumbledore told you?"

"Tha' he did," Hagrid said. "Wasn' all that forthcomin' with the details, mind, but I figured that if I needed 'em, he'd tell me. An' if yer ever wanted to talk about it, then ye know where I live."

Harry smiled, genuinely touched.

"Now," Hagrid said. "I see Ron, Hermione, Ginny, an' Sergeant Barnes, o' course."

"I've said it a thousand times, Hagrid, you can call me James or Bucky," Bucky said patiently.

"An' Captain Rogers has said the same thing. But as I've said a thousand times to the both of yer, I appreciate the offer, but ye'll always be Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers ter me," Hagrid said firmly.

Bucky cast a sidelong glance at the teenagers and explained, "The Commandos, my and Steve's unit, started running a few missions out of Hogwarts in 1943. Around that time, Hagrid was just starting as groundskeeper, if I remember correctly."

"Tha' I was," Hagrid said. "Blimey, that was a long time ago. An' ye've hardly aged a day."

Harry winced.

Bucky, however, merely smiled slightly. "I could say the same to you, Hagrid," he said, amused. "The only real difference is the beard."

Hagrid chuckled, then turned his gaze to Uhtred and Diana and started. "Blimey, an I've completely missed a couple of new friends of yours, 'arry," he said.

Harry simply smiled, noting that Diana was standing firmly on Uhtred's foot, having quickly and accurately discerned that Hagrid's size was not something discussed without him being the one to broach the subject. "Hagrid, these are my friends Uhtred Ullrson and Diana Herculeis. Uhtred's Asgardian, Diana's Olympian, and the daughter of Hercules and Hippolyta. Oh, and Diana's my third cousin on dad's side of the family, and Uhtred's my Sworn Sword. Uhtred, Diana, this is Rubeus Hagrid, groundskeeper of Hogwarts, Professor of Care of Magical Creatures, and someone who's known me since I was a baby."

"How d'ye do," Hagrid said, carefully shaking both their hands.

"Well, thank you," Diana said. "And yourself?"

"Very well, thank ye for askin'," Hagrid said, with a warm smile.

"It is an honour to meet one who has guided and protected my liege," Uhtred said formally, then clasped a hand against his chest and bowed. "Hail, Rubeus Hagrid."

Harry let out a long suffering sigh as everyone but he, Diana, and Bucky stared in surprise. Diana looked entirely unsurprised, while Bucky looked like he was holding back laughter.

"Uhtred," Harry said, pointedly.

Uhtred simply blinked innocently at him, drawing another sigh.

"He does that," Bucky said dryly.

"The position of Sworn Sword is one taken very seriously in Asgard," Diana said matter-of-factly. "Even if only for the purpose of annoying the one the Sword is Sworn to." At Hagrid's puzzled expression, she added, "He means what, every word." Her gaze slid to Harry. "He just also knows that it annoys Harry."

"I've asked him, repeatedly, to be less formal outside of an official occasion or something like that," Harry said flatly. "Usually, he listens. Usually."

"Righ'," Hagrid said, a little uncertainly. "So, uh, who wants tea? And rock cakes? I jus' baked some."

As it turned out, the answer was that almost everyone wanted tea, and to the silent astonishment of most present, Uhtred happily wolfed down all the offered rock cakes, and most of those silently slipped to him by others, pronouncing them delicious.

"How?" Ron whispered in incredulity to Harry.

"I have absolutely no idea," Harry murmured. "But he seems to enjoy them, and it makes Hagrid happy, so I'm not minded to complain."

Ron considered this, then half-shrugged in acknowledgement. His attention shifted to Ginny and Diana, who were quietly chatting away in a corner and, occasionally, giggling. "Those two are getting on well," he observed.

As Harry followed his gaze, he noticed Diana's hand hover over Ginny's, then, after a moment of hesitation, brush it lightly. Both girls met each other's gazes, went pink, then went red when they noticed Ron and Harry's attention, and then an even deeper red when Harry winked.

"Yes," he said, turning away, a delighted smile threatening to break out across his face. "I rather think they are."

The beginnings of that smile, however, were wiped out by Ron's next question.

"Are you planning to have a go at the Triwizard Tournament, then?"

This got the attention of the entire cabin.

"There's going to be an age restriction," Harry said. "So, no."

"Come on, Harry, any impartial judge would pick you in a heartbeat," Ron said. "You're, well… you."

"What is this Tournament?" Uhtred asked, puzzled.

"It's a contest between the three largest magical schools in Europe," Hermione said. "Hogwarts, Beauxbatons, and Durmstrang. Each school would enter a champion, and the three champions would then compete in several tasks testing courage, intelligence, and magical ability. It was held every five years."

"Until the death toll got too high," Harry said sourly. "And while dying might not be a permanent problem for me, I assure you that it isn't generally all that comfortable. It also has other downsides that I'm not exactly eager to explore." He sat back. "Also, there's the small fact that I would be a lot more powerful than anyone Durmstrang or Beauxbatons enter, which might be a bit of a problem."

"You think it would be unfair?" Uhtred asked.

"In the sense that 'challenging for me equals horrifically lethal for normal people'," Harry said. "Yes."

"Unless it was an intelligence test," Bucky remarked.

"True," Harry admitted.

"Harry's righ'," Hagrid said. "For all tha' he'd be the finest champion that Hogwarts could wish for, it wouldn't be fair on the other schools." His gaze settled knowingly on Harry. "Besides – I think Harry's earned a bit o' piece an' quiet, for the time being at least."

Harry cast him a grateful look. "Right," he said, then paused. "Also, I don't think that Bucky would appreciate having to figure out security for me through the Tasks."

Bucky snorted. "It can't be worse than trying to keep Steve out of trouble," he said.

Harry eyed him. "Also, odds are that someone or something would use it as an opportunity to try and kill me," he said.

There was a moment of silence.

"It worries me how calm you are about that, mate," Ron said.

"Why? It's not like it's anything new," Harry said bluntly, then shrugged. "I'm pretty resigned to the fact that I'm going to get into one mess or another. Probably several. But I'd prefer it if it didn't happen at Hogwarts." He took a deep breath. "One, quiet year here. That's all I ask. No Dementors, no evil teachers, no basilisks and –" He stopped sharply, gaze darting over to Ginny.

"And no Voldemort," she said quietly. "Yeah. I'd like that too."

There was another moment of silence, then Hermione coughed.

"Um, Harry," she said carefully. "I hate to say it, but…"

"You and quiet go about as well together as Steve and common sense," Bucky finished dryly.

Harry scowled, but didn't disagree.

Bucky then glanced at his watch. "And I think that I'd best be getting these four students back up to school, and the other two off home," he said.

Hagrid glanced up at his clock and started out of his chair. "Gallopin' gargoyles, is that the time?" he said, startled. "Ye'd best be goin'." He turned. "Uhtred, Diana, it was lovely to meet yer," he said, shaking their hands.

"Likewise, Professor Hagrid," Diana said. "Thank you for the tea and the rock cakes."

"Indeed, they were most delicious," Uhtred put in enthusiastically, before straightening up and adding formally, "it was our honour to meet you, Professor Hagrid. I hope we meet again."

Hagrid looked delighted, as the rest stared at him in barely concealed incredulity. For all his many virtues, his cooking was not among them, and 'delicious' was not an adjective normally applied to it. Nor, frankly, was 'edible'. The products of Hagrid's oven usually went down the throat like a rockslide, sat on the stomach like a cannonball, and had the taste to match. Even Diana had only managed to eat one, and then with a slightly wan smile, had politely refused offers of more.

"See you later, Hagrid," Harry said, then grinned lop-sidedly. "I promise not to avoid you, from now on."

Hagrid chuckled. "Be seein' you, then," he said.

OoOoO

And so the somewhat motley group tramped back up to the castle, as frost began forming on the ground, pausing outside the door.

"Well," Harry said, turning to Uhtred and Diana. "I suppose this is goodbye, for now. Unless you want to stay for dinner?"

The two shared a look, then shook their heads.

"It is a gracious offer," Diana said, a bit reluctantly. "But we need to be off."

"Do you?" Ginny asked, disappointed, before going a little red.

"We have an appointment elsewhere," Uhtred explained.

"In Asgard," Harry said.

"No, actually," Diana said. "Auntie 'thena and Uncle Loki were talking to Professor Xavier about setting up a bit of an 'exchange program'. Professor Xavier offered us the chance to spend a few months at his school."

"Until Yule, at least," Uhtred confirmed.

"That's… that's great," Harry said, rather surprised. "And unexpected. I thought that Professor X was really busy, with, you know…"

"My old friend Charles has been on something of a recruiting drive from amongst his former students and colleagues," Dumbledore said, appearing out of, apparently, nowhere, and making everyone but Bucky jump – in Diana's case, about fifteen feet into the air. "He feels that his newly expanded student body requires a newly expanded teaching faculty," he continued serenely. "And, Master Ullrson, Princess Diana, I do not think that he will mind if you stop here for dinner. Nor, in fact, do I. Indeed, time differences being what they are, it means that you will arrive at Charles' Institute just after lunch, something that should be convenient for us all." He paused. "Unless, of course, you would rather depart early."

Uhtred and Diana shared another look, then both inclined their heads. "We would be honoured to accept your invitation, Professor," Diana said.

"Excellent," Dumbledore said genially. "And Harry, I would like to speak to you after dinner."

Harry looked wary. "Whatever it is, Professor, I didn't do it," he said.

Dumbledore chuckled. "This is not a disciplinary matter, Harry," he said. "Merely that 'Professor Bach' –"

"They all know, Professor," Harry said, cutting across him. "Well, Ginny doesn't, and technically Uhtred and Diana don't either, but they could probably figure it out very quickly and I don't see any reason not to tell Ginny."

Dumbledore inclined his head. "Very well," he said.

"What is it about Professor Bach?" Ginny asked, puzzled.

"He's really Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme," Harry said bluntly, before pausing. "Though, I suppose that technically, 'Gwion Bach' _is_ his real name."

"Indeed," Dumbledore said, barely concealing his amusement at Ginny's stunned reaction. "We wish to speak to you about your next lesson with him. It will involve a field trip."

Harry's eyebrows shot up. "Okay, Professor," he said.

"Excellent. I will see you later," Dumbledore said. "Master Ullrson, Princess Diana, I hope you enjoy your time at Hogwarts, brief as it may be." And as he turned to leave, he said over his shoulder, "incidentally, Harry, I am rather fond of Ice Mice."

As he departed, there was a puzzled silence, then Uhtred said slowly, "Harry, does he wish you to bring him a gift of frozen mice?"

"Ice Mice are Wizarding sweets, Uhtred," Hermione explained. "I think he was giving Harry the password to his office."

"He was," Bucky confirmed. "For as long as I've known him, Dumbledore's been notorious for his sweet tooth."

"Ah. That makes much more sense."

OoOoO

Dinner passed without too much incident – Uhtred, being loud and gregarious and armed with a very large (and thus cool) axe, proved a near instant hit, and his good looks attracted more than a few admirers. There was, Harry noted, some crossover between the demographics. Diana, meanwhile, was similarly popular, being warm, charming, and stunningly pretty. And then, of course, there was the inevitable fact that among the students sorted into a House whose founder's most famous surviving artefact was his enchanted sword, Harry's newly acquired blade attracted awe, admiration, and more than a few visitors from other tables.

Including, as it happened, one Draco Malfoy.

"Evening, Harry," he said, as if he hadn't just ambled straight into what was still considered Enemy Territory for Slytherins, even if their surname wasn't Malfoy.

"Draco," Harry replied evenly. "How's things?"

"Pretty well, pretty well," Draco said. "I just came over to make my introductions."

Harry, taking the very obvious hint, duly made them, adding carefully that Draco had been rather helpful, and that he was nothing like his father, who neither Uhtred nor Diana had particularly good associations with.

Thankfully, the introductions went smoothly, if a touch warily. The two had, after all, heard enough about Draco Malfoy to know that there was something very unusual about him, that he knew things that ordinary mortal teenagers should not. However, after exchanging a few significant looks, they greeted him politely enough.

After the greetings were done, Draco then turned, as many others did, to Harry's sword.

"May I see it?" he asked, and, once he held it, examined it carefully. "Very nice," he murmured. "Superbly balanced. Sharp as a razor, of course – or rather, sharper. And enchanted by Loki, unless I'm much mistaken."

"You aren't," Harry said, shooting a warning look at the very surprised Uhtred. It was one thing to be able to tell a blade was enchanted. It was quite another to be able to tell, at a glance, who it was enchanted by.

Draco nodded, then inclined his head to Uhtred. "I commend your craftsmanship, Master Ullrson," he said. "It is a superb sword." He raised an eyebrow. "Resembling… a shashka?"

"Coincidence," Harry said shortly.

"Harry, Doctor Strange is heavily involved in your life. I am not sure if, for you, coincidence still exists," Draco said bluntly.

Harry sighed. "Allow me to cling on to my delusions a little while longer, please?" he said, in mock despair. "Also, Strange doesn't interfere where he doesn't feel he needs to. So…"

"So if something's going to happen anyway by coincidence, then he'll just leave it be," Hermione finished, darting a glance up at the high table. Strange, still in his Professor Bach guise, looked over at them and smirked.

"Ain't broke, don't fix it," Bucky said mildly.

"So, it could still be a coincidence," Harry said.

"Maybe," Draco said dubiously. "Anyway, I bid you all good evening."

And Harry, Bucky, Uhtred, Diana and, surprisingly, Hermione and Ginny, were the only people at the table who even acknowledged his goodbye.

OoOoO

The remainder of dinner passed quietly enough, with Uhtred resuming his charming of most Gryffindors from Fifth Year downwards, while Diana and Ginny continued talking quietly. After dinner finished, Harry made a point of quietly telling the two girls that his phone had the Institute's number, and as far as he was concerned, unless he actually needed it, Ginny could borrow his phone any time she wished.

"It's quicker and less strain on Hedwig," he said casually, while resolving to buy Ginny and Diana magic proofed Starkphones as soon as possible.

He waved them goodbye, watching as they called down the Bifrost, before heading off towards Dumbledore's office. And as he did, Hermione fell into step beside him. She was his only companion, as Bucky had stayed behind to talk to Professor McGonagall, and had arranged to meet Harry outside Dumbledore's office once he was done.

"You're setting the two of them up," she said. It wasn't a question.

 _Yes,_ Harry replied. When Hermione opened her mouth to ask why he wasn't just speaking, he added, _Walls have ears. Or rather, Peeves does._

Hermione looked around warily, and spotted the poltergeist one floor down, messing with a suit of armour, trying to make it tell rude jokes. He was having a surprising amount of success.

 _Fine,_ she said. _Let me get this clear: you're setting Ginny and Diana up, to help Ginny. And making sure that they stay in contact._

 _For the most part, yes._

 _Most part?_

 _Ginny's not the only one with issues,_ Harry replied quietly. _Just because Diana's all calm and confident and all that doesn't mean that she's all fine up here._ He tapped his skull for emphasis. _She's had a pretty rough life._

 _And you think setting the two of them up will help,_ Hermione said.

Harry cocked an eyebrow. _You don't approve?_

 _What? No – I mean, yes, I mean… I worry. I'm not bothered that Diana's a girl, if that's what you're thinking. I'm just worried. This would be Ginny's first relationship, and as you have pointed out, she is not exactly in a perfect mental place – and nor, from what you suggest, is Diana. I don't want the two of them accidentally making each other's problems worse, rather than better._ She looked at Harry. _Because that could happen, couldn't it?_

 _It could,_ Harry said slowly.

 _Harry, you all but said that's part of why you're not dating Carol._

 _No, I said that the problem was me having too many problems to be ready for a relationship and…_ He noticed Hermione's pointed look. _Okay, fair point._

 _Different sides of the same problem,_ Hermione said.

 _Maybe,_ Harry said, frowning. _But for now, all they'll be doing is talking and flirting, and that seems to make them both happy._

 _Yes,_ Hermione agreed. _It does._ She laid a hand on Harry's arm. _Harry, what you're trying, it's risky and impulsive._

 _So I'm coming to realise,_ Harry said sourly.

 _But it's also sweet, intention-wise at least,_ Hermione said. _And it's very kind. And, for the time being, at least, it's made Ginny as happy as I've seen her. So, speaking as Ginny's friend – thank you._

Harry smiled. "You're welcome," he said. Hermione returned the smile, before heading off towards Gryffindor Tower. Harry, meanwhile, looked up at the gargoyle that guarded Dumbledore's office and said, "Ice Mice."

The gargoyle stepped aside. Harry took a deep breath. "Right," he muttered. "Here we go."

OoOoO

Many hundreds of miles away, there was a house. It was a large, rather pleasant house, a manor house, even. And like many large, pleasant manor houses, it had been in the same family for generations. Unlike many such houses, however, that same family had been composed entirely of the same individual. It was also one of many such properties that that individual owned, and almost none of them were isolated gothic castles with a surfeit of cobwebs, guttering torches, and lurching servants called Igor. Or possibly Renfield. Either way, its owner disdained such things. For one, they were conspicuous. For another, they leaked.

In the living room of that not-especially-conspicuous-considering-and-certainly-not-leaky manor house, the house's owner sat in a large, stylishly ornate, almost throne like chair that dated from the 15th century. Much like the person sitting in it. He didn't look his age, though he did look in his late fifties, though well preserved, and well dressed, if in slightly old fashioned evening gear. He was tall, with the lean, rangy build of a swordsman, greying, receding dark hair swept back from his forehead, and a short, neatly trimmed beard surrounding piercing eyes. At first glance, he seemed nothing more than perhaps a politician in his late prime, or an experienced captain of industry. At second, to those who really knew how to look, he was pure predator.

The man opposite him – though man, or even human, was a rather tenuous description these days for both of them – was not nearly so old, but quite old enough to be going on with, whether he looked it or not. He was relatively tall as well, with dark hair and dark eyes, and handsome features too, the sort that one might take for an actor, or a suit wearing model. But that handsomeness would set alarm bells ringing, because something seemed false about it, something seemed cold. It was the handsomeness of a statue, not a man, which, it could be said, was appropriate, for the man who wore that visage had not really been a man for quite some time. And to those whose instincts were primed, he too exuded the aura of a predator.

Both of them hard glasses of dark red liquid in hand. It might have been wine. But it most probably wasn't.

"So," the house's owner said. "Let us get down to business."

"Business, sire?" his guest asked, feigning surprise. At his host's cold expression, he relented with a colder smile. "Very well. I have an offer to our mutual advantage, Lord Dracula."

"So you said," Dracula said. "And if you hadn't detailed what you had to offer, and why you knew I wanted it, I would have dismissed you out of hand. I am not in the mood to play games, Voldemort." He leaned forward. "How can you procure me the blood of a true super soldier, when so many have failed, and what do you want in return for it?

"Procure it for you? No," Voldemort said. "However, I can tell you how to procure it, and where to procure it from. I can even arrange distractions that will keep the Avengers and the White Council alike occupied, and most likely, even what remains of SHIELD too. As for what I want in return, that's quite simple – I want you to play a part, this All Hallows Eve, in keeping the likes of the Avengers and the White Council over-stretched, because I have plans of my own. All I need is your involvement." He paused. "Though a few expendable lesser vampires would help. I'll swap them for some Dementors that I domesticated and someone rather powerful and very stupid for you to turn."

Dracula snorted. "Halloween. I somehow doubt that that is a coincidence," he said.

Voldemort smiled another cold smile. "No," he said. "It isn't."

"And presuming I lend you my support, what would I be getting in return?"

"Captain Steven Rogers and Agent Margaret Carter had a daughter, who was passed off as Carter's much younger sister. She was a super soldier, but she is just as dangerous and well protected as her father, now that she's SHIELD's Deputy Director once more. She, in turn, had two children, who were not quite super soldiers, little more than human, and most likely useless to you. They have had children of their own, and amongst the mortal dross, gold can be found: one fully realised super soldier. Still young. Still inexperienced. Still easy prey for the King of the Grey Court." He smiled that cold smile. "Give me your support, Lord Dracula, and you will have their name, location, and all the information you could need to claim their blood for your own."

Dracula regarded him steadily. "Hmm," he said. "Interesting." Then, in an instant, he towered over Voldemort, the Dark Lord's jaw in his grasp, tilted up so Voldemort met his gaze. "Though the order of events will be reversed, I think." His eyes flared red as he plucked Voldemort from his chair and pulled him up to eye level as easily as a man plucking a loose strand of hair. "I warned you that I did not wish to play games, Voldemort. I will not be your pawn. Knowing who your enemies are, I do not particularly wish to be your partner, for fighting the Avengers and Asgard would swiftly grow tiresome. I will not be manipulated into being either. Is that understood?"

Voldemort, eyes burning with hate, nodded slowly.

Dracula dropped him with a thump, then pointedly turned his back on him as he refilled his glass from a decanter.

"In case you are wondering why your magic isn't working, or your psychic abilities, the answer is that I am suppressing them," Dracula continued calmly, as Voldemort slowly got to his feet. "It takes power, and constant focus, but I have both in abundance." He turned back to Voldemort and sipped at his glass. "You will give me the information you have. All of it. I will know if you withhold any or seek to embellish what you have. And if it is sufficient, then, and only then, will you have my support. Are we agreed?"

Voldemort glared at him, then smiled a thin smile. "Yes," he said. "Yes, we are."

 **My, my, what's being plotted here? Why would Voldemort want to set Dracula on Carol? To draw out Harry? Or does he have bigger aims in mind? Wait and see, my friends, that's all I'll say.**

 **Also, yes, I based Dracula on Charles Dance a.k.a. Tywin Lannister, albeit with darker hair. I wanted to underline that this is not the seductive sex god/cliché of a thousand films, books, and comics. This a man who earned the nickname 'the Impaler' for his real life exploits, and most probably would have been turned in later life, for his prowess as an effective ruler and ruthless commander. This is a Vampire** _ **King**_ **. And yes, he just swatted Voldemort like a fly. Of course, Voldemort's got plans, and intends to come out on top in this little alliance of convenience. Because for the most part, he just wants Dracula as a distraction. A distraction and, of course, something to make Harry angry…**

 **Anyway, sweetness, interspersed with ominous plotting. Yep, I'm setting events on a roll for the next major arc which, per a friend of mine who goes by Thunder Stag on here, is most likely going to be called 'Bloody Hell'. I like it, it's irreverent, yet just a bit ominous when you think about it.**


	25. Chapter 25: Perspective Shift

**Here we are again, with chapter 25. An apt milestone, for several reasons, not least of which being that this is the last chapter that I'm going to post from my old computer (my old one is quite literally falling apart). Anyway, I'm also not sure how much time I'll have to write more chapters in the immediate future, having a new term to come in my Masters. I'll be cracking on with my dissertation, things will be getting serious, stuff like that.**

 **Anyhow, as for the chapter itself, I wrote too much, again. Surprise! Or, to be more accurate, I tried to cover too much in one chapter, again, so it's had to be split up. Again. I say once more: surprise! So, yeah, it'll be the next chapter that rounds off the prelude to the next arc,** _ **Bloody Hell**_ **, and gets it started. This one, though, is a reasonably important chapter in terms of character development. Different sides to certain characters are explored, different perspectives (including viewpoint characters), even different tactics too. And, I think, we get to see a bit under Harry's metaphorical armour without him collapsing in a pile of misery after the latest traumatic experience. A piece of the puzzle filling in a larger picture, shall we say.**

 **Also, I'd like to say thanks to the Bibliomaniac for her assistance with Jewish traditions related to godfatherhood, for extensive assistance with science stuff (so sue me, I'm a Humanities student), and general occasional story crit. In the meantime, please do go and read her Doctor Who/Harry Potter crossover** _ **De-Aged**_ **on fanfiction dot net, it's excellent** _ **.**_ **You know, once you're done here, that is.**

Minerva McGonagall had, she felt, dealt with recent events quite well. It helped that she was not an easily worried woman, one well practised in adjusting to the extraordinary and the horrific alike. She'd fought alongside Captain America and his Howling Commandos straight out of school, battling Grindelwald and HYDRA across Europe. She had become a teacher at Hogwarts, one of the oldest magical schools in the world, a place soaked in magic for millennia and consequently rather strange, even at the best of times. She had seen Voldemort's rise to power and stood against him, losing friends and students to him and his fanatics. And she had seen the instrument of his fall, a little boy who had shrugged off the Killing Curse from a Dark Lord, with nothing to show for it but a lightning bolt scar, first in infancy, then a decade later in early adolescence. A little boy who was now not so little, and for whom she was very worried indeed.

Even Hagrid's reports of what he was like – which, among other things, had entirely confirmed her belief that the Dursleys were the last sort of people who should be entrusted with a magical child – had not prepared her for the shock. The resemblance he bore to his father was uncanny: he was practically James in miniature, right down to the glasses. He could almost be mistaken for James, but for two things. That famous lightning bolt scar and those arresting emerald green eyes, the ones so much like his mother's that sometimes left Minerva with the feeling that Lily was looking at her from wherever she had gone after her untimely death.

At first, he had seemed a normal and, it had to be said, rather lovely boy, combining the best of his parents in his gentle nature. He had James' genius on a broom too, and while he didn't seem to have either parent's academic gifts, it was very clear that it wasn't for lack of wits. Just direction. Direction and, she darkly suspected, a young life spent having to conceal his intellect so as not to outshine the Dursleys' own pig of a son.

However, it had not taken long for Harry to prove every bit as troublesome as his father had been, albeit in a different fashion – where James Potter and his so-called 'Marauders' were mostly interested in pranks, Harry had a nose for trouble that beggared belief. There was the matter of the troll, which would have been quite enough to be going on with. But then, at the end of the year, after a long and complex series of events, Harry Potter wound up facing a fully grown dark wizard over the Philosopher's Stone. That was the first sign that his protection endured: Harry was found unconscious, the Stone in his pocket, and without a mark on him. His enemy, by contrast, was burnt to a crisp.

After that, the incidents flew thicker and faster, from the relatively minor, like the affair with the flying car (very James Potter-esque, as Snape complained to anyone who would listen) to the increasingly horrifying, such as the incident with the Basilisk in the Chamber of Secrets. And it had only got worse, following the revelations about his heritage, and the extent of Doctor Strange's meddling. And no matter how many people tried to protect him; her, Dumbledore, and his newly rediscovered father, James a.k.a. Thor Odinson, most of all, he always found a new way to place himself in peril. Peril that, each time, he survived, against all the odds. And when he did not survive, he came back anyway, stronger than ever.

But all that, it left its mark, in ways that went far beyond the physical, scars that steadily accumulated. So, after he had run yet another gauntlet of horrors or two over the summer, Minerva had found herself having to deal with a student who at fourteen years old, had a collection of mental scars that rivalled that of Mad-Eye Moody and raw power that rivalled, if not already surpassed, that of Albus Dumbledore himself. He'd got better recently, though. And much of that, a consistent tempering influence, had been none other than Sergeant James Buchanan 'Bucky' Barnes. The man who, when she was barely out of Hogwarts, she had fought alongside. Fallen in love with. And, ultimately, had a child by, one she had only discovered she was going to have after the man she loved fell to his apparent death from a mountain train. Then, Steve, Bucky's commander and best friend, had apparently suffered much the same fate mere days later – and, in a piece of fairly spectacular irony, the woman that he had loved, Peggy Carter, had discovered that she was pregnant as well – and, like Minerva, with a girl.

There the stories had diverged. Then, both Steve, and later Bucky, had returned. At first glance, he seemed to be exactly as the cover story claimed, mirroring Steve even in his fate: to have been found and frozen by HYDRA for all those years as an experiment and a trophy, hardly ageing a day. At first glance, he looked like the man she had known. But a second glance revealed that he had changed, even if it concealed just how much.

Now, he was guiding Harry, a young man who had suffered much the same fate, albeit for a much shorter length of time. He'd even lost his left arm (and then, somehow, grown it back). And very few people knew that, either.

Minerva wasn't easily shaken. But considering that her first love and father of her child was strolling around the castle on a daily basis as if the years hadn't touched him whilst hiding a past as a mentally enslaved Russian assassin, mentoring a possibly immortal and impossibly traumatised teenage demigod and world-class trouble magnet, who had recently suffered a very similar fate, having also quite literally come back from the dead and blown up half the school, and was also being tutored by a disguised and incongruously Welsh accented Sorcerer Supreme, she felt entitled to it. Not much. Just a little bit. Especially since all that only scratched the surface.

It all certainly seemed to be doing a number on James – and while he went by Thor these days, he readily responded to both – who was at the heart of the maelstrom, one frequently stirred up by his son's many enemies and unparalleled nose for trouble. He had, when she'd first seen him again, been somewhat shocked, but delighted to have found his son once more, and they clearly loved each other dearly. Anyone who saw them together would be hard pressed indeed to deny that. But as much stress as Minerva herself had gone through as Harry's teacher, it had to be multiplied a thousandfold as his father. It was clear that James was unbelievably proud of his son, and even more clear that he would do anything to protect him. But how do you protect someone who consciously avoids every conceivable measure put in place for his protection?

Well, Minerva rather suspected, a good start would be to attach the most infamous spy and assassin in modern history to him as a bodyguard, someone who knew all the tricks, and had invented quite a few of them. Certainly, to her relief, Harry seemed to mind Bucky and respect the older man, even at his most difficult. It made sense, she supposed – Bucky was a positive male role model, of the sort that Harry had almost entirely lacked until his father's reappearance in his life. Dumbledore had been kind to him, Remus Lupin had served as a mentor to him, but they had both been teachers, with a duty of care to hundreds of other students.

No, until James' reappearance, male role models had been in short supply in Harry's life. The closest Harry had had was Hagrid, who was extremely fond of Harry, a feeling that was clearly reciprocated, but… well. Hagrid, Minerva knew, was as honest and upright a man as one could hope for, a loyal and gentle soul. However, he was extremely bad at keeping secrets and showed a frightening lack of judgement when it came to pets. A noble and admirable man, certainly, but not, perhaps, a role model.

Then, James had returned as Thor, stepping into the breach, and bringing with him an eclectic collection of others for Harry to model himself on, who were a motley collection to say the least. But they had loved him, and the poor boy had responded to affection with the quiet desperation of one unused to such things, soaking it up like a sponge. And inevitably, Minerva's pastoral eye had picked out how he had begun to mimic certain traits from each – James/Thor's brashness, Captain Rogers' air of command, Stark's charm, and Loki's legendary silver tongue, to name but a few.

Harry was definitely impressionable. Teenage boys always were, always had been, and most likely, always would be. Now, he was mirroring Bucky, responding to him, listening to him, and no wonder: Bucky was a figure he respected, one who he understood, and crucially, one who he believed understood him. They had been through very similar experiences, and had owed their remaining grasp on humanity to a bond with a stunningly beautiful red-haired woman with striking green eyes.

In Bucky's case, that had been Natasha Romanova who, it was painfully obvious, was the love of his life. Minerva couldn't pretend that that didn't sting, and more than just a little. But she was a practical woman, and one to whom age had granted if not wisdom, then perspective. She had long since grieved for Bucky and for what might have been, and moved on. Meeting Clint for the first time, then Bucky once more, had reopened some of those wounds, but only briefly. She entertained the odd wistful thought, every now and then, but no more. Mostly, she was glad that Natasha had helped prevent the man that they both loved from remaining in the darkness and cold that his torturers had imposed on him.

Harry's case was rather stranger, and the bond with the young woman who had saved him was rather different – it was far more familial than romantic, from what little Minerva had seen in Asgard, of how he interacted with the young woman generally referred to as 'Maddie', whose story had let her first utterly horrified, then downright murderous. While she despised Dementors and everything they represented, if there was one man who deserved the Dementor's Kiss, it was Doctor Nathaniel Essex.

In any case, his story mirrored Bucky's, and so he began to mirror the man himself. But as both she and Bucky knew, this was a mixed blessing. For where Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes was a noble and upstanding individual, one that any parent, guardian or teacher would be glad to see their child grow up to be like, there was another side of the coin: the Winter Soldier. He was a very different story, a dark legend and modern day monster, who most erroneously believed to be dead, much like Harry's own dark alter ego: the Red Son. That was grounds for worry. Especially when you factored in the not insignificant influence exercised by his private tutor, who was none other than the astoundingly brilliant, ruthlessly Machiavellian, and unbelievably dangerous Doctor Stephen Strange.

So Minerva did the most sensible thing she could: spoke to Bucky.

His immediate response was not, it had to be said, particularly helpful and made whilst methodically cleaning one of his eyewatering number of pieces of muggle weaponry.

"Harry's getting better."

Minerva folded her arms and arched an eyebrow. "And what, exactly, does that mean, James Buchanan Barnes?" she asked tartly.

Bucky met her gaze, and said mildly, "That he's coming to terms with what's happened to him faster than anyone expected. That he's getting his temper under control, and his powers with it. That you shouldn't worry about blasting any of his fellow students to smithereens."

"I wasn't," Minerva began, then, with no little shame, sighed. "All right. I was, just a bit. The power he possesses is colossal, and volatile, even before you take into account all that he's been through and…"

"The Phoenix," Bucky said.

"Yes," Minerva said. "I worry for Harry. But I also have to worry for the rest of my students, and I want to be sure that this is not a false dawn."

Bucky seemed to consider this for a moment, then said, "I can't be certain. I'm not a psychologist, or a telepath, or anything like that. And while what Harry and I went through is very similar, it's not the same. Harry and I, we're not the same. The duration of what we both went through, the responses, they aren't the same either."

"But you are the person with perhaps the greatest insight," Minerva said quietly. "You are, after all, around him day in and day out. He trusts you. He confides in you." She caught his expression. "I don't want you to break any trust he has placed in you, nor share any secrets, not unless they relate to the safety of the school. I just want a… general picture, I suppose."

Bucky nodded slowly. "Then I'd say that, as he is now, presuming that there isn't a setback, that something unexpected doesn't happen…" His wry smile spoke volumes of wha he thought of the chances of that. "Then I'd say that he's getting better. Much better. He's got a new hobby, for one thing."

"Hobby?" Minerva asked, with mingled surprise and suspicion.

"Matchmaking," Bucky said cheerfully.

"Heaven help us all," Minerva muttered.

Bucky blinked at her innocently. "I wasn't aware that you were looking into dating again, Minerva, but I'm sure Harry would be happy to help."

Minerva rolled her eyes. "That's not what I meant, and you know it," she said.

"A very wise young lady taught me many years ago not to make assumptions," Bucky said gravely.

Minerva's lips twitched in remembrance. "Yes, she did, didn't she," she said.

They shared a long look, then Bucky sat back, tone business-like. "Harry's recovery is likely to continue, and the lessons discussed with Doctor Strange and Professor Dumbledore should help."

"Yes," Minerva said. "The lessons."

Bucky raised an eyebrow. "You disapprove?"

"Of the idea of specific tailored lessons, beyond those that Doctor Strange is already giving him? No, quite the opposite. Harry has recently expressed an actual interest in his lessons once more, which is something of a relief," Minerva said. "And does not have to be reminded so often to actually use his magic, which is another. Professor Zatara in particular says that he's been picking up her teachings like he was born to it – which, considering his uncle, he might well have been."

"That he might," Bucky agreed. "But?"

"But," Minerva said. "I have some reservations over the choice of teacher."

OoOoO

 _Several hours earlier_

Harry opened the door to Dumbledore's office, then stopped.

"Well," he said, after a moment, as his gaze swept the room. "I've got to say, I didn't see this coming."

"And good evening to you too, Mister Thorson," a rich, amused voice said. Its owner was a tall man who could have been anywhere between forty and sixty, an ambiguity increased by his iron grey hair. He was well dressed, in what looked like a simple knee length steel grey coat with rust-red lining over similarly grey trousers and black boots. In other words, something that would fit in just fine in the Wizarding World, and not attract many, if any, looks outside it, and help its owner pass for a middle aged professional gentleman.

He was, however, as Harry well knew, nothing of the sort. His birth-name was Erik Magnus Lensherr, but in certain circles, he was better known by his _nom de guerre_ : Magneto. As names went, it should have been faintly ridiculous – certainly not the stuff of dark legend. And yet, like the man who used it, it carried far more power than was immediately apparent.

Also, when it came to being taken seriously, it probably helped to be an Omega class being, with the power to manipulate one of the fundamental forces of the universe on a global scale and the knowledge to do so effectively. Few people are willing to sass someone who can and has performed feats more appropriate to a wrathful god than anyone mortal. Even Harry, who was in Magneto's weight class, broadly speaking, was disposed to tread carefully.

He knew that, these days, Magneto was, as these things went, 'one of the good guys', that he had reformed, like his uncle Loki, something that even Wanda accepted (albeit grudgingly).

He knew that Magneto had played a key part in the Battle of London, near single-handedly turning HYDRA's _Dreadnought_ to scrap, and that he'd earned his vaunted reputation the hard way.

He also knew that Magneto had singlehandedly taken down the Winter Guard and the Red Son, the former without even breaking the sweat, and the latter – who had, in almost every way, been him – while holding back. This was a little bit of a sticking point. Harry was deeply grateful that the Red Son had been stopped, especially since he had taken to using crowded passenger planes as projectile weapons, and even more grateful that the Transmode Virus had been stopped before it turned his entire body into a techno-organic abomination. And the details of his Red Son memories were locked away behind a wall of thought of Professor Xavier's construction, which Harry had not pulled down. All of this was true and well understood by Harry himself.

However, having half your body blasted into ruin and then hit by an electromagnetic pulse sufficient to fry most electronics within a hundred miles is the sort of thing that gives one pause for thought, even if you weren't in your body at the time and can't remember the exact details.

There was a long silence as Harry mulled this over and those in the office - Magneto, Professor Dumbledore, and of course, Doctor Strange – politely waited for him to do so.

"Well," Harry said eventually. "On the upside, this is going better than our last meeting."

Magneto smiled faintly. "Yes, it is," he said. "Much to my relief." His grey eyes swept over Harry. "I am glad to see you well. Or, at least, better."

Harry's lips twitched. "Better would probably be the way to put it," he said. "Well?" He tipped his head thoughtfully. "That's a work in progress."

"As such things often are," Dumbledore said. "Please take a seat, Harry."

Harry took the indicated seat, and listened with some puzzlement as Dumbledore continued his thoughts.

"Though I thin that it could be argued that we are all works in progress, all of the time," the Headmaster said. "And are for so long as we live." He smiled. "It is a view I am rather fond of – it gives us something to always strive for."

"But on the other hand, it is also pleasant to consider the idea that one day, one might be complete. And that one's labours might be completed with it."

Everyone turned to the thus far uncharacteristically silent fourth man in the room. Doctor Strange favoured them all with a faintly wistful smile, then turned politely to Dumbledore, as if requesting permission to speak. This was possibly the most surprising thing Harry had seen on a day with no shortage of surprises. Until now, he'd been of the impression that Strange didn't generally both asking permission to speak, it being something he treated much the same way he did the laws of nature – as something that applied to other people. Up until now, it seemed as if he just picked his moment and spoke as he pleased. Then again, he _had_ said earlier that he was trying to be nicer…

In any case, Dumbledore indicated with a gesture that Strange had the floor, and so Strange turned to Harry.

"I said that I would teach you, Harry, and so I am," he said bluntly. "However, as part of my impromptu curriculum, you will be having other lessons."

"With Magneto?" Harry asked, glancing at the man in question.

"And others that I think have something to teach you," Strange said. "In the prest, the past, and perhaps the future too."

Harry's jaw dropped, and Strange smiled, this one wickedly amused.

"Having a time traveller for a teacher _does_ have perks, you know."

Harry's jaw stayed dropped.

"I might be amenable to a side-trip, here and there. However, I draw the line at building a TARDIS."

"That… that implies that you could," Harry said.

"But I won't," Strange said. "In any case, we will be taking a little field trip. One of several."

At Harry's raised eyebrow, Magneto added, "Doctor Strange has also consented to come and consult on the treatment of a young mutant in my care. Normally, I would be happy to teach you here, but since Ruth is living in my home, in isolation due to her condition and therefore perhaps best not moved, we thought that it would be easiest to combine the two."

"I thought that it might help with… perspective," Strange put in, before glancing at Dumbledore.

"And I felt that this would be perfectly all right so long as these lessons took place on weekends and during holidays," the headmaster said, perfectly serene. "Oh, and I trust that Lady Herculeis and Master Ullrson departed comfortably?"

"They were all in one piece, Professor, if that's what you mean," Harry said glibly.

Magneto winced and Harry felt a spasm of guilt, one only magnified by Dumbledore's disapproving expression.

"Sorry," he added. "They were fine." His gaze shifted to Magneto, then to Strange. "They said they were going as exchange students to Xavier's, actually."

Both of Magneto's eyebrows shot up, and he turned to Strange. "Well, that is quite a turn-up for the books," he said mildly.

"Yes, it is, isn't it?" Strange said cheerfully.

Harry internally marked this off as the point in the conversation by which Strange had decided to stop saying anything useful. He was, mostly, correct, as Strange then stood up.

"Harry, I will see you at eight o'clock sharp tomorrow morning in the Entrance Hall," he said, as he made to pass Harry.

"Does that mean you want me awake, dressed, etcetera in the Entrance Hall at eight, that you've predicted I'll be there at that time, or that I'm going to find myself in the Entrance Hall at eight whether I like it or not?" Harry asked suspiciously.

Strange turned and smirked. "Now, now. I can't go telling you everything, Harry," he said. "That would take all the fun out of life." He paused. "Oh, I almost forgot." He reached into a pocket and pulled out a folded piece of paper. "Your reading list. The books are by your bed, this just lists them in order of priority." He chuckled at Harry's expression. "Don't worry – I bookmarked only the relevant parts."

"I can hardly wait," Harry said flatly.

Strange shrugged. "Knowledge is power," he said. "And power is rarely enjoyable to acquire."

Harry eyed him. "… I'm going to need whatever's in these books, aren't I?" he said. "And soon."

Strange considered this. "You could manage without them," he said eventually. "The same way that, in theory, you could have managed to get into the Chamber of Secrets and slay the Basilisk within, as well as its master, without the information Miss Granger had clutched in her petrified hand identifying the beast." His expression turned grave. "I do not give you these readings, or indeed these lessons, simply for my own amusement. Everything magic I teach you, every book I suggest to you, is designed to better arm you against what is to come, to grant you the insight that you will need. And you will need it, because something wicked this way comes, and this time, I will not be around to protect you."

" _Protect_ me?" Harry said. "Protect _me?_ Pr –"

"Yes," Strange said bluntly, cutting him off before he could build up a head of steam. "The pile of people and creatures I have slain to protect you, Harry Thorson, would make a small mountain." He paused. "Or perhaps a large hill." He waved this away. "I have lied, tricked, manipulated, and killed to protect you, and I would do it all again without batting an eye. Perhaps not as much as I could, or as much as I should, and the ways I've done it… you've more than got reason for a bone to pick with me, a whole forest, even. But I have. My protection has not always been obvious – indeed, it often has not. I say this not to diminish what you have done, what you have achieved, because more often than not, my protection has mostly consisted of watching your back and preventing someone or something planting a knife in it while you were occupied with the monster of the month. But I will not be around forever. And even though I have delegated many of my duties to Wanda in preparation for her succession, I am still the Sorcerer Supreme, and the walls between our reality and the Outside are at their thinnest in centuries. I warn you now that I will not be there, during your next battle, because I will be required to face what is going to come through."

His expression softened as Harry looked stunned.

"I will prepare you as best as I am able. The books are a large part of that. I wish I could prepare you more, but time, so long my friend, is now becoming my enemy," he said. He sighed, sounding genuinely tired. "So much to do, and so little time in which to do it." He shook his head. "But remember this: I would never ask you to do anything that I did think you could. Sleep well, Harry."

And with that, he vanished.

Harry stared at the space that Strange had just vacated, then sighed, opened his mouth, closed it, then sighed again.

"Well, nice to know I'll have something to look forward to," he said. "Still, at least he had the decency to warn me in advance, this time." He looked over at Dumbledore. "Has he said anything about whatever it is happening at school, Professor?"

"No," Dumbledore said, lips pressed into a thin, grim line. "He has not."

This was a remark met with murmurs of disapproval by the portraits of Headmasters and Headmistresses past.

"However, that leads me to suspect that whatever is going to happen won't happen here," Dumbledore continued. "There is no benefit for him in allowing an attack on the school."

"And Strange has, for all his many flaws, always had a soft spot for children," Magneto observed.

"That is also true," Dumbledore acknowledged. "Charles should be warned."

"I will speak to him this evening," Magneto said. "He is out at the moment, conducting an investigation."

Dumbledore nodded in thanks. "And I shall speak to your father, Harry," he continued. "I doubt he will be any more pleased with this turn of events than I am. A word with Wanda might also be wise." He glanced at Fawkes, who dipped his head, then vanished in a puff of flames. "Also, I think that I will most likely have to speak to Director Wisdom about how this will change the situation regarding security arrangements."

Magneto winced slightly. "I am sure that those will be wonderfully pleasant conversations," he said, sounding more than a little sympathetic.

Dumbledore smiled thinly. "I am sure that they will be," he said. "Forgive me, Erik, but…"

Magneto stood up, nodding. "Of course," he said. "I will leave you to it." He smiled faintly. "I believe that I still remember my way around here." His gaze shifted to Harry. "And if I do not, may I prevail upon your services as a guide, Mister Thorson?"

"Call me Harry," Harry said. "And yeah, sure." He turned to Dumbledore. "Are you sure that you don't want me to talk to dad and Wanda, Professor?"

"Thank you, Harry, but no," Dumbledore said. His expression turned pointed. "For one thing, you have some reading to get on with."

"How could I forget?" Harry muttered rhetorically. "Okay. Good night, Professor."

"And to you, Harry."

OoOoO

The walk down from Dumbledore's office was, at first, a quiet one. Filch glowered suspiciously as he passed, but it wasn't curfew yet, and in any case, Magneto saw his glower and raised him a glare that made hardened HYDRA Agents fall to their knees and beg for mercy (which was rarely granted). While Filch's reaction wasn't quite as dramatic, his eyes did widen, before he sort of shrivelled and slunk off, with Mrs Norris following in his wake.

"You said that you'd been to Hogwarts before?" Harry ventured.

"Yes," Magneto said, shooting a somewhat disdainful look at the retreating Filch. "Twice, as it happens. And that wretch was, I believe, employed on my second visit. He does not seem to have improved with age."

"Dad said the same thing," Harry observed.

"He would know," Magneto said. "But yes, I have been to Hogwarts twice. The first time was in 1945, after Auschwitz was liberated, as part of a bit of a kerfuffle over whose jurisdiction I fell under."

"What do you… ah," Harry said, catching on. "They thought you were magical."

"Exactly," Magneto said, rewarding him with an approving smile. "I was part of what might well have been the first generation to see mutants born in real numbers, outside of certain reclusive clans." He considered. "Well, I say that... but the simple truth is that often, it can be quite difficult at first glance to distinguish a mutant from one magically gifted, particularly windlessly gifted, or a scion of some supernatural being. To many, it would not occur to make the distinction at all." He shrugged. "In any case, I was not the only young superhuman experimented upon, and we were examined either at Hogwarts, or at the White Council's headquarters in Edinburgh, to establish what we were and we exactly we were capable of. I was examined here, and in the process, I met Albus."

His eyes grew distant, as if he was looking back through the mists of time. "It was a shock, both for me and for those others who were being assessed. We had believed until that point that we were merely a few oddities and freaks, that were alone in the world, or near enough. And yet we found ourselves in a castle that, even after it had been emptied of students for the holidays, was still full of dozens of people who were part of a whole society that was different, just like us. Oh, their differences were often, well, different to our own, but even so. Yet it was perhaps the simple things that were overwhelming. The SSR had been kind, but there had been limits to what they could do for us, close as they were to the front lines, though even the limited rations they could provide were like the sweetest ambrosia in comparison to what we had had before. But when we came to Hogwarts and saw the meals there…" He trailed off, and then smiled wryly. "Well. You would be better placed than most to understand the shock of the contrast."

Harry nodded slowly. While the Dursleys had hardly treated him with any particular kindness, and under-feeding him, even forgetting to feed him, had been a common enough occurrence. Of course, he couldn't claim to have been suffered anywhere near as badly as a concentration camp survivor, and wouldn't dream of doing so.

But he _did_ remember how stunned he had been to see all the food freely available at Hogwarts, that he was not only allowed to eat, but positively _encouraged_ to do so, that he did not have to constantly defend his portion from Dudley. As a result, the students of Gryffindor House had learned early on that if they wanted any treacle tart when it was on offer, they had best move quickly.

"And the second time?" he asked.

"A little over thirty years ago," Magneto said. "Around thirty years after my first visit, as it happened. It was with Wanda. My oldest child. And your godmother."

"Does that make you something like an extra grandfather?" Harry asked dryly.

Magneto let out a startled laugh. "I had not thought of it like that," he said, chuckling. "I was raised Jewish, after all, even though my practise of the faith has slackened somewhat over the years, and godparents are a Christian tradition. Granted, I was raised in the Ashkenazic tradition, which does have the custom of the _kvater_ , which can be either male or female – and from what little I remember, couples often served in that function. I believe was derived from the concept of godparenthood in surrounding Christian populations. And there is the _sandek_ , of course. But both are different, and neither carries quite the same cultural expectations that the role of godparent does. Especially not in Britain." He looked reflective. "Wanda, by contrast, was raised Orthodox Christian, albeit flavoured by the Roma cultural background of her mother's family, and the religious attitudes of Doctor Strange, which I think can be summarised as a form of Agnosticism."

"He knows gods exist, he just doesn't feel like worshipping them," Harry said.

"Precisely."

"He enjoys bossing them around instead," Harry continued. "Or in the case of my grandfather, slowly winding them up."

Magneto smiled wryly. "He enjoys doing that to everyone," he said.

"Also true."

"And while I cannot say for sure, he at least affects British cultural manners, which are influenced by the Church of England." He waved a hand. "In short, though she is Jewish by descent, on my side of the family at least, she was raised in an eclectic mixture of backgrounds that emphasised the importance of godparents. And with your mother…"

"Ascended beyond this plane of existence," Harry supplied in the most matter of fact tone imaginable. "And Jane is lovely, we get on really well. But."

"She is not a mother," Magneto said.

"Yeah," Harry said. "She's more sort of like a younger aunt, or something like that. Which means…" He trailed off. Magneto let him collect his thoughts as they descended a staircase. "Which means that Wanda is the closest thing I have to a mother," he said eventually. "Apparently, that's what a godmother, or godfather, is supposed to be, if your parents aren't around. That's certainly how Sirius sees it." He chewed his bottom lip. "And Wanda…"

Magneto rested a hand on his shoulder.

"Wanda loves you as if you were her own," he said gently. "She and I have not always seen eye to eye, and with good enough reason. But she is my daughter, and I know her well. Certainly well enough to know that giving you up was the hardest thing she has ever had to do. It broke her heart."

"I know," Harry said quietly.

"And," Magneto said. "I do not think I have ever seen her so happy as she has been with you." His expression turned solemn. "And by the way, before I forget: you freed my daughter from the Red Room. For that, Harry, I can never thank you enough."

Harry went pink. "Well, mostly, that was Carol," he said. "I just provided the distraction."

"And ripped open the prison she was held in, by her account," Magneto pointed out. "But yes, I intend to express my gratitude to Miss Danvers as well."

Harry went pinker. "Um. You're welcome?" he ventured.

Magneto chuckled.

"By the way, how is she?" Harry asked.

"Much better, thank you," Magneto said. "Charles, Jean, and Madelyn helped restore her mother's memories of her and the two are happily reunited."

"What about her and you?" Harry asked.

"I visit," Magneto said. "Though she does not say, I think that the décor of my home reminds her a little of the quarters she was kept in by the Red Room. Enough to set her on edge." He shrugged. "I have extended her an open invitation to come and visit, as and when she feels comfortable."

"A little different to Strange's approach," Harry muttered, as they reached the Entrance Hall. "Oh, and by the way, I wanted to thank you too, Mister Lensherr."

"Oh?" Magneto asked politely. "And, Harry, please feel free to call me Erik."

Harry nodded his thanks, then paused, collecting his thoughts. Magneto, recognising the signs, waited patiently. And when Harry spoke, it was careful, halting, and measured.

"My memories. Of being the Red Son. They're locked away, thanks to Professor Xavier," he said. "Which everyone thinks means that it's like a massive blank spot in my mind. But it's not like that. Not quite." He stopped again. "It's like a book in a shop," he said eventually. "You can see the title, read the blurb, maybe even have a quick look at the contents page. That much is free. But." He frowned. "But if you want to see any more, then there's a price. And there's no way to get out of paying."

"I understand," Magneto said gravely. "Thank you for feeling able to share this with me, Harry."

Harry shook his head. "That's not it," he said. "I…" He let out an explosive breath. "What I'm trying to say is that I have a fairly good idea of what the Red Son did. Not the details, but enough of an idea that I could probably fill in a few gaps." He grimaced. "Which my imagination frequently does." He shook his head, his right hand drifting over almost unconsciously to his left arm, rubbing it slowly, as if it was cold. "You stopped him. Me. Whatever. And if you hadn't, a lot more people would have died. So… thanks."

Magneto inclined his head. "I only wish I could have done it more gently," he said quietly.

Harry froze, then smiled crookedly. "Tell you what," he said. "Let's call it even."

Magneto burst out laughing. "Yes," he said. "Let's." He smiled. "And by the way – you are most welcome."

Harry went pink again.

"Now, young man, I think that you should go and get some sleep," Magneto said. "If nothing else, I fully intend to put you through your paces very thoroughly on the morrow."

OoOoO

"… and so that's why I won't be around this weekend," Harry finished.

Ron and Hermione stared at him. Normally, most of the rest of the Common Room would be staring too, with quite a few of the older students still present in the Common Room. However, most of those still up were doing homework, and the conversation was concealed behind the _muffliato_ charm previously used to such effect by the Twins.

As it turned out, Harry could cast it too, having learned it from the self-same teacher: Sirius. Even so, normally, such a concealed and furtive conversation would attract curiosity from the rest of Gryffindor House. However, most Gryffindors had learned a long time ago that where Harry was concerned, they just didn't want to know.

"You're learning from _Magneto?_ " Ron said eventually, in strangled tones.

"Who is he, anyway?" Hermione asked, puzzled, before Harry could respond. "I've never heard of him."

"You wouldn't have," Ron said, in a low voice. "He was meant to be dead. And if he isn't, then… that's not good. That's really not good." He shook his head in disbelief. "I mean, blimey, Harry! What're Strange and Dumbledore thinking?"

"Who is he?" Hermione repeated, gaze switching between Ron, Harry, and Bucky.

Bucky opened his mouth to supply an answer, before Harry stopped him. "Ron?" he said. "Could you explain? I'd like to hear what the Wizarding world thinks of him."

The coda, 'and laugh at how hilariously wrong it is', went unspoken.

Ron shot him a somewhat dubious look, then shrugged. "I don't know much," he said. "No one really does. But from what I heard, he's a seriously bad Wandless Warlock, like, really, properly bad. He was around when You-Know-Who got going, and he was a bit like You-Know-Who really – he hated Muggles, killed hundreds of them…"

As Ron's account rambled on, Harry noticed that it was rather thin on actual details, sounding more like cobbled together rumours and hearsay. But some of it wasn't actually that far off the truth.

"… they say that he started out hunting HYDRA, because they killed his family, tracking them down and killing them with their own weapons. That's how I really found out about him, looking up people who went after HYDRA. And while he kept killing, he decided that he hated all Muggles, so he started killing more and more, planning to wipe out all Muggles," Ron said. "He got together this Brotherhood of Evil, to help him, like the Death Eaters. They even killed a few wizards, if they got in their way." He frowned slightly. "He never joined up with You-Know-Who, though. No one knows why."

"Why not?" Hermione asked. "I mean, if they were around at the same time, and they wanted the same thing…"

Ron shrugged. "Maybe they were rivals?" he guessed. "Or You-Know-Who didn't want competition? Magneto was supposed to be nearly as powerful as him. Then he disappeared, years ago. No one knows why he did that, either. Some said that You-Know-Who killed him." He turned to Harry. "What do you think, mate?"

"I think that nearly everything you just said was wrong," Harry said.

"Not entirely," Bucky said softly. "Parts of it were close to the truth, as Natasha, Albus, and Charles and his former students could tell you. Magneto himself would probably concede it. He did begin as a Nazi hunter, he did kill a lot of humans, and at one point, he did want to take over the world. And he has never been short of followers." His gaze shifted to meet Harry's. "There is a reason why people are afraid of him, and truth behind the stories. You have only known the kinder, gentler Magneto, the same way that you've only known the kinder and gentler version of your uncle. What your uncle did on Earth is a matter of public record, and he did all of it in a matter of days. Likewise what he did in Asgard. Do you think that Magneto, over the course of decades, would do any less? He might not have had an alien army, or the Tesseract. But you know better than most what he's capable of."

Harry looked away. It was hard to square the witty, grandfatherly man who had spoken to him so kindly, who had fought at the Battle of London, who had contained the Red Son's rampage, his rampage, with minimal loss of life, and at great risk to himself, with the megalomaniac Ron described, that Bucky implied.

But that didn't mean they were wrong. He found it hard to imagine his uncle as the madman he'd so clearly been when he'd invaded Earth. Come to that, he found it hard to imagine his father as someone who would start a war on an impulse. And, as he thought with a lurch, he just knew that Ron and Hermione would find it hard to imagine him as the Red Son, a cold, heartless and mindless assassin, or the Dark Phoenix, intent on destroying everything. Or at least, he hoped that they would find it hard…

But hard to imagine or not, that did not mean that they had not once been those people. His uncle had once been a deranged conqueror, his father an impulsive, arrogant, and bloodthirsty warrior, and him… he had been a monster that would have destroyed everything just to try and stop it hurting. And unlike the Red Son, he had chosen to become it.

Moreover, he knew very well that the other Avengers had fairly dark pasts, that they had dark sides of their own. And that wasn't even getting started on Doctor Strange. Why would Magneto be any different, he thought, and was angry at himself for being naïve. Of course he wouldn't be, he thought angrily. There was, as Bucky had said, a reason that he was so feared, a reason that Wanda had hated him, her own father, and even now hardly trusted him any further than she could throw him – with her bare hands, at least. Probably quite a few reasons, come to think of it.

Then, he picked up a thought, purposefully projected at him.

 _There's nothing wrong with seeing the best in people._

Harry looked up at Bucky, who met his gaze once more, and carried on.

 _Because if you do, then it makes those people see it too. It makes them want to be better, to live up to the way you see them. Not all people, mind, maybe not even most. But a lot. Maddie could tell you that; if you hadn't had faith in her, she'd never have turned._

He leaned forward.

 _And a lot of people wouldn't. They'd have dismissed her as dangerous, as a lost cause, as something to be pitied and put down. But you didn't. You saw something good in her, the best of her, and you trusted it. You had faith in her, and soon enough, she had faith in herself._

 _It wasn't quite that simple,_ Harry said. _Or that easy._

 _Of course it wasn't,_ Bucky replied calmly. _But it was a start. And it's a gift, a rare one at that. You've got it, Steve's got it, maybe your dad as well._ He looked reflective. _And Carol too, under the cynicism. Mostly, she reminds me of Peggy, if you swap the classy manners for New York anger. But there are times that she reminds me of Steve too._

 _She saw the best in me,_ Harry said quietly. _When I was… you know. The Dark Phoenix._

Bucky nodded. _She did,_ he said. _She's probably a mix – hope for the best, prepare for the worst. And that's the attitude you should have. There's nothing wrong with seeing the best in people… but you shouldn't let it blind you to the worst in them, either._

Harry nodded slowly. "Yeah," he said. "I do know. What he's capable of, I mean. And yeah, he was once the big bad." He smiled wryly, as Hermione rolled her eyes at the Buffy reference, before that smile faded. "But for starters, he's not a Wizard, or a Warlock. He's a mutant, and way more powerful than Voldemort. And he's reformed these days. Plus, there's a reason he hates Nazis…"

He went on explaining about Magneto, and more pertinently, why he thought that Doctor Strange wanted him to have lessons with the man, well into the night. The discussion lasted for hours, and would likely have lasted for hours more, if Bucky had not firmly informed Harry that he was going to bed. _Now_.

OoOoO

Not all discussions were quite so pleasant, however.

In the depths of the Raft, a tall, thin man dressed in grey prison overalls sat reading. At first glance, he looked almost normal, but for a bandage marking recent surgery on his forehead. A white collar criminal, perhaps – certainly without the scars, calluses and other marks of a thug, common or otherwise. It might make one wonder why such an apparently ordinary fellow was incarcerated in one of the most secure facilities on the planet. At second glance, however, the slightly unnatural length and proportion of his spidery limbs, the pallor of his skin, too pale even for a case of albinism, and the cold red of his eyes, all became clear. And suddenly, the observer stopped wondering.

And rightly so. Doctor Nathaniel Essex a.k.a. Doctor Nathan Milbury, a.k.a. the Pale Man, a.k.a. Nosferatu, a.k.a. Sinister, was one of the most prolific biological terrorists of all time, having committed almost every conceivable crime against humanity in the name of advancing his experiments. In the process, he had inveigled himself into every super-soldier program of significance, and gained an unparalleled understanding of human, and indeed, superhuman, genetics, learning how to manipulate and replicate various genetic traits at will.

As a result of this, he had had many visits from those hoping to extract some of that knowledge for themselves, to understand how he had granted himself psychic powers, shapeshifting abilities and mastered cloning, among many others. This last led to one small snag: the man in the cell was not the original Doctor Essex. He was a clone; formerly one of many around the world, part of a practical hive mind that had effectively granted him immortality. Until Doctor Strange had managed to hack the psychic network behind it, by literally hacking one of Essex's cloned brains. He had since gone on to methodically slaughter his way through the rest. Now, only this clone remained. This clone… and the original, hidden outside the network.

The search for that original was an important matter, but not the matter of the moment.

Essex looked up as he noticed the door open, and didn't show any discernible sign of surprise at his latest visitor. In fact, he mostly seemed satisfied, as if someone had _finally_ done something that he had wanted them to.

"Professor Xavier," he said.

"Essex," Xavier said frostily.

Essex's eyebrows twitched slightly.

"As far as I am concerned, you have long since forfeited any right to a Doctorate," Xavier added in the same tone, answering the unasked question.

Essex regarded him for a moment, then shrugged, as if the judgements of mere mortals meant little to him. "I presume that you have a rational reason for coming here," he said, standing and walking over to the impenetrable glass-like material that separated the two of them. "Is the weapon malfunctioning?"

Xavier's expression grew even colder. "Miss Grey is no more a weapon than you or I," he said. His voice was icy calm, though humming with rage. It was, in fact, the exact same tone that Magneto had used before he had dismantled – and in some cases, almost dismembered – the Winter Guard. Like that one, it portended nothing good.

Essex, however, merely tilted his head like a bird. "I raised her from birth for a specific purpose," he said mildly. "To serve as my weapon, my hunting Hound; to track, contain, and either capture or destroy, as required. Accordingly, her mind and body were shaped to this end. It was her programmed function: thus, she was and remains a weapon. As a result, any deviation from this path is therefore a malfunction; caused either by a flaw in her mental structure, similar to a flawed computer processor, or by infection with contradictory programming, comparable to a computer virus. Or, perhaps, by a combination of the two."

There was a long, terrible silence. Then, Xavier… smiled.

"Remarkable," he said.

Essex arched an eyebrow. "Remarkable?"

"You are," Xavier said. "You are a brilliant scientist, Essex and a powerful telepath. You have, by your own account, worked with the likes of Weapon X and the Red Room for decades. You have accrued a level of knowledge and experience that is perhaps unparalleled. But for all that brilliance, after all that time, there is one truly remarkable thing about you, which surpasses all others."

Essex's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "What is that?" he asked.

"You are _extraordinarily_ stupid."

"… What?"

"Ignorant on a scale that beggars belief," Xavier said, sounding almost amused.

"Ignorant of what, Xavier, ignorant of what?" Essex demanded, anger seeping into his normally calm, flat voice.

"Something that even with a hundred pairs of eyes you could not see because they were blinkered, and with a hundred brains you could not understand, because it would never occur to you," Xavier said. "Not if you spent a century thinking of it and nothing else."

" _Tell me what!"_

Xavier regarded him for a long moment, as if considering whether to explain or not, before speaking. "Maddie, your 'weapon', who you controlled in all things from mere hours after her birth, broke free of your conditioning and programming," he said. "All because of what you describe as a malfunction, inspired by a 'flaw' and 'contradictory programming'. You saw that much. But that's where your comprehension ended. Because while you saw them, the crucial pieces that tore the smooth running machine of your programming apart from the inside, time and time again, your ignorance meant that you did not understand. You were doomed to repeat the same mistakes, over and over again."

Essex was pressed against the glass, teeth bared. "What mistakes?" he hissed, his usual calm utterly banished.

"Overlooking the importance of two things," Xavier said. "The first is the 'flaw': free will. You dismissed it time and time again, not realising that so long as she had a mind, that she was anything more than an empty shell, she had the capacity to _think_. No matter how you tried to drown all vestiges of independence, there was always that little spark, deep inside, that little part of her that identified as 'me' and 'I', that refused to go out. That is free will. That is the capacity to choose; to think, to be curious, to _imagine_. That is your 'flaw', Essex. It is humanity's gift, one that she was born with and one that even you could not take away, not without turning her into a vegetable. And once that spark was spotted, once it was nurtured, once Maddie realised that she had it… then it was only a matter of time."

Xavier smiled, and this time, it was both warm and savagely triumphant.

"The second? The 'contradictory programming'?" he said. "That was something else, something nearly as fundamental: compassion. She was shown compassion and kindness, by Remy LeBeau – faked, at first, simply to manipulate, but it became real. And when he did that, for the first time in her life, she was treated as a person, as more than a living machine. Then, she faced Harry. He was meant to be her enemy. You had pitted her against him not once, but twice. Someone who would have every reason to see her as nothing more than a living weapon. But he saw more. He saw the confused young woman under the programming, and understood that she was not so different from him. And he reached out a hand."

Xavier rolled forward, eyes boring into Essex's. "They showed her compassion, Essex, and from that moment, she was lost to you. Why? Because it got under her skin. The 'contradictory programming' set in, and she began to show it in turn. First, she tried to protect Harry, an act that Mjolnir itself recognised as a mark of heroism. Arguably, she succeeded in saving him, at the second attempt. Then, she freed Jonothon Starsmore and helped him piece himself back together. And after that, all the triggers and commands you'd implanted in her mind might as well have been purged, because even if you had reasserted there and then, it would always have been doomed to eventual failure: where free will was the 'flaw' that tore your programming apart time after time, compassion was what replaced it, what made it harder and harder, and ultimately impossible, for your programming to take a solid hold."

Essex just stared at him, then shook his head. "Sentiment," he said dismissively. But there was a just a hint of a waver in his voice, a tiny seed of doubt.

"Yes," Xavier said. "Exactly. Sentiment. Compassion. The power of love, some call it, though often without realising the many forms that love can take. It is something much scorned, but by fools, of whom you are one, because they do not understand it. And that is why, no matter how many prisons you built for her, Maddie always broke free once she realised that she could. It is why she would _always_ have broken free. It is not tangible or measurable or even obvious. But it is real. And, Essex… it beat you."

Essex glared. But in those red eyes, there was doubt.

"And now to why I am really here," Xavier said. "Though before we discuss this, I feel I should explain this: I know every single telepathic technique that you are likely to use. Maddie has been most helpful in explaining what you have taught her, and what she has seen you use. But even if she hadn't, I would have recognised your moves – they're textbook Askani. Though with, I think, a few magical flavours." He steepled his fingers. "I don't know how exactly you learned the techniques of the Askani, and to be honest, right now, I do not much care. It is not a priority of mine. I know your abilities, and thus your limits." He glared at Essex, mirth gone. "And while my scruples would normally prevent me from entering a mind by force in any but the most necessary of circumstances, I am willing to make an exception. Meaning that not only can I dismantle every single mental defence you possess, leaving your mind as bare and open as a freshly peeled orange, I will do it without batting an eye. I will also not bother to be gentle. It is therefore in your best interests to cooperate. Is that understood?"

Essex was silent, but nodded slowly.

"Good," Xavier said briskly. "Now that I have made myself abundantly clear, I have several questions, starting with this one: who and what is Remy LeBeau?"

 **And we come to the end of another chapter. A bit different, eh? Unusually harsh from Xavier? Well, he's not always nice, especially when dealing with Essex's ilk, and he is capable of being very scary. Anyway, our next chapter leads into** _ **Bloody Hell**_ **, with appearances from Wanda (at Hogwarts, no less!), Zatanna (yes, I am finally figuring out how to actually write her), possibly Ginny, and perhaps Dracula, along with a visit to Asteroid M/Avalon. Oh, and crucially, the Triwizard Tournament is also getting started. Which means that stuff is going down on Halloween...**


	26. Chapter 26: Ad Astra Per Aspera

**And I'm back – not as soon as any of us hoped, granted, but you're getting a longer chapter than either of us expected, so it all balances out. Plus, this is my first chapter with my new laptop! And of the new semester, too. So, I have had a few other things on my mind.**

 **This chapter was an interesting one, because it was actually quite difficult to write. Some chapters flow, others are forced, while this one… dawdled. It wasn't as hard as some, but certainly not easy, and I'm not entirely sure how it turned out. It's a bit more serious than I expected, for one thing. Not grim… just serious.**

 **Anyhow, it's largely about character development and character responses, and features a few characters we haven't seen much of in a while. If it had any solid themes, though, I'd say that they were 'consequences' and 'evolution (personal)'. It's also a key point in Harry's development, both in his powers, and in his personality as part of his recovery – he steadily continues his shift into helping others again, rather than just being helped, and in ways more significant than just matchmaking.**

 **Enjoy.**

To say that Thor was not pleased by the news that there would be yet another crisis and that his son would be right in the middle of it would be an understatement. Given the additional fact that Strange had bluntly stated that this time he could not protect him, instead only arm him with knowledge, it was therefore unsurprising that New York was currently covered by a brooding thunderstorm that constantly flickered with lightning and bombarded the city and its environs with rain.

"You know, all those times I joked that when you were sulking it was like you had a rain cloud hanging over your head, I never knew how right I was."

Thor looked up to see a very wet Sirius, and flushed. "I am sorry, Sirius, I…"

"Was just off in your own little world, sulking," Sirius said matter-of-factly, waving his wand at his wet clothing and hair, instantly drying them.

"Sirius," Remus said reprovingly, following him into the room, having been coming to greet his newly returned friend. He had been working with Bruce on a scientific study of lycanthropy in search of a cure – or at least, a means of controlling it, by scientific and magical means. As part of that, they were in correspondence with Dr Moira MacTaggert, who apparently had a young ward with a mutation strikingly similar to lycanthropy, which they hoped would provide insight.

As well, he and Sirius had been providing insight derived from enchanting objects in Jane and Tony's latest project: miniaturising her Bifrost based portal generating technology into gauntlet form. So far, all it had really succeeded in doing was turning the prototype gauntlets inside out and, on one memorable occasion, opening a doorway to a dimension filled entirely with a substance with a custard-like consistency that smelled, and, as it happened, tasted, remarkably like rotting fish. The doorway was eventually closed by Loki, but not before it flooded two labs and a corridor.

"You can't deny it, Moony," Sirius said.

Remus paused, then sighed. "Perhaps not, but there _is_ such a thing as tact," he said.

"I spent twelve years in Azkaban, cut me some slack."

"There will only be so many times that that line will work, Sirius."

"And I intend to take advantage of every one of them."

Thor rolled his eyes at the two of them, and looked up, shifting unconsciously into his James Potter form as he did. It was something he did less and less these days – most of those who'd known him as James had become fairly accustomed to seeing him as Thor, and in any case, they were witches and wizards and thus well used to strange physical transformations. There was Fury too, granted, but Thor knew that Fury had an even higher tolerance for weirdness than any wizard short of Albus Dumbledore, who tended to redefine weirdness all by himself.

However, he knew that while Sirius said that he was comfortable with it, and would vociferously deny any implication that he wasn't, he was more comfortable with Thor appearing as James. Accordingly, Thor often did, when his old friend was around. It was hardly a hardship, after all.

"I am not merely sulking," he said. "I have just found out that Harry is going to be in the middle of a crisis. Again."

There was a moment of silence, wherein Remus and Sirius exchanged a look.

"I realise that this is not exactly a surprise," Thor added wryly, before his expression darkened again. "However, this time is different."

"Different how?" Sirius asked, expression sharpening, jokes banished.

"And where does this news come from?" Remus asked. "I can well believe that Harry will be in the midst of some crisis – the world has been turned upside down time and time again in the last few years, shaking all sorts of things loose, and Harry attracts trouble."

"And is attracted to it in turn," Thor said, nodding.

"Which would explain why he fell for a real firecracker," Sirius remarked, with a brief half-smile. "Like father, like son."

Thor shared the half-smile, before collecting his thoughts. And his temper. "This news comes from Doctor Strange," he said. "He was very explicit: there is a crisis coming, and he will not be able to protect Harry from it as he has before."

Sirius muttered something rude about Strange's definition of protection being as squirrelly as the rest of him.

"Yes, that was my first reaction," Thor said. "But…" He sighed. "I love my son dearly. So much that even the slightest hurt to him makes my heart shudder, as if it is about to snap in two. And while it is easy to jest about his habit of seeking out trouble, one which comes from both Lily and I, his desire to right wrongs… it has clouded his judgement time and time again." He waved a hand at Sirius' inevitable objection, cutting it off. "I know. We were hardly any less impulsive at his age, indeed, we were more so, at his age and much older. In my case, much, much older."

He was silent for a moment. "As with me, as with us, it leads him into danger. Often mortal danger. And the more I consider it, on discussion with my brother and my parents, the more I come to a conclusion that I do not like, but cannot refute: Strange has protected Harry. Almost every time Harry has found himself in mortal danger, truly mortal danger, it is because he has put himself there. Even back to his first year at Hogwarts. He chose to seek out a rampaging mountain troll, to descend into the depths of the school to face Quirrell and Voldemort, to enter the Forbidden Forest to consult Hagrid's former pet, and to descend into the Chamber of Secrets to face Riddle's wraith and the basilisk, each time with only a stalwart friend or two, other children, and once the worse than useless Gilderoy Lockhart. He chose to ascend the mountain this Easter past with his friends to find a lost mutant child, who was hunted by HYDRA, to put himself in their path when at that point, what SHIELD and my brother have gleaned suggests that they were intent on avoiding him. He chose to attack HYDRA's forces head on when they attacked Hogwarts, rather than use his telepathic abilities, or fight from a distance with his other gifts. He chose to invade HYDRA's base and, more than that, intercept Chthon when he attempted to possess Wanda."

He looked away, taking a steadying breath. "And he chose to re-enter the Red Room once freed, to give up his body in an attempt with Maddie to outfox them," he said.

There was a faintly appalled silence, then Remus said, "Thor, you can hardly blame him –"

"I don't," Thor said, cutting him off. "I do not blame my son for one bit of what has happened to him. His actions have been noble, and many of his decisions are ones that I would have taken in his place. For all that I wish he could show some more – a lot more – common sense at times, he is 14. Young even by mortal standards, and during much of all that, he was younger still. His decisions, his actions, they have not been perfect. But no one is perfect, and in a man, they would be decent enough, under all of that stress and pressure; and make no mistake, they are decisions that would be weighty for a man or woman grown. In a boy of his age, the ability to make them reasonably well, and survive the consequences intact… it is nothing short of remarkable, and far more than either I or Loki would have managed at that age. I am incredibly proud of him."

He looked both of his old friends in the eye. "The point I am trying to make is not that the blame for Harry's suffering, for the constant cavalcade of crises, should be shifted from Strange to him. That would be incredibly unjust. It is to recognise that Strange's near omniscience does not translate to near omnipotence. He can arrange circumstances, whisper in ears, and guide choices; indeed, that has been the source of much of his power; knowing what to say, to who, and when. But he does not control our choices. He can manipulate events, information, and people so as to make one choice more likely than another, he can charm, bully, barter and threaten, he can make it seem like the only choice possible is the one he wishes be made… but he does not control them. All he can do is work with and around them. And with Harry, I must admit that he has protected him, after a fashion: he was the one who arranged for Lily to attract the Phoenix's attention, granting him a protection, and a safety net should the worst happen."

"You're exonerating the tricky bastard?" Sirius asked, a little disbelieving.

"No," Thor said. "I am not doing that, either." He frowned. By this time, the rain had stopped, though the skies overhead were still ominous and full of storms. "Strange is human," he said eventually. "He is a living being, and a fallible one. It is easy to forget, for he has gone to great lengths to hide it. His mystique, and thereby much of his power, rest on the belief that he is infallible and all-knowing, or close enough to both. He made a misstep with the Disir, for instance, when they kidnapped my son and two of his friends from the heart of Asgard, with the aid of Gravemoss and the spells of the Darkhold. He troubled to show me what he did with them."

"And that would be…?"

"He restored their consciences and sealed them inside a crystal ball to be haunted by the spectres of their victims for so long as he pleases," Thor said shortly.

Sirius seemed caught between grim satisfaction and utter horror. Remus leaned hard towards the latter.

"The Disir are Valkyries, twisted by dark magic and bloodlust into monsters that hunger for the flesh of gods, but will devour anything that crosses their path. They planned to either ransom Harry and his friends for a tithe of Asgardians, or to devour them themselves. Alive." His gaze caught Remus'. "Their nature was different to yours, even cursed, Remus. They were not transformed into unthinking beasts. They reasoned, thought, and _chose_ to be cruel. They deserve their fate."

Remus did not look entirely convinced, but nodded. "Strange has a vengeful streak," he said mildly.

"And he is fond of children," Thor said.

"If he's so fond of children, why he's leaving Harry to swing in the wind now?" Sirius demanded.

"Sirius," Remus said. "He doesn't have to. It's not his job."

A normal man would have wilted under the glares he received, even if the one from Thor was leavened by a reluctant acknowledgement that what he said was true. Remus, however, simply steeled himself and carried on.

"Strange is the Sorcerer Supreme," he said. "His duty is to this world, this plane of existence, to protect it and all its billions of inhabitants. Not just Harry. The matter of Chthon and the Darkhold aside, from a strictly literal point of view, as the Sorcerer Supreme, he is not obliged to help. He has not been obligated to do _anything_ for Harry that he is not already doing for countless others." His mouth twitched into a slight smile. "That's our job."

"Damn right it is!" Sirius barked, before stopping and frowning.

"Thank you both," Thor said. "And you are right, Remus, much though I do not like to hear it, any more than I did when my brother reminded me of it. Repeatedly. And at length. However." His expression hardened. "The reason I am not inclined to exonerate Strange is because while he is not obligated to involve himself in Harry's life, he has. And that involvement has had consequences, not all of which have been good. He bears responsibility for that."

"And he's suddenly dropped it," Sirius said. "Did he give any reason why?"

"He indicated that he would be occupied," Thor said shortly. "He did not say with what."

"Did he give any warning as to what Harry would face?" Remus asked.

Thor shoved a sheet of paper under his nose, which Remus took and scanned, with Sirius craning to look over his shoulder.

"… I presume that Harry isn't going to be attacked by books," Sirius said, after a moment. When Remus gave him a flat look, he shrugged. "What? It's not like it would be the first time."

Remus sighed. "Going by the books listed here, some of which I don't recognise," he said. "It will involve vampires. And blood magic, especially as relates to vampires." His brow wrinkled in puzzlement. "And… a basic overview of the science of blood transfusions." He looked up at Thor. "Does he expect that Harry will get involved with the White Council's war with the Vampire Courts?"

"The what?" Sirius asked, puzzled.

"Possibly," Thor said. "And it is a war, Sirius, begun some years ago by Harry Dresden."

"Wanda's boyfriend?"

"Yes," Thor said. "From what I can grasp of the details, Dresden had made an enemy of a local Red Court notable who, on her elevation to the Red Court's nobility, managed to arrange circumstances such that she could partly turn Dresden's then girlfriend." He glanced at Sirius. "Red Court do not turn fully until they make their first kill. And she did so legally, without having broken the letter of the Unseelie Accords."

"And Dresden didn't take this lying down," Sirius said.

"He burnt her house down, with her and her court inside it," Remus supplied.

"Knew I liked him."

"You would," Remus remarked. "What's the alternative?"

"There are other breeds of vampire out there," Thor said. "The Grey Court, Dracula's court, has remained neutral in the War. According to my brother, the Grey and Red Courts despise each other. And they are not the only ones. Additionally, the War has remained… quiet. It has been a Cold War, with no major offensives by either side in the last couple of years."

"The White Council's headquarters are in Scotland, in Edinburgh," Remus said suddenly. "Not that far from Hogwarts, in the grand scheme of things. If there was a major attack, and Harry sensed it…"

"He might feel that he had to get involved," Thor said, nodding grimly.

"Okay, so if the threat is identified, more or less, and you've got the Avengers ready to go," Sirius said. "And us, of course, and probably Wanda too, then surely you should be glad to have a heads up from Strange. Why the rain?"

"Because we do not know the exact nature of threat, where it is coming from, or how my son will get involved in it," Thor growled. "And because it feels like Strange is simply dropping this problem in our collective lap and vanishing to who knows where."

"Strange probably isn't just cutting and running, Thor," Remus said cautiously. "I mean, it may not be obvious at the time, but he does generally have a good reason for what he does."

"This is true," Thor said sourly. "But as Wanda once said: 'Doctor Strange always has a good reason. Unfortunately, his definition of what is a good reason doesn't always coincide with that of the rest of us.'"

OoOoO

Harry, meanwhile, was too in awe of his surroundings to share his godmother's opinion of her former mentor, much less that of her father. Finding oneself in a space station made from an asteroid a kilometre across that had been hollowed out, reshaped and reforged to dwarf any other manmade satellite, would be astonishing enough. Knowing that all this had been achieved by the exertion of one man's will made it all the more astonishing.

Furthermore, while Harry was a demigod, a prophesied saviour who had danced close to Death's embrace on several occasions, who had held all of reality in the palm of his hand… he was still a teenager. And more than that: he was a teenager who loved to fly. How could someone like that not be enraptured by the chance to walk among the stars?

Strange had done much as Harry had suspected he would, and teleported him into the Entrance Hall, regardless of state of dress or if he was awake. Harry, being paranoid, had therefore got up, got washed, dressed, and eaten his breakfast by that time, and was therefore not caught short in any way, shape, or form when Strange summoned him and Bucky. This had drawn a flicker of a smile from Strange, before he waved a hand, as if shifting the world around them, transforming the sharp lines and ancient stone of Hogwarts into the smooth, futuristic curving metal walls and vast glass windows of Magneto's space station: Avalon, sometimes codenamed 'Asteroid M'. And as they looked out of those windows, the Earth came into view, a blue-white-green swirling marble on the star speckled tapestry of space. Harry's jaw dropped. Even Bucky raised both eyebrows.

"Enjoying the view?" an amused voice asked.

Harry twitched and whipped around to see Magneto, who raised his hands to indicate that he was unarmed – or, more pertinently, that he didn't have any hostile intentions.

"Mister Lensherr," Harry said, relaxing out of the fighting stance he'd dropped into and flushing.

Magneto raised a pointed eyebrow.

"Erik," Harry amended, flushing even further. "Sorry about that. I…"

Magneto's lightly amused expression softened in understanding. "There is no need to apologise," he said gently. "Like you, I spent a couple of years in the hands of the likes of the Red Room. Including more than a little time spent at the mercy of the creature you know as Nathaniel Essex. After my liberation, I too found myself easily startled." His expression shadowed. "Among other things." Then, he smiled. "In any case: welcome to my home. Welcome to Avalon."

Harry nodded, blush fading. "Thank you for having us," he said. "Avalon?" He smiled. "I like it."

"I thought that the name was apt," Magneto said. "Though some have referred to it as 'Asteroid M', which is accurate, I suppose, but somehow crude."

Doctor Strange, having shed his glamour, chose that moment to cough pointedly.

"Ah, yes," Magneto said. "Good morning, Doctor Strange." His lips twitched into a slight smile. "I would offer to guide you to Ruth's chamber, but I suspect you already know the way. Please proceed – you are expected."

Strange nodded, then turned to Harry. "I will see you later," he said. "At this point, any advice I could give you would mostly seem like vague platitudes, so I will only say this: listen."

"Listen?" Harry repeated, puzzled.

"Closely," Strange said, with a sage nod, then swept away. "Oh, and this evening, I expect to see you reading the books I assigned you," he called back over his shoulder.

Harry sighed. "Yes, Doctor Strange," he said.

Magneto chuckled at Harry's faintly put upon expression. "Knowing Doctor Strange, those books could well save your life one day," he said. "One day very soon."

"I know," Harry sighed again. "It's just… does he _have_ to be cryptic all the time?"

"Does he have to? No," Bucky murmured. "Does he enjoy it? Yes."

Harry grumbled.

Magneto chuckled again. "I would have to agree with Sergeant Barnes," he said. "But I dare say he has other reasons beyond mere amusement value. Now, shall we?"

Harry nodded and followed him into a network of smooth, rounded silvery corridors which rang like bells with each footstep.

"You made this place, then?" he asked.

"I did indeed," Magneto said.

Harry shot him an incredulous look. "All by yourself?!"

"Not entirely," Magneto said. "I captured and hollowed out the asteroid, I mined, refined, and shaped the materials, and I did the majority of the building work." He shrugged. "The main difficulties in building such a station are logistical, and my abilities are especially well suited for both mining and transportation of materials into space. However, I was not alone. I was assisted and advised by a man called Mar-Vell."

"Captain Mar-Vell?" Harry asked, and at Magneto's nod, said, "I've met him."

"So have I, I think," Bucky remarked thoughtfully. "A long time ago." At two enquiring looks, he shook his head and smiled wryly. "It was back in my Winter Soldier days – we didn't exactly stop for a chat." He shrugged. "He seemed like a good man."

"He is," Harry said. "As far as I could tell, anyway."

"Your judgements are correct," Magneto said. "Mar-Vell is indeed a good man. As for the help he provided, it wasn't all that much; essentially, he ran his eye over my designs to ensure that Avalon was space-worthy, and provided a few tips, here and there. Improvements to its life support systems to account for its size and the number of people likely to be aboard, improvements to defences to counter radiation and debris and reduce Avalon's radar profile so it won't be picked out easily, and finally…" He jumped briefly to demonstrate. "Artificial gravity generators."

"Not all that much," Bucky echoed wryly, while running his eye over the corridors and the points where they met as they took a right turn down a gentle slope. "The base is modular?"

That got two briefly raised eyebrows. "Indeed it is," Magneto said, sounding mildly impressed. "I can rearrange corridors, reshape, add, and remove rooms as I see fit."

"That's amazing," Harry said, in awe. "Absolutely amazing."

"I am glad you think so," Magneto said, with a smile. "Now, though, you are about to see something that, I think, will impress you even more."

Harry looked at him, puzzled, but didn't get an answer as they reached a small atrium, with a series of doors arranged around the walls. The one directly ahead of them was larger than the others and, as Harry found, led into a pair of changing rooms indicated by Magneto, a set of spiral stairs leading to an observation deck and control room, and larger set of double doors leading into the room that Magneto had been leading them to.

The doors slid open without a word or even a gesture from Magneto, and Harry, after a moment's hesitation, walked inside. Once in the room, he looked around. At first glance, it appeared to be a dome, about seventy metres or so across, and thirty or so at its highest point.

It also, unlike all the other rooms Harry had seen so far, looked to be severely damaged. The floor was pockmarked with smoking holes in the metal, and smoke, accompanied by the acrid scent of burning plastic, suffused the atmosphere. Various obstacles and what looked like gun turrets had been blasted to ruins, the latter hanging loosely from the walls and ceiling.

"What the…" Harry began, suddenly on his guard, before snapping his head up at Bucky's barked warning, in time to see a ruined gun turret large enough to squash him into jam plummeting towards him, trailing sparks and smoke. Reacting in the blink of an eye, he focused his will, catching the turret four metres above his head with a flare of power and a juddering crash.

"Impressive. You have passed the first test."

Harry turned, still holding the turret above his head. "Test?" he asked, tossing it aside with a mere thought.

"Test," Magneto repeated, waving a careless hand. As he did, the craters, ruined gun turrets and other obstacles faded away into nothingness, including the one Harry had just caught and tossed aside. "And a demonstration."

"Of what?" Harry asked, eyes narrowed.

"That your powers extend a great deal further than you think they do," Magneto said. "That falling turret was an illusion, nothing more – light and energy, shaped into an image. If it had landed on you, it would have passed straight through you. And yet, you caught it." A series of balls the size of marbles rose seamlessly out of the floor, and began rotating in formation. "Far too many telekinetics assume that their gifts are simply the equivalent of an invisible hand, or at most, the ability to create constructs of force and will. They think that they can manipulate matter and little more."

He shrugged. "It is a not unreasonable assumption. Moving objects is usually how it first manifests, after all. For my part, I believed well into my twenties that my abilities consisted of little more than a form of telekinesis limited to metal. Powerful, to be sure, but… limited. I suspected there was more, and focused my studies on electromagnetism. But it wasn't until after I made the acquaintance of my good friend Charles that I began to open my mind to the possibilities and thus, realise my potential."

Electricity snapped and crackled around the floating metallic marbles, before they suddenly shifted and merged into a frame, with a clear picture of the view out the observation windows forming within it.

"Flight, electrical manipulation, electromagnetic pulses, light manipulation to achieve invisibility or project images, a degree of technopathy…" Magneto said. "The list goes on. Your abilities, Harry, potentially extend to all of those. And, in theory, far beyond. You can, in theory, manipulate all the many states of matter –"

"Many?" Harry asked, pausing and frowning. "I thought there were only…" He counted quickly. "Three. Solids, liquids, gases."

"In fact there are rather more than three," Magneto corrected him. "Those you mentioned, yes, but also plasma, and more exotic states: Quantum Spin Liquids, Rydberg Matter, Bose-Einstein Condensates, that sort of thing. The latter are not of any especial concern to you – most have only been theorised a matter of decades ago, and only recently created, if at all, in a lab." He met Harry's gaze. "And crucially, you can also manipulate energy, as you just unknowingly demonstrated. Not just block or deflect it, but manipulate it. Manipulate and, I think, generate it."

"Generate it?" Harry said, before raising a glowing hand. "I know I can do that –"

"That would be psychic energy," Magneto said. "And yes, your ability to generate it – and in such quantities – is something I will come back to, along with magical energy. However, what I meant was forms of energy such as heat, electromagnetic energy… and even more exotic forms of energy, such as gamma radiation."

Harry raised his eyebrows. "That's pretty expansive," he said frankly.

"It is," Magneto agreed. "That is, I think, the enduring problem for those of us with such extensive gifts. While limits in capability can be frustrating, they are also very useful for focusing one's efforts, by providing a framework to work within. Your abilities are, especially when taking into account your magical abilities, even less limited than my own. The fundamental forces of the universe are, in theory, yours to command. While you may not quite be able to make reality your plaything, to break and remake the laws of nature as you please, you can certainly bend them to your will." He shot Harry a knowing look. "Of course, I think that you already suspected something along these lines."

"Harry?" Bucky asked, eyebrow raised.

"He's talking about the Phoenix," Harry said quietly. "Phoenix hosts are basically psychics; telepaths and telekinetics like me, but with much more power." His expression shadowed. "Much, _much_ more."

"Enough to rewrite the base-code of the universe," Magneto agreed. "Enough to simply impose their will on it, to make what they think come to be, without any of the inconvenience of having to understand the fine detail in between."

"Warping reality still comes with a price, though," Harry said. "No matter how much power you have."

"So it does," Magneto agreed. "And while you could hardly just wave a hand and make up into down, left into right, or air into earth –"

"Not here," Harry corrected him. "In the Nevernever, if I really had a go…" He trailed off.

"Yes, the Nevernever," Magneto said. "A parallel dimension running alongside our reality, positively bristling with magic. A dangerous place, inhabited by dangerous creatures. Where time and space are much more… mutable. "

"Because of the amount of magic," Harry said, in somewhat tired tones of rote repetition. "It's the fifth fundamental force of the universe – the more of it you can get together, the more you can bend the other four."

"Something that applies, to one extent or another, to the other four forces as well," Magneto said.

Bucky looked up sharply. "You can use magic?"

Harry's eyes shot wide open, and he stared at Magneto in shock.

"No," Magneto said, shaking his head. "Magic and electromagnetism are related – a magical hex directed at a piece of technology, for instance, has similar effects to an electromagnetic pulse. I can sense it, defend against it, and perhaps even disrupt it if a spell is in motion, but I cannot use it. And my ways of interacting with it are not precise, the points of overlap limited. I could not identify particular spells or specific casters, unravel enchantments, or anything of real significance."

Harry frowned, looking somewhat puzzled, which Magneto noticed.

"Perhaps an analogy is in order," he said. "If the spectrum of ability to sense and interact with magical energy was compared to visual acuity, then someone without any magical ability or extranormal senses whatsoever would be blind, or almost so; perhaps able to distinguish light and dark, or exaggerated movement, but nothing more. Someone like your headmaster, a wanded wizard of great power and unusual… deftness, shall we say, who has explored the mysteries of the Art for most of his life and developed his senses in concert with that, would be at 20/20. Someone like Wanda or a member of the White Council's Senior Council would be at 20/10, approximately twice as sharp as Albus' – wandless practitioners, after all, have naturally better magical senses. You follow me?"

Harry nodded, frowning.

"Good," Magneto said. "Now, someone like your uncle, a god of magic, would have magical senses far greater than anyone human. Perhaps the equivalent of an eagle's eyes, between four and eight times as sharp as a human's, perhaps even greater. I must confess, I do not know for sure – he keeps his own counsel on that score. You're more likely to know than I am."

"I'll ask him," Harry said, then looked thoughtful. "What about Doctor Strange?" he asked curiously.

"Doctor Strange makes your uncle seem like an open book," Magneto said wryly. "I don't know, honestly. But I wouldn't be at all surprised if he equalled your uncle, or surpassed him – and if he did not, then I would expect that he would have long since found ways to make up for his disadvantage."

"Sounds like him," Harry agreed. "Where do you fit in?"

"20/200, most probably," Magneto said. "20/160 at best. And colour-blind at that. A result attained after decades of refining the senses my abilities have given me." He shrugged. "It is a rough estimate, very rough. But it suffices to demonstrate my point."

"Which is…?"

"I am not magical in the slightest, yet through extending my native extranormal senses, I can sense magic," Magneto said. "And through much practice, and a good deal of trial and error, discover how to affect it, if only to a limited extent. The same basic principle applies to my other abilities: through study and training, I refined my senses to detect light, electricity, radio waves, and a great many other things. Since they are, naturally, far sharper when it comes to things actually on the electromagnetic spectrum, I was very successful. But why did I do it? Why am I discussing this with you, rather than teaching you technique after technique?" He leaned forward. "Because the first step in affecting something, anything, is knowing it is there. The second step is understanding it. And I am quite confident that considering your combination of magical and psychic abilities that though your range of senses will not match mine in fine detail, in potential extent, they will far surpass them."

Harry grimaced. "Potential," he muttered.

"Yes, potential that is not quite realised as yet," Magneto said. "I have heard about how you've sometimes missed that which is right under your metaphysical nose, even after lessons from Miss Braddock, Professor Zatara, Doctor Strange, and your uncle." He smiled faintly. "We'll soon see about rectifying that."

Harry's eyes widened, and Magneto smiled.

"Now you realise," he said. "I am not simply going to help you master a clever technique or two. Instead, I intend to do something far more ambitious, something that will help you expand your own horizons far beyond what you ever imagined. I intend to give you the keys to the universe itself. So, my young student: _attend_."

OoOoO

On the planet far below, another young man with extraordinary gifts and a trail of even more extraordinary secrets was also learning. This young man, however, was largely ignorant of the secrets in his past (their details, at least), and even more ignorant of the full extent of his gifts. Both of these were entirely understandable: those few who knew the full truth about where he came from were keeping it a closely-guarded secret, and the young man consequently had no way of knowing all of what he could do.

He also lacked the battle scars that his counter-part far above had accrued, physical and mental. This last part was rather remarkable, since only a couple of days before he had been hit by a speeding Porsche, knocked into a river and come out without a scratch, exposed to form of radioactive material that particularly affected him while being crucified in a field, before being electrocuted by a mildly insane electrokinetic. So when Clark Kent casually dropped his schoolbag off in his room, he shouldn't have been entirely surprised when an amused French accented voice said, "Some time ago, _mon cher_ , I decided that you were not related to my good friend Harry Thorson, no matter how much the two of you look alike."

Clark jumped, and whipped around to see Jean-Paul emerge from behind his door, casually shutting it.

"But with your demonstration of the same knack for finding trouble, I am tempted to reconsider," he continued. He sighed. "You _have_ been busy, haven't you?"

"Jean-Paul!" Clark yelped, startled, before hurriedly lowering his voice to a hiss. "What are you _doing_ here?"

"Until less than a minute ago, waiting for you," Jean-Paul said placidly, going from standing by the door to seated on Clark's bed in the blink of an eye.

"My _parents_ are _downstairs_ ," Clark whispered fiercely.

"I know," Jean-Paul said calmly. "And perhaps we should speak with them."

Clark bit his lip. He already had one friend who his parents – or more specifically, his father – disapproved of. He didn't want Jean-Paul to become the second, because, well. He wasn't entirely sure how his parents would react to Jean-Paul. Not because of his sexuality, but because he knew Clark's secret, because Clark had been keeping him a secret, and because… well, Jonathan and Martha Kent were upfront, honest, straight-forward people, the small matter of their son being from another planet aside.

Jean-Paul, on the other hand, was not upfront, not remotely straight-forward, and if Clark was being honest with himself, not entirely honest, either. Or at least, while Clark didn't think that Jean-Paul had lied to him, he'd noticed that the other boy had an occasionally selective attitude to the truth. And he knew that Jean-Paul had chosen to keep things from him in the past. In fact, if anything, Clark found that Jean-Paul reminded him somewhat of Lex, and vice versa. Which did not bode well for his father and Jean-Paul getting along.

On the other hand, he thought sourly, considering that both his parents and Jean-Paul had been cagey in the extreme about what they did know about his origins, perhaps they'd get on just fine.

"Clark."

Clark looked up, drawn out of his thoughts, to see the other boy's grave expression.

"This is not a mere whim, _mon cher_ ," Jean-Paul said, tones gentle but serious. "Your recent actions, they have put you on the radar of some very dangerous people."

Clark frowned. "Lex is –"

"Lex is not who I am worried about," Jean-Paul said flatly.

"Then who?" Clark asked, arms folded.

"His father, for one," Jean-Paul said. "And anyone else who might have noticed."

"It was barely in the news for a day," Clark said, dismissing it. "And only the local news – mom and dad checked. It wasn't even the main story, and they barely mentioned my name. Everyone's too busy worrying about what's been going on in Russia."

"For which you should be very grateful," Jean-Paul said bluntly.

Clark caught his expression and took a very accurate shot in the dark. "You _know_ what happened," he said, with mounting excitement. "Don't you? You _know_ why everything went crazy in Eastern Europe, why everyone in the world got headaches or worse. You _know_." He snapped his fingers. "That's why you've been away for the last month and a bit, why you were so worried when you last dropped by!"

Jean-Paul regarded him, then sighed. "Well, there's nothing wrong with your mind, I will say that," he said. "Your common sense, perhaps." He heaved an even deeper sigh. "Which makes me wonder even more if you and Harry are related. You and he share a combination of quick wits and boundless curiosity. In your case, I had hoped that it was held in check by an abundance of caution and common sense." He eyed Clark a touch coolly. "Considering how we met, however, I think that that hope was in vain."

Clark looked, and felt, somewhat affronted. "Hey," he said.

Jean-Paul inclined his head in acknowledgement and apology, sighing again. For the first time since they'd met, Clark noticed that the French boy looked tired.

"I am sorry, _mon cher_ ," he said. "I have had a… _difficult_ month or so. It is why I have not been by to visit. And it has left me short of temper." He steepled his fingers. "It is also why we must speak to your parents."

Clark opened his mouth to protest, when suddenly, he heard the door open behind him and his father's voice.

"Speak to us about what?"

OoOoO

Five minutes later, the Kent family and their unexpected guest were sat around the dining room table.

"So, Clark, Jean-Paul," Jonathan said, tone somewhat tense. "You've known each other for how long?"

"Since the Summer," Clark said.

"We first met on Red Sky Day, _Monsieur_ Kent," Jean-Paul interjected politely.

"How, if I may ask?" Jonathan asked, directing his attention to Jean-Paul.

"The school was burning down, dad," Clark said. "Me and Chloe were stuck inside, and I was about to use my speed to get us out – there was no other way. Then…"

"I was passing through Smallville, and it was only a very slight alteration of my course to pass through the school," Jean-Paul said calmly. "I saw Clark and his lady friend caught in the flames and, not knowing of Clark's gifts, rushed them outside."

"Excuse me, you 'rushed them outside'?" Martha asked, puzzled.

Jean-Paul vanished in a crackle of golden lightning, before reappearing a matter of seconds later, dropping a fresh copy of the _Daily Planet_ on the kitchen table.

"Exactly that, _Madame_ Kent," he said, into the stunned silence. "Your son is far from the only person in the world with gifts." He smiled wryly. "Of course, I did not quite realise this until he attempted to catch up with me."

"Attempted?" Jonathan asked, a little surprised.

"Jean-Paul's faster than me, dad, mom," Clark said. "A _lot_ faster."

"I would estimate Clark's speed at 400 miles per hour," Jean-Paul said. "My general top speed is Mach 10 – better than 7500 miles per hour." He gestured at the suit he was wearing beneath his clothes. "I can go faster, but for safety reasons, my suit prevents me from going faster." He sat back, ignoring the stunned expressions. "I noticed that Clark had abilities, and that he wished to meet others like himself." He smiled wryly. "In my absence, he seems to have become less discriminating."

Clark flushed as both his parents raised eyebrows at him. "He's talking about Jeremy," he said. "Jeremy Creek."

"The kid who was caught in the meteor shower and wound up with electrical powers?" Jonathan asked.

Clark nodded.

"After the events of Red Sky Day were concluded, I came back to visit Clark," Jean-Paul said. "Because, I must admit, I was curious. Not strictly because he had powers, more because of…" He grimaced. "It is difficult to explain. _Un moment, s'il vous plait._ " He seemed to mull over it for a few moments, then nodded, before speaking again, tone measured. "When I rushed Clark out of the school, unaware that he was more than capable of taking care of himself, I did so by sharing my speed, the power behind my abilities, with him. Rather than simply carry him, I… accelerated him. You follow me?"

"Sort of," Jonathan said slowly.

"We get the gist," Martha said firmly.

Jean-Paul nodded. "In the process, I felt Clark, for want of a better way of putting it," he said. "He felt different to anyone else I have ever encountered. I have shared my speed with ordinary humans, with Asgardians, demigods, witches and wizards, demigod mutants – mutants being one term for those humans, like myself, born with non-magical superpowers – and even super soldiers. Clark was distinctly different; there was a different energy about him. The closest comparison would be to Uhtred, an Asgardian, or Diana, an Olympian demigoddess, but while there were similarities… Clark was distinct." He sat back. "So, I was understandably curious, and wary: Clark has a great deal of power. Power that I have come to realise that he uses with the utmost responsibility." He shot Clark a very amused look. "Mostly."

Clark, remembering how he'd stacked the football team's pickups on top of one another in revenge for the scarecrow incident, blushed.

Jean-Paul turned back to Kents, expression sober. "However, I did not know that for sure at the time," he said. "Power such as Clark's is easy to abuse, and while he seemed to me to be a very decent young man, I felt that I should at least get his measure. And I had another reason to wonder." He pulled out his phone and turned it on, flicking to the photo gallery, bringing up a picture from a couple of months before.

Clark craned his neck to get a better look and promptly choked on thin air. At first glance, it was almost like he was looking at a picture of himself, wryly waving at the camera. Then, almost instantly, differences became apparent: for one thing, Clark didn't have a thick lock of white hair in his fringe, nor did he have striking emerald green eyes, or a lightning bolt scar. And there were other differences, becoming visible as Clark looked closer. Even still, though, if the boy in the picture wasn't the twin of Clark that he seemed at first glance, then he could certainly easily pass for a brother, or a close cousin.

"Harry Thorson," Jean-Paul said. "He is a good friend of mine. And, as you may already have noticed, he and Clark look startlingly alike. So far, I do not know why."

"Does he know about Clark?" Jonathan asked sharply.

"No," Jean-Paul said. "And if any of our other friends, or any of the Avengers, or any of those in their circle of trust, know about Clark, I can promise you _Monsieur_ Kent: they did not hear it from me." His expression turned grim. "I know very well the importance of keeping secrets such as Clark's. Very well indeed."

"You think that people are going to figure it out," Martha said. "Because Clark looks like your friend Harry."

"In part," Jean-Paul said. "By itself, the resemblance could be dismissed: Harry rarely appears in public, and on his few filmed public appearances…" He smiled thinly. "Well. Not only was the footage quality poor, his precise appearance was not the immediate focus of attention. And not only do Clark and Harry have certain obvious differences; hair, eyes, scars, that sort of thing, but less obvious ones as well." He waved a hand. "In essence, he is beginning to look more like his mother."

"I'm sensing a 'but'," Martha said.

"Clark saved Lex's life," Jean-Paul said. "In a way that by itself, could be dismissed. But combined with the resemblance…"

"You think that Lex could figure it out," Clark said, wanting not to be completely superfluous.

"Lex Luthor is many things, Clark. Stupid is not one of them," Jean-Paul said bluntly. "He is a friend of Harry's as well, one reasonably well acquainted with Harry's powers, and he has an intellect that Loki and Tony Stark respect. He already knows that you have powers, I would stake my life on it."

Jonathan clenched his jaw and exchanged a look with Martha. Jean-Paul spotted it.

"I have known Lex for some years now," he said. "I do not know him as well as a mutual friend ours, Carol – Lex has all but adopted her as a little sister – but I know him. He will not harm Clark. The most I foresee is him being curious about Clark, as I was. And if nothing else, he is already keeping a similar secret. Several, in fact." He grimaced. "His father, on the other hand, is a different story."

"His dad?" Clark asked, surprised.

"Lionel Luthor," Jonathan said. "He's… a piece of work."

Jean-Paul snorted faintly. "That is one way to put it," he said. At Clark's enquiring look, he said, "I know him well enough to know that it is a miracle that Lex is a decent person, and that when he eventually dies, the world will become a better place."

Clark gaped. He was not the only Kent to do so, though Jonathan's expression strongly suggested that he was trying hard not to agree with Jean-Paul.

"He treats his son abominably, as well as practically everyone else he encounters who does not immediately benefit him," Jean-Paul said flatly. "He cares for nothing, nothing but power and shaping his son into a 'worthy heir': someone as selfish, soulless and merciless as he is. As far as he is concerned, the things and people of the world are divided into three categories: those that belong to him, those he wishes to have belong to him, and those which oppose him. One must be controlled, one must be claimed, and one must be destroyed." His gaze shifted back to Clark. "Which is why I am worried about the possibility of Clark catching his eye."

"What about you?" Clark asked. "If you know Lionel, then he knows you. Aren't you worried about you catching his eye?"

"Clark's got a point, Jean-Paul," Jonathan said. "Lionel Luthor is a dangerous man, and if he knows about you…"

"I am not worried about Lionel Luthor," Jean-Paul said. "Because whether he knows of my abilities or not, I am a far less tempting target to him. My father is the French Ambassador to the United Nations, one of my dearest friends is the niece of an Air Force General and granddaughter of the Deputy Director of SHIELD, and I am close friends with Harry Thorson, a Prince of Asgard. I am also on first name terms with all of the Avengers, and Pepper Potts, the CEO of Stark Industries, among others. And those are just connections that I think Lionel would be able to immediately discern. He might yet see more. He is, after all, vile, but not a fool. He knows that my disappearance would become very public, very quickly, drawing attention and making enemies that he could not afford."

His gaze flicked back to Clark. "Clark, by contrast, is the adopted son of a Midwestern farming couple, living in a small town in, if you will forgive the turn of phrase, the middle of nowhere. His disappearance would hardly be noticed outside of Smallville in the normal run of things, and therefore far easier to cover up, to fabricate some false explanation for. As far as Lionel knows, Clark would have no-one powerful to support him or to speak up for him if he vanished, to orchestrate a rescue or to wreak bloody revenge on his behalf."

"He'd be dead wrong about that," Jonathan said heatedly. "If he went after Clark –"

"Then you would go after him," Jean-Paul said. "I believe you, _Monsieur_ Kent. I do. I see the same look in your eyes now as I have in Thor's, when his son, my friend Harry, was threatened. But how would you fight him? How would you get past his armies of thugs, of lawyers, of tame politicians and journalists? Lex would help you, I am sure. He owes Clark his life, after all, and that is the sort of thing he takes seriously. But his power comes from Lionel, and you would all be playing a game that Lionel has mastered. You would most likely be destroyed, and if Clark escaped Lionel's grasp, he would be hunted across the world, living as a fugitive, like Doctor Banner did before he joined the Avengers."

The words were calm, practical, and dispassionately delivered, into a silence that swallowed words like light into a black hole.

"I don't want anyone to get hurt protecting me," Clark said, breaking the silence, and for some reason, that drew a sad smile from Jean-Paul. "And besides, it's not like Lionel knows for sure that I have powers."

"No," Jean-Paul agreed. "It isn't. But I would be very surprised if he did not at least suspect. You either have to hide your abilities well enough to allay suspicion and find ways to sow doubt in his mind – to continue hiding, in other words – or to make visible friends and connections with those whose power and wrath Lionel, and others like him, would respect. Even fear. So that even if he, they, discovered your abilities, they would be still have to leave you be for fear of the consequences."

"Are those the only options?" Clark asked.

"No," Jean-Paul said. "But you and your parents are good people."

"So?"

"So, _mon cher_ , I doubt that you would agree to have Lionel's memory erased entirely and for him to be abandoned in a small town on the other side of the planet, to convince the world and perhaps himself that he is insane, to abandon him in another dimension to live out a lifetime in a day or to the mercy of its native predators, or simply to kill him," Jean-Paul said bluntly. "Especially when it is not clear if he has more than even a faint suspicion that you are anything but an ordinary teenage boy. If it becomes clear that he does, then it would be possible to have that knowledge wiped from his mind, but if he wrote it down somewhere, or told someone else..."

He shrugged. "He would either need to be separated from his power, or the knowledge separated from him. Or convinced to leave you alone; either by being made to believe that you are only human, or that going after you would be the ruin of him. And that goes for anyone else like him who found out."

After that, the impromptu meeting broke up.

OoOoO

Shortly after, though, another meeting began outside, by a fence overlooking one of the Kent fields.

"Look," Jonathan said. "I appreciate that you've been a good friend to my son, maybe even saved his life. And I appreciate that you understand the importance of keeping his secret. But that is no call to frighten him with horror stories about what might happen to him if the likes of Lionel Luthor find out about him, and what you feel might have to be done."

" _Monsieur_ Kent," Jean-Paul said quietly. "If I wanted to frighten your son, I would tell him about the sort of things I have seen done to people with gifts like ours, by people who wanted to use them. I would tell him about the man with the ability to heal from almost anything, whose bones was coated in metal to make him into a weapon, and whose memories were stolen to make him easier to control."

His gaze turned distant as he looked out over the Kent farm.

"I would tell him about a girl who was stolen from her cradle for the power she was born with, by a man who is called Sinister by some. It is a fitting name. He raised to believe that she was a weapon, one he had created to detain and destroy his targets and his enemies, that her sole purpose was to serve him. He attempted to break not just her mind… but her soul."

He took a deep, steadying breath. "And I would tell him about a friend of mine, Harry Thorson, who was as sweet and noble as Clark himself. And because of that nobility, he stayed behind while helping others like us escape from their captors, the Red Room. They were monsters viler than you could imagine, monsters who even HYDRA feared. These were the people who created the Winter Soldier, and they counted the creature Sinister among their allies. Harry saw the girl I just mentioned, saw that she was a victim." He smiled bitterly. "And, as fate would have it, she was his cousin too. He tried to convince her to come with him." He grimaced. "But the conditioning was too strong. She wavered, but followed her master and his allies. But Harry was not going to give up. He saw that he was close. So he literally slipped free of the Avengers, his father, uncle, and godmother among them, leaving all who would help and protect him behind, and followed her, followed them, to another dimension where they hid. And in doing it, he left himself at their mercy."

He snorted. "Mercy. Something they had none of," he said. "Time passed quicker there, months passing in days. It was hidden from even the eyes of Asgard. And they tortured him for who knows how long, physically and mentally, trying to break him, so they could rebuild him as their weapon. His only concern, though, was trying to open her eyes, to convince her that her life was her own. His sacrifice convinced her, and she tried to protect him from torture, but she had programmed as a weapon."

His expression darkened. "And weapons have failsafes. Off-switches. Her master turned her off, and it was days before she managed to even remember what she had tried to do for him. Days of torture and horror. The second time, she managed to hide her intentions, and hid his mind away somewhere safe, intending to restore it as soon as the Red Room and her master blinked, and to escape with him. But they sent her away. And his empty body was then turned into a weapon, one used…"

He closed his eyes briefly.

"One used to do such horrible things that when Harry managed to reclaim it, the memories drove him insane. Now… he is recovering. But it left scars on his soul."

Jean-Paul looked up, and the eyes which he looked with did not belong in a teenage boy's face. They looked haunted. Haunted, and old.

"I would tell him about those things, and more," he said. "If I wanted to scare him."

"Then what do you want to do?" Jonathan asked eventually.

"I want all of you to realise the stakes," Jean-Paul said. "And thank you, by the way."

"For what?"

"For not reacting against what I am saying because of my age," Jean-Paul said. "You are treating me like an adult. I appreciate it."

"You're welcome," Jonathan said. "Though, truth be told, we've heard warnings like this before. Not as… graphic, I'll grant you, but the same rough idea."

"Who from, if I may ask?" Jean-Paul asked, then stopped and let out a humourless laugh. "Of course," he said. "SHIELD."

"How did you know?" Jonathan asked, startled.

"It was a guess," Jean-Paul admitted. "But an educated one. After I first met Clark, I did my reading on the history of this town, and the meteor shower. Clark came down in the meteor shower, and that sort of thing is SHIELD's area of interest. I also know a few SHIELD Agents, as I said earlier, some quite senior. It was a reasonable enough guess that it was a SHIELD Agent who warned you about the dangers to Clark." He looked thoughtful. "I would say that it was good fortune that you encountered one loyal to SHIELD, and willing to help you, rather than one secretly loyal to HYDRA, but Doctor Strange likely had a hand in it."

"Doctor who?" Jonathan asked, baffled.

Jean-Paul seemed to suppress a smile. "Doctor Stephen Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme," he said. "He is a complex man, and a very dangerous one. He is also among many other things, a time traveller and a powerful seer, much given to giving destiny a helping hand, here and there."

"I see," Jonathan said, rather dubiously.

Jean-Paul gave him another disconcertingly old and cynical look, and smiled a wry half-smile. "I know," he said. "It is mad. Gods and monsters, time travel and prophecies, with magic all around… it is insane. Beautiful, at times, exhilarating, and wonderful beyond words. But also insane. If I had my way, I would not be involved. I would leave the heroism, the daring deeds, to other people. I would be perfectly happy finding my own way in the world, with ordinary problems, like getting good marks at school, rather than fighting demon-gods to save reality. I…" He looked up at Jonathan. "In truth, _Monsieur_ Kent, I wish that this hadn't happened to me." He sighed. "But I don't think I ever had a choice. A great destiny, Harry's destiny, came through the world, and I am one of those who got caught up in its wake."

"And that's what you want to drag my son into," Jonathan said, in harsh, flat tones.

Jean-Paul gave him a steady look. "If that was what I wanted, _Monsieur_ Kent, then I would have long since dragged Clark to New York, introduced him to Harry, and let nature take its course," he said. "Instead, I have visited in secret, satisfying his curiosity about others with powers while keeping him away from everyone else. I have only recently told any of my friends even the smallest thing about Clark, and only in the most oblique terms, because I thought that his resemblance to Harry might endanger him. I have not said his name, I have not explained his abilities, and I have not even hinted where he lives. The only thing I mentioned was the fact that he and Harry look almost identical; something that any of them would notice immediately if they saw him. As it happened, they soon had far greater worries to concern them. If Clark had not had his encounter with Lex's car, we would not be having this conversation. He would still be protected by secrecy."

"Clark's secret is still safe," Jonathan said. "And even if Lionel suspects, even if he knows, then from what you've said, that still sounds safer than being with the Avengers and their friends."

"None of the three people I mentioned was protected by secrecy. Nor did they have safety in numbers," Jean-Paul said bluntly. "They were either alone and unprotected to begin with, like Clark, or they chose to run away from those who were protecting them, like Harry did. And that made them vulnerable."

His eyes hardened, taking on a cold, vengeful gleam.

"But once they were no longer isolated… then those who took them regretted it. Briefly."

Jonathan Kent was not an easily shaken man. But Jean-Paul's tone sent a shiver down his spine. "The Avengers killed them," he said, keeping his voice steady.

"In the first case, no. It was years before the Avengers formed," Jean-Paul said, shrugging. "I do not know many of the details. But the man with claws, Logan, was taken in by a telepath called Charles Xavier. He is a pacifist, a kind and gentle man who has dedicated his life to helping people. One of those he has helped is my sister. However, he does not tolerate people threatening those under his protection, any more than you would someone threatening Clark."

"And the other two?" Jonathan asked, ignoring the accurate remark appended to that tale.

"Sinister is locked away in one of SHIELD's strongest prisons, I believe," Jean-Paul said. "And I suspect that is only because he might be more dangerous dead than alive. And the Red Room… they took Asgard's Prince. Asgard took its revenge. That is all I know, and all I wish to know."

"I see," Jonathan said carefully.

There was a long moment of silence. Then, suddenly, Jean-Paul spoke again. "There was another reason," he said abruptly. "That I kept coming back here. One I have not mentioned."

"My son," Jonathan said evenly. "You like him. I know." When Jean-Paul shot him an astonished look, he met it with an even one. "Son, I might be a farmer from, as you put it, the middle of nowhere, but I'm not stupid. And while I might not know much French, I know enough about tones of voice that I don't need to. "

Jean-Paul continued to stare at him for a long moment. Then, to Jonathan's surprise, he burst into peals of honest, carefree laughter. It went on for quite some time.

"Thank you, _Monsieur_ Kent, I needed that," Jean-Paul said eventually, bubbling laughter on the edge of his words. "Yes, I do like your son. But not like that; though he is very handsome, the love I have is more that of a friend, or perhaps an older brother. And besides, I have a boyfriend." He shook his head, laughter fading away, to be replaced by something somehow wistful. "That other reason I keep coming back here… it is because it is peaceful. Beautiful. And uncomplicated."

"You'd be surprised," Jonathan said wryly.

Jean-Paul cocked an eyebrow, then smiled. "I suppose I would," he said. The smile faded somewhat. "But the fact remains that it is largely untouched by fate, and by groups like HYDRA and the Red Room." He chuckled wryly. "For example, you do not have portals to hell dimensions in your back yard, or catacombs full of unearthly scientific laboratories beneath your barn."

"We had one or two demon problems on Red Sky Day," Jonathan remarked.

"And there was the meteor shower too," Jean-Paul agreed. "Almost untouched, then. And I would very much have preferred for it, and Clark, to have stayed that way."

"Because your friend Harry attracts trouble," Jonathan said.

"He attracts it and is attracted to it in equal measure," Jean-Paul said. "A part of him desires to be normal; at least, normal in the sense that he would not have monsters to fight on a depressingly regular basis. But another part… well. It might give you some insight into his character to know that one of his favourite books, which I have seen him read from cover to cover, is about King Arthur. If he sees someone in distress, he will go running to their aid, without a moment of thought as to the consequences." He glanced back at the house. "Of course, I do not think that Clark is all that much different. A bit more cautious and discreet, perhaps, but with that and one or two other things, maybe nothing I do will be enough to keep him away..." He trailed off, then waved a hand sharply, brushing the thoughts away. "Harry seeks out trouble because it is his nature, and trouble seeks him out because, in the simplest of terms, the evil fear him. HYDRA, the Red Room, Sinister, they all see his already considerable power and fear it, fear him. They want to either control him, or destroy him, for fear of what he might become."

"And you were going to keep Clark clear of that, letting all the monsters and bad guys converge on your friend?" Jonathan asked, startled as he put it together. "That's…"

"Cold?" Jean-Paul suggested, and sighed. "Yes, it is. It is also very practical. My theory ran that Harry would attract all those beings and organisations anyway – I have not made him anymore attractive to them, and I always have, and always will, help him against them. And when he does not serve himself up on a silver platter, he is increasingly able to look after himself. Besides, each organisation or monster that focuses on Harry is one less to threaten Clark later on: Harry is far from alone, and in the space of a year, the Avengers and Asgard have gutted both HYDRA and the Red Room, as well as Sinister's own extensive network. My reasoning was that Harry would draw out more of these threats simply by existing, while, as time passed, Clark would grow more and more powerful, more and more able to look after himself. All I would need to do is keep him secret. Keep him safe."

"But now you want to sacrifice secrecy entirely," Jonathan said, frowning.

"Not entirely," Jean-Paul said. "I…" He paused. "I suppose that there is something to that," he admitted. He folded his arms. "My entire reason for this meeting, _Monsieur_ Kent, was because I was, and am, afraid that Clark's secrecy might already be a thing of the past, at least so far as certain dangerous people are concerned. In the long term, I am not sure if it was ever going to be an option. And…" He took a deep breath, and for the first time, Jonathan saw a glimpse of the boy behind the cool, confident ageless mask, one frightened for the sake of his friend. "I have seen what happens to people like us, who are not protected by secrecy, support, or the ability to defend themselves. I do not want that to happen to Clark. Or to your family."

"You're trying to protect us," Jonathan realised, surprised and genuinely touched. "That's what you've been trying to do all along."

Jean-Paul nodded wearily.

"Look, Jean-Paul, we appreciate it," Jonathan said gently. "And we understand why you're worried; Martha and I have been worrying about the wrong people finding out about Clark from the very beginning. And believe me, we know enough bad about Lionel Luthor to be wary of him. With what you've said about what's happened to people you know, friends of yours with abilities like Clark's, I also understand why your instinct is to introduce Clark, and us, to people who you think will keep us safe. Or at least, safer than you think we might be otherwise."

"There is a 'but' coming," Jean-Paul said.

"Yes," Jonathan said. "I think you're jumping the gun. Lionel's bad, but you said it yourself – your friend Harry, and those around him, attract trouble."

"I may have over-emphasised the darker bits," Jean-Paul said wryly. "But yes." He sighed. "I think I see where you are going, _Monsieur_ Kent."

"I think you do. You seem like a smart young man," Jonathan said. "I'm not going to be so arrogant as to say that me and Martha could take on Lionel Luthor, Luthorcorp, and whoever he's got on his side, if it came to it. But you're not the only one with friends."

Jean-Paul looked up sharply.

"You were right, earlier, when you guessed that we were helped by SHIELD," Jonathan said. "Specifically, two Agents: Agent Fury and Agent Coulson. Among other things, they faked Clark's adoption. And while I won't pretend to know the ins and outs of SHIELD, I've noticed that Agent Fury is now Director Fury."

Jean-Paul's eyebrows shot up.

"You know him, I take it," Jonathan said, watching the teenager carefully, seeing if he was following where Jonathan was trying to lead him.

"Not well, but well enough," Jean-Paul said. "And I have met Agent Coulson in passing."

"Well, while they gave us contact details, I think it would be safer and more discreet if you spoke to them personally," Jonathan said. "Could you do that?"

Jean-Paul paused, then nodded seriously. "I could," he said. "And I will."

"Thank you," Jonathan said seriously. "Please let them know what's going on, if they don't know already. And let them know that Martha and I would like a word with them, about how we're going to handle things going forward – especially the problem of the likes of Lionel Luthor."

"Of course, _Monsieur_ Kent."

OoOoO

"How is he doing?"

Magneto glanced up at the speaker who had once again demonstrated his uncanny ability to appear in absolute silence. This startled most people. Of course, most people weren't half-expecting it, or able to sense the speaker's disguised metal left arm.

"Remarkably, Sergeant Barnes," he said, returning his gaze to Harry in the training room below. The room itself seemed to be utterly featureless, with the sole exception of an ever-shifting set of nine metal poles that drifted through the air at a leisurely pace. "He picked up manipulating electricity, for instance, exceptionally quickly. Though considering his father, and his natural gifts with fire, that is perhaps not all that surprising."

"Magic, or telekinesis?" Barnes asked.

"A little bit of both, I think," Magneto said. "My main priority was to get him used to the feel of it."

"And now you're testing his senses," Barnes said. A hint of dry humour entered his voice. "Or at least, I assume you didn't have him put that blindfold on for the fun of it."

"It covers his ears, too," Magneto confirmed. "Effectively rendering him blind and deaf. At the moment, his task is to sense and locate the pole emitting a significant amount of energy."

"You think he can do that?"

"As I pointed out to him, Sergeant, he can manipulate both matter and energy with his mind," Magneto said mildly. "It would seem logical that he could sense them with his mind as well."

Bucky eyed him. "That seems like a very careful choice of words," he said.

"Yes, it was," Magneto said somewhat smugly, then nodded his satisfaction as Harry, stalking through the poles, suddenly pounced on one. "That was the fifth time I have run him through the exercise. It took him half an hour the first time. This time, it only took him two minutes and forty seven seconds. It's really rather impressive, considering he's never done this before."

"Harry learns fastest when he's forced to adapt," Bucky said. "Put him under pressure, and his brain works faster."

"Is that so?" Magneto said. "Hmm. Very well."

The poles collapsed in on themselves, going from solid to liquid in an instant, before reshaping themselves into football-sized spheres. Then, they started to move again. But this time, they were moving a great deal faster. And this time, they were flying at Harry.

"Thank you for your advice, Sergeant Barnes."

Bucky audibly ground as his teeth as the ringing sound of metal spheres hammering at Harry's hastily raised telekinetic bubble. That minor symphony was interspersed with the occasional resonant clang as one of Harry's half irritable, half panicked telekinetic swipes hit a sphere, largely by chance, and an apparently endless flow of fluent swearing in English, French, Russian, and something that sounded vaguely Scandinavian. After several minutes of this, Bucky turned, apparently to descend to the training room and intercede.

"Wait," Magneto said sharply, a smile slowly crawling up his face. "Look."

Harry had frozen in place, suddenly utterly silent. His previously annoyed expression had transformed into one of utmost concentration, and the spheres flew unmolested, blocked only by the bubble. This state of affairs continued, until, suddenly, the bubble flared gold and expanded outwards in an explosion, no, a wave, of energy, that picked up the spheres and slammed them into the walls.

But that wasn't it, as the energy then condensed around the spheres and slowly lowered them, palpably restraining their attempts to fly free.

"Well, well, well," Magneto murmured. "Crude, perhaps, but clever. Definitely a good start."

"He pushed his telekinesis out, pinned those balls of yours against the wall, then used that to get a hold of them," Barnes said.

Magneto nodded. "It was not what I hoped, but certainly more than I expected," he said. "An encouraging demonstration of creativity within his limitations."

"What were you hoping for?"

"A radar, if you will," Magneto said. "A sense like a bat's sonar that would allow him to build up a picture of the world around him, but far more precise, allowing him to sense, understand, and manipulate things that he cannot see without guessing. A telekinetic variation on Psychometry. Of course, he could probably do so quite adequately by sending pulses of energy through the floors and walls around him."

"Why not tell him to do that?" Barnes asked, then nodded suddenly. "You didn't want him to get too comfortable with that and limit himself."

Magneto nodded. "I was hoping he would pick up the more difficult aspect first," he said. "As it is, he hasn't quite, but he's made a good start. All I really need do is persuade him to make the energy pulse outwards somewhat more subtle, and perhaps try and develop that into a sense for moving objects, rather than the equivalent of half-blind fumbling." He gestured, and the apparatus around Harry's head unlatched itself, coming away, before adding, in a voice that also emerged from unseen speakers, "Well done, Harry. That is enough for today."

Harry, bruised, sweaty, and dishevelled, but triumphant, removed the apparatus with one hand and wiped his forehead with the back of the other.

"I figured out your pet bludgers, Erik," he called up, with a grin on his face and pride in his voice. "You'll need a better trick next time."

"So I saw," Magneto said, utterly deadpan, as he and Bucky descended into the training room. "Curses. Foiled again. If only if it wasn't for you, you meddling child."

Harry chuckled. "How did I do?"

"You managed to get a grip on the spheres, but the method you used was the equivalent of fumbling along a wall in the dark in search of a light switch," Magneto said briskly. "It was crude, and only worked because you were in an enclosed area. As for the poles, you took minutes to pick out the correct one when it should take you mere seconds, if that." He paused as Harry's pride seemed to seep out of him like air out of a balloon, and his tone softened. "However, your stratagem for grasping the spheres showed encouraging initiative, and your technique, while crude and limited and in sore need of refinement, is broadly on the right track. Equally, while I expect you to ultimately pick out the correct pole almost instantly, you increased your speed by over ten times in only five attempts. If – and only if – you continue that speed, you should soon be counting the length of time taken to pick out the pole in seconds, and then fractions of a second. There is work to be done, but, for today…" He smiled. "Well done."

Harry positively beamed all the way back to the room they had arrived in, until, near the end, he paused, cocking his head.

"Harry?" Bucky asked.

"There's a psychic," he said slowly. "A strong one." His brow creased in a frown. "Her mind's a mess."

Bucky frowned.

"I'm not looking inside it," Harry said. "I can feel it without even trying." He looked at Magneto. "Who is she?"

"Her name is Ruth," Magneto said. "She is a young mutant, in my care. She is also Doctor Strange's patient." With a brief gesture, he separated the tube-like corridor they were in, and began to lower it through the bowels of the space station.

"Despite its capacity," he continued. "Avalon has only a small permanent population. Even as large as it is, it can still feel a little confined after a while, and most people prefer fresh air. This is perfectly fine, since Avalon was intended as a refuge, further removed and better protected than Charles' Mansion."

The corridor connected to another entry point, and Magneto continued without missing a beat. "That population is divided into three broad categories," he said. "First, there are those who help keep this station fully functioning; two examples would be Amelia Voght, whose skills as a paramedic and teleportation abilities allow quick and easy transport of injured mutants from Earth to Avalon for treatment, and Simon Hall, whose unusual brand of phasing and skills as a mechanic and engineer help maintain Avalon. Others, like Piotr Rasputin, are here because they prefer the quiet isolation that Avalon affords."

He stopped outside a door, turning back to Harry and Bucky, his expression serious.

"And others still, like Ruth, are those because they need that isolation," he said.

"Because she's a psychic and her powers damaged her mind?" Harry asked.

"More or less," Magneto said. "However, if she were simply a psychic, I would have turned to Charles or Dr Moonstar. There is a complicating factor, one which led me to turn to Doctor Strange." He sighed. "You see, she is a seer."

He gently knocked on the door.

"Enter," Strange's voice said from within.

The door slid open and, at Magneto's nod, Harry made his way inside.

It was a surprisingly homely room, considering. Aside from the fact that the walls were made of smooth metal, with its collection of posters and pictures of friends and family, and strewn assortment books, toys, and scattered drawings, it could have been the room of any one of millions of adolescent girls on Earth. Clearly, Magneto or someone resident here had gone to some lengths to try and make it comfortable for its resident.

That resident was a diminutive girl who was seated cross-legged on the bed, and being regarded with a serious and sympathetic expression by Doctor Strange. She looked, Harry thought, to be about the age Diana had been when he'd first met her – and, if anything, even smaller. Further examination revealed that she was dressed in a simple green shirt and a sky-blue long skirt, against which a mismatched pair of socks, one violently pink and covered in sparkles, and one pale yellow and emblazoned with a cartoon bumble-bee, stood out sharply.

She had brown skin of a shade common across the Middle East, particularly on the Mediterranean coast, and curtains of neatly combed black hair that fell to her shoulders, covering her face. This did not seem to overly impede her vision, however: the white blindfold covering her eyes did that.

"Hello. Goodbye. Are you – you are well. Shining eyes, scarred spirits." She looked past them, through her blindfold, at Magneto, and smiled. " _Zayde_ Eisenhardt," she greeted him.

He smiled back, sadly. " _Aynikl_ ," he replied.

She cocked her head suddenly, seeming to focus on Bucky's currently human looking left arm. "Is your arm cold?" she asked suddenly. This, as everything she had said, was delivered in a sing-song Israeli accented voice, and before Bucky could answer, she turned back to Harry.

"Little bird," she said. "Not-so-little? Has your egg hatched yet?"

"I… I don't know?" Harry said helplessly.

Ruth nodded, expression philosophical. "Yes. No. The cold cracked it. It's still cooking," she said, before pausing, looking apologetic. "Sorry. Bad-words, bad-hands, not ready."

Harry frowned, trying to remember why that rung a bell.

"She's been like this ever since I found her a little over a month ago," Magneto said quietly. "She was begging on the streets of Tel Aviv, and even less coherent than she is now. So far I have been unable to find her family – even with Charles' help, it took three days to figure out her name. Moving her to Avalon has helped; she seems to be something of a telepath as well as a seer, and she can't turn her powers off."

"I can see why," Harry said quietly. "Her mind's even more a jumble than I thought. It's a little bit like…" He tipped his head thoughtfully. Ruth imitated the gesture, once again giving the impression that she could see through her blindfold.

"Like yours, when you were being possessed by Chthon," Strange said quietly. "Or mine. A mind able to see constantly branching possible futures by the hundred, by the thousand. But this was a mind that was unused to psychic power, any power, and one that was fractured to begin with."

"Broken glass shows lots of same-different pictures," Ruth said calmly. "More pieces, more pictures."

"Well said, Ruth," Strange said gently. He looked up at Harry. "It's a miracle that she's even functioning, let alone as coherent as she is."

"Coherent?" Harry asked, tone mildly sceptical.

"Broken mirror still has all the pieces," Ruth said. She regarded him. "Will your shell be the same when you hatch?"

"I'm not sure. I'm still putting my cracks back together," Harry replied, without quite knowing why, or entirely understanding what he was saying.

Ruth, however, seemed to understand it just fine, nodding seriously. "Grey teeth want what's inside," she said, then paused, frowning. "Yes. No. No. Grey teeth do-don't. The cold doesn't like the fire, doesn't like cups of burning. It prefers gold. Fire makes ice-stone melt; there's a star underneath."

"She's speaking an identifiable language, and in mostly completely sentences," Strange said. "And in oft understandable metaphors too. So yes, she's coherent. A great deal more so than most of the seers I've met, in fact."

"She makes more sense than you usually do," Bucky said dryly, in a tone that belied his sorrowful expression.

"Is there anything we can do to help?" Harry asked.

"Yes. No. Yes. Hands broke. Same hands can fix," Ruth said, before Strange could reply, and gave Harry a very serious look. "Hands come in twos."

Harry made his way over to the bed and half crouched so that he was at eye-level with the girl. "What do you mean by that, please?"

Strange sighed, closing his eyes briefly. "You might as well tell him," he said. "It's easier if we just get it over with."

"You know what she means?" Bucky asked sharply.

"I do," Strange said, then added, directing his words at Magneto, "And I know why her powers were damaged when they activated. I have even since I laid eyes on her."

Ruth smiled sadly, then reached out and gently patted his cheek. "Come back when you have your other hand, thank you-please," she said.

The words and the touch were gentle, but Harry staggered away, all the blood draining from his face, as if he'd been stabbed in the chest with his own sword.

"Harry?" Bucky said, worried, at his side in a moment.

"I did this," Harry whispered.

"Ah," Magneto said slowly. "I see."

"I don't," Bucky said flatly.

"Harry and Carol were captured by the Red Room and trapped in the Nevernever," Strange said. "When Harry escaped, he realised this, and also realised as he orchestrated the escape of his fellow prisoners that they would need back-up. He knew that his telepathic power was sufficient to reach across dimensions, but his skill was not sufficient to direct it properly, especially if he didn't know where exactly he was. So he decided that the best course of action was to face Maddie Grey in psychic combat, engaging sufficiently to cause as much of a psychic disturbance as possible and keep her occupied, while also not facing her quite head-on for fear of being flattened."

"But I underestimated us," Harry said flatly. "How much of a mess we'd make."

"Yes, you did," Strange said, bluntly, but not harshly. "Though the fact it took place in the Nevernever didn't help." He looked up at the others. "In most people, who were unprotected, it merely caused rather nasty headaches. In psychics, however, the effects were significantly greater." He looked down at Ruth. "And in a young, powerful psychic and seer whose powers were on the brink of manifesting..."

"I did this," Harry repeated, in a horrified whisper. "I am sorry. I am so, so sorry."

"It takes two hands to clap," Ruth remarked.

There was a moment of puzzled silence, before Harry figured it out. "It was my plan," he pointed out.

Ruth shrugged. "The wall needed a hole," she said. "I have all the mirror-pieces. Come back with the other hand, thank you-please."

Harry frowned, slightly puzzled.

"I think," Bucky said, a touch dryly. "That she's telling you that if you want to help, you should stop burying yourself in guilt and go find Maddie."

Harry's frown deepened, before vanishing, replaced by an expression one of determination. "I," he said to Ruth. "Will be right back."

Then, he stood and turned to Doctor Strange. "Doctor Strange," he said. "I think the reading you set me is going to have to wait 'til later."

"Oh yes?" Strange asked, eyebrow raised.

"Yes," Harry said. "I'm sure it's important, but… this last month and a bit, people have been trying to help put me right." He glanced at Ruth. "To help put my pieces back in place." He looked back at Strange. "Now it's my turn."

Strange regarded him for a long moment, then smiled faintly, inclining his head. "Well listened that man," he said quietly, before taking Harry's arm and shifting his gaze to the rest. "We will, as Harry said, be right back."

And then, they vanished.

 **And there we have it – another steady shift in Harry's recovery, from him being helped, to him once again doing the helping. Not that the two are mutually exclusive, of course, but this is another step in Harry getting back on his feet and back to his old self, more or less. And lots of Clark and Jean-Paul, too. Those couple of scenes felt a bit rambling to me, but I left them as they were because I felt they worked, and because those two have been a bit neglected as far as screen-time goes.**

 **Ruth, meanwhile, got more screen-time than I intended, a great deal more. I don't plan for her to be a regular feature, and to be honest, she'll probably be more of a One Episode Wonder – we'll see her again, sure, but she's not going to be a particularly important character.**

 **And yes, I know, I said Zatanna would appear. Sorry. I had a neat scene planned, with her and Wanda, but it didn't quite fit with the chapter, which was already running over my plans. Again. Ah well, it'll probably fit better tonally with the next chapter, anyway, which sets the events of the Triwizard Tournament in motion, and the last preparations for the various plots converging on Halloween.**


	27. Chapter 27: Here We Go Again

**Good afternoon ladies and gentleman! Yes, here is another update, the day before Valentine's Day, just to show how much I love you all – though aside from the usual Harry/Carol sorta flirting, there's very little romance in it. And it's a long one, too, mostly because I decided to yank the story along to the selection of the Triwizard Champions on Halloween night, and thus the start to the next arc:** _ **Bloody Hell.**_

 **In the process, there'll be darker and lighter moments mixed up together, priming the pump, so to speak. I'll also admit that I skimmed bits of the canon lead up to the selection of the Champions scene because, to be perfectly frank, it would just be a rerun of canon with a few dialogue changes here and there – and also because Harry finds it somewhat boring and is firmly staying out of it. Or trying to, at least.**

 **Oh, and one of my delightful readers, who goes by PrinceOfAngels8129 on Youtube, is continuing his ongoing efforts to create an audiobook for _Child of the Storm_. Do check it out, it's excellent.**

 **Frodo's Heir:** **Harry has, as yet, no time for, or interest in, runes beyond the most basic identification. He's got enough on his plate with his current abilities and 'canon powers', whatever you mean by those. And he's unlikely to be mingling with dragons.**

"You're _joking!_ "

"No, Ron, I'm really not," Harry said bluntly. "He really does live in a space station the size of the castle. In fact, it might be bigger."

"How?" Hermione asked, astonished.

"As far as I can tell, he hollowed out an asteroid," Harry said.

"That's not possible," Ron said, in disbelief. "Going to space, that's not possible."

Harry snorted. "Say that in Doctor Strange's earshot and you'll probably be on the Moon before you finish the sentence," he said.

Ron went pale. "He couldn't…" Then, he paused. "He could, couldn't he?"

Harry shrugged. "I've long since stopped trying to figure out exactly what Strange can and can't do," he said. "But since he seems to treat the laws of nature as amusing suggestions, I'd go with yes."

"And besides, Ron, going to space is possible," Hermione said. "Muggles visited the Moon back in 1969, and there's a permanent space station in orbit above the Earth."

Ron stared at her in disbelief.

"And Jane's Bifrost gates could send someone there, fast as snapping your fingers," Harry remarked casually. "Tony's been talking about building a Moon base."

Ron continued to gape as Hermione turned to Harry.

"But I've never heard of anything like that," she continued. "Hollowing out an asteroid, even a small one –"

Harry snorted. "Believe me, Hermione, it's not small," he said. "I didn't exactly get a clear view of it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was over half the size of Hogwarts. At least. Like I said, it could be bigger."

"Three-quarters," Bucky supplied softly. "Give or take five hundred cubic metres."

"But still, how could anyone do that?" Hermione asked. "By themselves, I mean. I could see Loki doing it – after all, he…" She trailed off awkwardly.

"Once led an alien army through a portal in space?" Harry said, with a raised eyebrow.

"Right," Hermione said, awkwardly. "I mean, well, he's Asgardian. He's got that kind of power, and the technology too. But Magneto…"

"He had help on the technology part," Harry said. "As for power…" He sighed. "Hermione, _I_ have the raw power to do something like that. I'm not sure I'd know _how_ , as such, but I could do it."

"Yeah, but you're, well, _you_ , mate," Ron said, having snapped out of his stunned disbelief. "You're half Asgardian, for one thing. And Magneto's human." He looked a little sour. "Unless that's something else we got wrong."

"Magneto's human," Harry said quietly. "He's also more powerful than I am." He sighed. "If I had to guess, he's about as powerful as dad. If he isn't, he's close."

"But –"

"Ron, in London, HYDRA had a massive Helicarrier, a flying ship the size of Hogsmeade and actually now that I think about it, it was probably bigger," Harry said. "It was armoured with Vibranium, the stuff Steve's shield is made of. I threw two dismembered, zombified giants the size of skyscrapers at it, and all that did was take out a few of its weapons. Dad threw Mjolnir at it a few times and it _bounced off_. It would have taken all day to take down, unless we found a way around its defences. You understand?"

"Yeah," Ron said, frowning. "So?"

"So Magneto did that in less than a minute," Harry said flatly. "He crumpled it up like a ball of parchment, without even breaking a sweat." He leaned forward. "Listen to me: I could throw everything I have at him, and I mean _everything_."

Bucky shot him a meaningful look, and Harry paused, before smiling thinly. "Well," he said. "Perhaps a better way to put it would be everything that's me."

"Everything that's you?" Hermione asked, puzzled.

Harry grimaced. "I'll get to that. Anyway: I can do things that you couldn't even imagine; I could fly cross the Atlantic in a couple of hours, I could read the mind of someone sitting on a beach in Monaco or in a cabin in the Swiss Alps, or if I put my mind to it, I could probably blow up a large mountain or a small city. And if anything, I'm probably underestimating it by quite a lot." He smiled wryly. "Forgive me if I'm a little wary about finding out by how much."

He sighed at Ron and Hermione's stunned expressions.

"My point is that even I'm not really sure how powerful I am. I say I could only reach someone between here and the Mediterranean –"

" _Only?_ " Hermione squeaked.

"Only," Harry said gently. "Because the possible alternative is that I could reach someone halfway around the world, as one or two people have hinted. Bucky told you that I was responsible for the global scale migraines a couple of months ago, remember." His expression shadowed. "And worse."

He sighed. "But that was… not an exact measurement of what I'm normally capable of, even if I was in a fight and went all out. For one thing, I was in the Nevernever, the Spirit World, which apparently has some connection to the Astral Plane and humanity's subconscious and basically, it magnifies the effects of psychic powers. Magic too, for slightly different reasons. And for another, I was fighting a psychic even stronger than I was."

"The Red Room asset I mentioned," Bucky put in for clarification. That caused Harry to shoot a harsh frown at him, one that Bucky met without batting an eye, and one slowly faded after several long moments of silent communication.

He sighed again. "I haven't really tested my telepathic range since then, and I mean really, properly pushed it, so I don't know. Even then, I don't know what I can do at a distance – you might be able to see someone a mile away, but you're not going to see as easily, as clearly, or in as much detail as someone a couple of feet away from you. And it definitely helps with precision when you're up close…" He trailed off.

"Harry?" Hermione asked curiously.

Harry went pink, shot a glance at Bucky, whose eyes were dancing with amusement, and promptly went bright red.

"Mate?" Ron asked, prompting him curiously.

Harry cleared his throat and changed the subject. "Anyway," he said briskly. "The basic idea, though, is that I am more powerful than you could believe, and believe me when I say that I'm not saying this to boast." He met their gazes. "I'm saying this to try and make you understand."

"Understand what?" Ron asked carefully..

"What it means when I say this: Magneto is older than me, stronger than me, and much, much, _much_ better than me. His helmet shuts out telepathy. I could throw everything that's me at him, _everything_ , and I would _still_ lose. If he wanted to, he could crush me. In fact, he could kill me," Harry said flatly. "You understand the kind of power I'm talking about now? Making a space station like Avalon is not beyond him. In fact, I don't think it's even close to his limit. All it would take for someone like him is material, know-how, and patience. And Magneto's got all of those."

"What about someone like you?" Hermione asked, sounding rather subdued.

Harry was silent for a long moment. "I could get them," he said eventually. "Material? I can break mountains. Know-how? I'm one of the strongest telepaths on the planet. I can read almost any mind I like. And patience?" He smiled thinly. "I'm working on that." Then, he grinned, darkness banished, mischief in its place. "Why, Hermione? Is this your way of telling me you want a space station for your birthday? I could have a go at building you one, if you want, though it would probably be a bit wonky." He turned to Ron. "How about you, Ron? I could build you one too." His eyes darted between them and the mischief intensified, until his green eyes were practically dancing. "A matched set, maybe?"

"You might want to try and build yourself one first," Bucky suggested mildly, a hint of amusement in his voice. "You know: to work out the kinks."

"There's that," Harry acknowledged. "But what would I even call it?" He tilted his head in amused thought, white lock glowing in the fire-light, left eye flaring gold. "Graymalkin? Providence?"

"Why would you call it anything like that?" Hermione asked, baffled.

Harry shrugged. "No idea," he said. "Just random thoughts." He paused and bit his lip.

"Harry?"

"There's another reason I'm saying all this," Harry said abruptly. "Not just to go on about how badass I am, and therefore how badass Magneto is. There…" He hesitated. "There are things I haven't told you."

Ron snorted involuntarily.

There was a dangerous moment, then Harry echoed his amusement. "Yeah, I guess that's pretty obvious," he admitted. "Like I said: there are things I haven't told you. There's a lot I haven't told you, actually." He sat back. "And there are things that I won't tell you. Things I don't want to talk about, things you're not allowed to know about… and things you are much better off not knowing."

"Like what?" Ron asked, tongue getting ahead of his brain.

"Well, for starters, I'm not going to tell you what it feels like to be in contact with someone's mind as it's erased, or to be possessed with an Elder God," Harry said, in a deceptively mild tone. "I mean, the concepts don't translate very well into words. In theory I could share the experiences with you, but I think you're better off without, don't you?"

Ron gulped and nodded.

"We understand, Harry," Hermione said.

Harry arched an eyebrow, then shrugged and raised his right hand. He paused for a moment, concentrating, then deliberately snapped his fingers once, releasing a soft whisper of power.

"What was that?" Ron asked warily.

"Theatrics," Hermione said, a little disapprovingly.

Harry shrugged. "I didn't have to do it," he agreed. "Well – not that way. The finger snap, I mean. But I didn't want us being overheard."

"So…"

"I put everyone else in the Tower to sleep and made sure that those already asleep stayed that way," Harry said calmly. He met both of their gazes in turn. "I told you most of what happened over the summer. What happened to me. Now, I'm going to fill in the gaps." He stared into the fire for a long moment. In that moment, it began to shift and change, darkening from orange to red, bathing the room in a mixture of blood red light and deep, dark shadows. "It begins… well. I suppose it begins with the Red Room." He stopped. "Bucky told you what they did to me, I take it?"

"The first part," Bucky said quietly. Harry glanced up at him, and once again, something passed between the two of him, causing Harry to nod grimly.

"You left out quite a lot, then," he said. "Like what happened when I was with the Red Room."

"What do you mean?" Ron asked. "I mean, they had you, didn't they? And they had you for ages and they…" He trailed off.

"Tortured me?" Harry asked mildly. "In various different ways, yes."

"Then what are you getting at?" Ron asked.

"Oh," Hermione said suddenly, in tones of revelation, shock, horror, and above all, compassion. "Oh, _Harry_."

"'Mione?" Ron asked, puzzled.

"You figured it out, then?" Harry said.

Hermione nodded, giving Harry a sad look. "They didn't just torture you," she said. "Did they?"

Harry closed his eyes, then shook his head.

"I wondered," Hermione admitted. "But I only realised just now, when you hinted that there was something else to it."

"I'm a bit lost here," Ron said, shooting a glance at Bucky. He might as well have glanced at a statue.

Hermione exchanged a look at Harry, and at the latter's short nod, took a deep breath. "What Harry was getting was that all those things that were going on in and around Russia over the Summer needed a powerful telepath to pull off. A very, _very_ powerful telepath."

Ron's eyes widened as the implications hit him. "Wait, you mean," he began.

"The Red Room had their heyday back in the old USSR, and they wanted to bring the 'good old days' back," Harry said quietly. "Not the Communism, though. The power. And in the 'good old days' they had an arsenal to enforce that power. An arsenal including two living weapons: the Black Widow and the Winter Soldier." He paused for a moment, letting that sink in. "And they already had a new Black Widow."

Ron and Hermione's expressions were identical pictures of horror, pale faces rendered eerie by the red flames.

"So they made you into the new Winter Soldier," Hermione whispered.

"The _Krasnyy Syn_ ," Harry confirmed, in a flawless Russian accent. "The Red Son. The Winter Soldier Mark II: faster, stronger, and infinitely more powerful." He flexed the fingers of his left hand. "They spent days trying to force the programming on me, to make me give in. And in the end, I did."

Ron and Hermione stared at him in horror. Then, Ron suddenly cocked his head. "Who did they have?" he asked shrewdly.

Hermione blinked at him in surprise, and Ron shrugged. "It's obvious," he said. "And, no offence mate, but you're the stubbornest person I know."

"I can think of a couple of competitors," Bucky murmured.

Ron shot him an odd look before looking at Harry again. "Point is, I can't see anyone managing to..." He trailed off, going a little green at the thought.

"Break me?" Harry asked gently, then sighed. "You're right, but not the way you think. They did have someone. But the Red Room didn't use her as leverage." He was silent for a moment, gathering his thoughts. "Okay," he said. "This part takes some explaining. I've mentioned my cousin Jean to you?"

"Vaguely," Hermione said, as Ron nodded uncertainly.

"And that she had abilities? That she was a psychic, like me?"

"I think so."

"That if the world is the night sky, most other psychics are like stars, then I'm like a full Moon by comparison?"

"I'm not sure if you did, but I think I see what you mean," Hermione said. "You're much more powerful than every other psychic."

"Almost every other, but yeah," Harry said.

"I see. Harry, where is this going?"

"You'll see," came the reply. "This is the part that I'm not sure if I mentioned," Harry continued. "On that scale, if I'm the Moon… Jean's the Sun. She can do things that put her in the same weight class as dad, uncle Loki, and Magneto – which, since dad can destroy planets if he cuts loose, is saying something. And she's only seventeen, so she's probably got a bit to go yet."

Ron swore loudly, as Hermione gasped. Then, Ron's eyes widened as something clicked.

"Wait," he said suddenly, whipping round to look at Bucky. "Back on the Astronomy Tower. You mentioned that this Red Room, they had an, uh, asset? Someone more powerful than Harry."

"I did," Bucky said, as much confirmation for Harry as acknowledgement to Ron.

"Right," Ron said. "Was it –"

"No," Harry said quietly. "It wasn't Jean." He smiled wryly. "Don't worry. I made that mistake too. This is where it gets complicated."

And so, in calm, controlled sentences, he explained to two of his oldest friends the sad tale of Maddie Grey. When he drew the tale to a close, the reactions were predictable.

"Oh my god," Hermione said, horrified. "The poor girl. That must have been awful…" She shook her head. "Words don't even begin to cover how much."

"That's _sick!_ " Ron burst out, sounding both furious and utterly revolted. "He made her think she was just some sort of weapon?!"

"Yes, yes, and yes," Harry said calmly. "Yes it was, on both counts, and yes he did."

"How can you be so calm?" Ron demanded.

"Because you haven't seen me anything more than a bit annoyed since I got back to Hogwarts," Harry said flatly. "Except for the thing with Seamus, I suppose."

"Yeah," Ron said, pushing. "But why? I mean, she's family! He ruined her life!"

In an instant, Harry was on his feet, teeth bared, eyes blazing an incandescent white, power radiating off him in waves as the hearth fire erupted into an inferno of white-hot flame, sucking all the air from the room and made the hint of wood smoke on the air into something all encompassing. But over all that came words that were part the crackling roar of a forest fire, part the shriek of an enraged bird of prey, and part the scream of an angry child.

" _ **I**_ **KNOW** _ **! HE RUINED MINE TOO!"**_

Then, as quickly as it had arrived, it was gone. Harry settled back into his seat. His eyes had returned to their normal green, the fire in the hearth had died down almost instantly, and the air had returned to normal, comfortably breathable levels.

"Sorry," he said quietly, into the deafening silence.

"That was an illusion?" Hermione asked carefully. "It wasn't real?"

Ron said nothing, face completely white.

"Yes and no," Harry said, tone subdued, even a little ashamed. "Sorry," he repeated. "I…" He looked away. "That was a look at what I was feeling at the time. It was real inside my head." He stopped for a moment. "Talking about this, it's cleaning out a cut," he said abruptly. "It's necessary, to stop it going bad and festering. But it hurts like hell. Sometimes it comes out as tears, sometimes as anger, sometimes as both. I've been trying to keep a lid on it, while talking to you, so I can get it done. And when Ron thought I wasn't angry, that I didn't care, and asked why... I lost control. So I projected it at you. As a demonstration. I shouldn't have done."

He looked and sounded profoundly ashamed.

"Harry," Hermione said gently. "It's all right. We understand. You've been through something utterly awful, and it was barely two months ago, if that. You're an incredible person, and you've done some amazing things, but you're still human: of _course_ you're angry and upset."

"Right," Ron said, somewhat unsteadily. "Sorry mate. Shouldn't have doubted."

Harry grimaced. "Maybe," he said. "And Ron, please don't start taking my words as gospel. Unless the alternative is us all dying horribly." He paused. "Anyway: I can't afford to let my temper get away with me, even little bits like that." He noticed the surprise and smiled thinly. "Yes. That was 'little'. That was a… a shadow of what the real thing is like." The smile faded. "One of the things I've been learning from Magneto is summed up like this: 'anger makes a good servant, but a poor master.' That applies to me more than most, and there's a reason for that, one I'll get on to in a bit. Even without that, what I'm going to get into, the fact is that if I'm not careful, I can break minds, drive people mad, even erase their minds entirely, completely by accident! I live in a world made of glass!"

"Easy," Bucky said. Like most things he said, it was quiet, but even so, it was clearly heard.

Harry glanced at him and nodded, sighing. "Right. I have to be careful, like I said," he said. "Anyway, I'm sorry I scared you." He looked away. "Maddie broke away, though." He smiled slightly. "It was kind of amazing, actually: he'd been dominating her mind, controlling her, all her life. She'd had a few outside influences; mostly a guy called Remy, another prisoner… sort of. Essex had him on a leash, but he found some wriggle room, and started using it to lead Maddie away. I helped, where I could, and I think seeing Jean the way she did raised a few questions. But she made the choice herself." The smile widened. "And she saved me. The Red Room had me, and she stood up for me." The smile faded. "Then Essex erased the memory. But she got it back after a couple of days, and contacted me." The smile returned, wry and grim. "At that point, we got too clever for our own good. We tried to pull a fast one on the Red Room, and on Essex: I would get out of my body and she'd hide my mind in that phoenix feather I'd been wearing, that my grandfather gave me. Remember, Hermione?"

Hermione nodded uncertainly. "Yes, but –"

"How?" Harry asked rhetorically. "Ron, it looked like this." He conjured an illusion of the golden phoenix feather. "Short version: it's not a phoenix feather, not that anyone but Doctor Strange knew, and there's a reason I'm not wearing it." He shook his head. "The plan was for my mind to be downloaded into the feather, Maddie would present my empty body to the Red Room, claiming to have erased my mind, then the moment they took their eye off the ball, she'd put me back in and we'd make our escape. It nearly worked - technically, it did, in the long run. But." He grimaced. "Essex was suspicious. And curious about the feather. He separated Maddie from my body, and took the feather too. The Red Room had my empty body, and reprogrammed it as the Red Son, who they used to conquer half a continent, bend and break dozens of minds, and kill –" He stopped sharply.

"So it wasn't you," Ron said tentatively.

"Technically, no," Harry sighed. "But there's two flaws in that argument: first, they only had my body because I gave it up. Second..." He tapped his skull. "The Red Son's still in here."

Both Ron and Hermione froze.

"Don't worry, the programming's gone and he's well locked away," Harry said. "He doesn't have a real personality or will of his own, either. He's more like a collection of memories and skills, ones I can't even access, not without breaking the mental block and I think you can understand why I wouldn't want to do that. Even so, I know the broad idea." He sighed and looked tired. "He's a part of me, though, even if he isn't one that I particularly like to discuss." He snorted. "And that isn't even the real problem."

"Sounds like a problem to me," Ron said, in a voice that was just shy of a squeak.

"What, that I have the memories of six-months-in-twelve-days of life as the Winter Soldier Mark II locked away in my brain?"

Bucky raised an eyebrow.

"… okay, fine, that does sound like a problem," Harry admitted. "Unfortunately, it's pretty much nothing compared to what happened when I got back into my body and was hit with all those memories." He took a long, slow, deep breath, and looked down at his tightly clasped hands. "I told you about my mother. And about the Phoenix. About how She intervened to protect me from Voldemort's killing curse, then brought me back after Daken killed me. But I left something out." He laughed bitterly. "You see, that night that mum accidentally called on Her, that Doctor Strange pointed her in my direction, and Voldemort tried to kill me… She left something behind."

"You mean," Hermione began, eyes widening to the size of golf balls.

"Yes," Harry said. "A fragment. You've seen it before. And you've been warned about my dark side. Put them together, and what do you get?" He smiled thinly, and his voice shifted. **"The Dark Phoenix."**

OoOoO

 **The following evening.**

" _You told them?"_

"Doctor Moonstar says that talking about my problems helps," Harry said. His pose was not, on the face of it, uncommon to a teenager: sitting cross-legged, nominally reading books set by a teacher, with a phone pressed against their ear.

The fact that it took place seated on a cloud, however, was a little less common.

"And besides," he continued. "I think they deserve it. I've shut them out for long enough."

" _Fair enough. How did they take it?"_

"How would you take it if one of your oldest friends suddenly informed you that not only does he have PTSD and can blow up mountains by thinking about it, but he's got an inner demon that's a mix of his own dark side and the embers of an impossibly ancient cosmic entity that eats stars as an afternoon snack, a diet choice that he might just embrace if he gets too angry one day?"

"… _so, they took it badly."_

Harry sighed. "The way I put it probably didn't help."

" _You got into the dramatics again, didn't you."_

"… Maybe?" Harry ventured, before explaining just how he'd put it.

Carol's response was predictable, and rather exasperated.

" _I've said before, I'll say it again: you are a total fucking drama queen."_

"I turned my guardian angel into an inner demon that might eat the planet. There's no good way to put that."

" _Yes, Harry, but that was a terrible way to put it."_

Harry sighed. "Probably true."

" _Definitely true. You idiot."_

"You're not the only one to think that," Harry said sourly.

" _Bucky?"_

"No. Strange, actually."

" _He spoke to you about it?"_

"No. But the book I'm reading, which he set me kind of gives it away."

" _How so?"_

"Carol, it's called 'Blood Magic for Morons'."

" _You're joking."_

"I'm really not."

" _That doesn't mean –"_

"Carol. He wrote it."

" _It is kind of unrelated, though."_

"Bet you five quid."

" _No. Partly because I'm not sure, and partly because I'm not sure what a quid is."_

Harry snorted.

" _Look, they'll come 'round,"_ Carol said. _"Give 'em time. It's a lot to take in."_

"You took it in fine," Harry grumbled.

" _I was there, I saw it for myself. I had time to adjust, to have my meltdown in private."_

Harry winced.

" _Relax, dude. Only half of them were because of you."_

"That doesn't make me feel better."

" _Live with it."_

"I'll add it to the list."

" _Good boy. Anyway, I had my own issues to be going on with. You know. Family. So that was the other half,"_ Carol said. _"Anyway, I had a few things they didn't."_

"Like a backdoor into my brain?"

" _Not what I was going with, but yeah, that too."_

"Then what?"

" _I saw it happen. I had context. I saw you change… and I saw that you were still you."_

Harry didn't reply.

" _When I saw the Dark Phoenix, I saw that it was you – you hadn't suddenly gone evil or anything like that. It's just that you were hurting and angry and lashing out. If they'd been there, they'd have seen that too. But they weren't. They only know what you told them."_

"They've seen the Phoenix fragment in me before."

" _Yes, it brought their best friend back from the dead, blew up their school, vaporised about a bajillion HYDRA goons with super tech and superpowers, and a whole bunch of those Dementoids –"_

"Dementors."

" _Dementors, whatever. I'm willing to bet it generally scared the hell out of them. Add that to you making clear how scary powerful you are even without it, and outright stating that it mixed with your dark side – not the best way to put it, by the way – and what it could do… of_ _ **course**_ _they're going to be scared. They're going to jump to the worst case scenario and imagine that there's an evil unstoppable cosmic nightmare split-personality growing inside you because that is the picture you gave them."_

"It's not exactly inaccurate."

" _Shut up,"_ Carol snapped. _"The Phoenix isn't evil. Weird, maybe, excepting the part that's your mom, but not evil. It's a force of nature, and those aren't evil. A tornado isn't evil. A thunderstorm isn't evil. Destructive, sure. Scary, definitely. But not evil."_

"Destructive is what I'm worried about," Harry said flatly. "One of the things, anyway."

" _Well, you're in luck, because you're in control of that force of nature. If you weren't, we'd all have been fried already. And you, Harry Thorson, are not evil."_

"I have a dark side. And sometimes, it gets out," Harry said. "You said it yourself."

" _Sure. We all do. Even Steve, believe it or not."_

"I'll go with 'not' on that one," Harry said wryly. "But not everyone has a Phoenix fragment for it to mix with and run wild."

" _Harry. Your dark side is part of you, same way mine is part of me. You're the psychic – and the one with the psychic shrink and, you know, Bucky – but from what you've told me, what I've seen, what I've_ _ **felt**_ _… I'm pretty damn sure it's not some split personality. And neither is the Phoenix fragment you've got. All it is, as far as I can tell, is power that your mom left behind to protect you. Scary strong power, power that super-charges you to – well, you know how much better than I ever will. It super-charges your emotions in the process, and messes with your head. All true so far?"_

Harry grunted.

" _I'll take that as a yes. Here's the killer point: it doesn't think by itself. Neither does your dark side, because it's just you. They're not suddenly going to take over, turn you into an evil cosmic nightmare, and destroy the world. I know that. You know that. Stands to reason that your friends should know that too, huh? I mean, maybe you didn't think to do it, and there's plenty of reason why you wouldn't, but… it's something you should do. Especially if you left it out on purpose because you're feeling guilty and want to torture yourself."_

"You sound like an unholy fusion of Steve and Darcy – guilt trip combined with uncomfortable insight."

" _I'm surprisingly okay with that."_

"I thought you might be."

" _How well you know me. I mean, it fits: Steve contributes looks, athletic inclinations, and guilt-tripping as a superpower. Darcy contributes insight, sarcasm, and a fantastic rack."_

Harry went red.

" _You're blushing, aren't you?"_ she said. He could _hear_ the smirk.

"I'm not."

" _Hey, if Maddie and Jean are anything to go by, you'd have one too if you were a girl."_

Harry went redder and merry laughter streamed down the phone. Sooner rather than later, though, it stopped, and when Carol's voice returned, it was sober and serious.

" _Anyway,"_ she said. _"I'd suggest filling in the gaps."_

Harry said nothing.

Carol's tone softened. _"If you don't feel up to it, I can do it. Or Bucky, your dad, Loki, Wanda, Doctor Strange, hell, that headmaster of yours…"_

"I think Bucky's doing it," Harry said quietly. "I asked him to leave be, but…"

" _Bucky was ignoring people way more commanding than you long before either of us was even thought of."_

"Yes."

" _You should have mentioned that earlier. You know, before I got into the swing of lecturing you: I've done enough of that recently with Lex, on account of how the dumbass managed to drive into a river and would have drowned if some local farmboy hadn't dragged him out."_

Harry smiled seraphically, savouring the moment of sweet revenge. "Well, I thought about it," he admitted in his most innocent voice. "But you sounded like you were having so much fun."

" _Fuck you, Harry James Thorson."_

"Maybe later, Carol Susan Jane Danvers," Harry retorted, largely on automatic as he tried to banish the mental images from his treacherous imagination, and dropped his book in the process.

Thankfully, Carol was distracted by responding with a string of the foulest profanity she could come up with and didn't notice the hasty fumbled juggling.

"You know," Harry managed, after he regained his composure – and his book, which he'd ultimately caught with his feet. "If nothing else, this has cheered me right up."

" _I'm happy for you,"_ Carol said, and surprisingly enough, she sounded as if she actually meant it. _"And Harry? A couple of things."_

"Go ahead."

" _Even once Bucky fills in the gaps – you know, that you're not a ticking cosmic time bomb – they'll still take time to come 'round."_

"I know," Harry said. "First impressions stick. And I messed up that first impression."

" _I'd argue that your mom kind of messed it up for you. You messed up the second one with that explanation,"_ Carol remarked. _"And I didn't just have context. I also didn't have six months of your insane shenanigans dropped on me in twenty minutes. Telling them about the Dark Phoenix just after the whole Red Son thing? Maybe not the best idea."_

"I wanted to get it over with," Harry said tightly.

" _I know,"_ Carol said, tone gentle. _"Believe me, I know. It's easier to get it all out at once. And then going back in… Yeah. I get it. It's just that you really threw them in at the deep end, melodramatics notwithstanding. It'll take time to adjust."_

"I know," Harry said. "I can feel them doing it, literally feel them." He smiled wryly. "Perk of being a telepath."

" _And –"_

"Actually, can I say something first, Carol?"

" _Shoot."_

"Using the Phoenix fire. You hinted that I could do it without going Dark Phoenix."

" _Well…"_

"I might be able to," Harry said. "But I can't. And not just because I'm afraid of going Dark Phoenix, or about a million gods deciding to try and pre-emptively destroy me. I'll explain why later. Not over the phone."

" _Okay,"_ Carol said. _"Done?"_

"Done."

" _Cool. You want to know the other thing I was going to say?"_

"Sure."

" _You're making a video-call. For the last half hour, I've had an up-close and personal view of your ear. Which is how I could tell when you were blushing, by the way."_

Harry paused, then floated the phone around to hover in front of him. Carol waved cheerfully.

" _Hi!"_

"And you waited this long to tell me."

" _Well, you sounded like you were having so much fun…"_

"I hate you."

" _No you don't."_

"No, I don't," Harry sighed, then snorted and smiled. "Thanks for the talk, Carol. Catch you later."

" _And you, Harry._ "

OoOoO

A couple of weeks passed, and, true to predictions, Ron and Hermione took some time to adjust to what they'd been told. Even once reassured by Bucky that no, contrary to Harry's incomplete explanation, the Dark Phoenix was not some split personality within Harry that was set to emerge and destroy reality, it took some time to adjust.

In the meantime, Harry buried himself in books. _Blood Magic for Morons_ was followed by SHIELD, MI13's and the White Council's files and combat manuals as pertained to the Grey Court, and quite a few others.

Among them were _The Encyclopaedia Vampyrica; Dracula: A Biography; The Hemomancer's Guide; The Necrotelecomnicon; Bloody Night: A History of the Grey Court of Vampires; Blood Rites: the Use and Abuse of Blood Magic; The Voynich Manuscript_ (Translated) _; Everything To Know About the Undead But Were Too Afraid to Ask; Fangs for the Memories; The Life and the Resurrection: The Connection between Blood Magic and Death Magic;_ _Liber Paginarum Fulvarum;_ and _The Book of the Dead._

The last sparked Hermione's curiosity, because it shared a name with the famous Egyptian funerary text, supposed to guide a soul through the Underworld. While Harry could unequivocally say that that was not the case – though it did deal in part with Ancient Egypt, as part of its general subject matter of the undead – Harry felt he would have preferred the original. For one thing, he somehow doubted that the Egyptian Book of the Dead felt cold all the time, or that it had a distressing tendency to bleed whenever it was near the site of a recent death. Or, as it happened, when it was around Bucky, which was doubly distressing for all concerned.

He also tended to take what he felt were 'constructive breaks' from time to time.

No one, not even Hermione, questioned the need for occasional breaks. Indeed, in Hermione's case, she was mostly just impressed that he managed to fit the reading around not just his normal time-table and homework, but additional lessons with 'Professor Bach', and practising exercises that Magneto had set him (with occasional extra visits to Avalon to examine his progress, add refinements, and check on Ruth's progress). And were all that not enough, he also had combat training with Bucky, which included both hand to hand, marksmanship, knives, and swordsmanship training. Adding breaks, she felt, should break some fundamental law of physics.

Harry agreed that this would be the case, were it not for one simple thing: he didn't sleep.

Or rather, he did sleep. But unless he was particularly exhausted or injured, he generally only did so for a maximum of five hours a night, six at the outside, and more usually four. Bucky, meanwhile, didn't seem to sleep at all.

The reason behind this was the same as the one behind his newfound ability to read as fast - even faster – than she could, behind his increasingly – even uncannily – good memory.

As he reluctantly explained when she asked, he wasn't just growing physically stronger; though that was part of it. As Bucky supplied in quiet, clinical tones, the steady emergence of his Asgardian heritage, aside from giving him more magical power to work with, meant that Harry's body was solidly into the super soldier category now. Without using his telekinesis, he had an effective top speed on foot of fifty miles per hour, and could maintain that for perhaps seven minutes, and speeds of thirty miles per hour for over an hour. He could bend steel bars and, if his fist was protected, punch holes in concrete. And if anything, his healing abilities were faster than those of fully fledged super soldiers like Steve and Bucky himself. Likewise, he had reflexes like a scalded cat, and his senses were comfortably beyond human.

This development had been relatively slow, taking jumps after his death and resurrection at the Battle of Hogwarts, and after the time he'd spent in the Red Room's hands. The physical effects, though, were merely the most obvious. There had been mental effects too – though as Harry hastened to explain, these did not make him smarter, as such, just better able to do what he could already. For instance, while he still could not make head or tail of the kinds of equations that Jane, Tony, Bruce, and occasionally Loki scribbled on whiteboards or on projected holoscreens, he could make calculations faster if he could actually interpret them in the first place.

As he put it, he couldn't think better, but he could think – and thus, read – faster. And as Hermione thought about it, she realised that he was right. The only exception to that particular rule she could think of seemed to be language absorption; previously, as far as she knew, he had been limited to English, with scattered French and Russian words picked up from the Avengers, and a broad variety of swearwords picked up from the same. Now, he spoke French, Russian, German, and Spanish with perfect fluency, and possibly others too. He vaguely attributed this fluency to a combination of native Asgardian facility with languages and a remnant of his time with the Red Room, then refused to speak about it further. Hermione drew her own conclusions.

All told, Hermione felt that breaks were necessary, for fear of physical and mental burnout. And if those breaks were constructive, in terms of keeping the brain somewhat exercised, or entertained in a way relevant to what he was learning about, that was all to the good.

However, her and Harry's definitions of constructive did not match.

"Really, Harry?"

"It's relevant, it's unusually accurate in regards to the nature and general personalities and, to an extent, aspirations, of Grey Court vampires, and the dangers of improperly performed magic too. And the main characters parallel the three of us; me, you, and Ron – I'm the snarky badass hero with ridiculously bad luck, you're the magically inclined super-genius, and Ron is the eternally loyal, funny, and occasionally insensitive back-up. It even provides strategies that have proved effective in heavy combat."

"You are, of course, joking."

"Would I do that?"

"Yes."

"… You know me too well."

"Yes, I do."

"But I'm not joking. About any of it, especially the last one, the strategy one. I used it at the Battle of London. Ask Carol if you don't believe me; she was there, she helped me do it."

"I…"

"Hermione. I realise that you may have trouble believing it, but just ask yourself one question: Am I mad enough to use a strategy from a tv show to defeat – or rather, temporarily dismember – an insane elven necromancer as powerful as my uncle, who was well on the way to becoming the host to an eldritch abomination?"

"… God help me, you are."

"Told you. And it worked, by the way. Granted, all we really managed was to make him someone else's problem, but I'm reliably informed that Wanda's boyfriend, Harry Dresden, accidentally forged a bit of his soul into a magic holy lightsabre and cut off the necromancer's arm. Permanently, I mean. He kept growing them back, before."

"…"

"What? It happened. Wanda told me, and Rhodey, Colonel Rhodes, confirmed it. Admittedly, Rhodey looked a bit like he wanted to drink until he forgot how insane his life was, but Tony says he usually looks like that, so it's okay."

"I'm just amazed that you managed to say that with a straight face."

"Natasha taught me. It's a useful skill."

"I'm sure."

"Also, that day was so ridiculous that an accidental magic-holy-lightsabre was basically a footnote."

"I'd gathered."

"Good to know."

A pause.

"But Harry, seriously."

"Seriously what?"

"Seriously, how is this constructive?"

"Like I told you, it's relevant. It even has 'vampire' in the title.

"So does _The Little Vampire._ So does _Interview with a Vampire._ Having 'vampire' in the title doesn't make it any more relevant."

"This is completely different. And besides, it's popular with the rest of the House, especially after the Twins rigged up a projector. And why wouldn't it be? It's got it all! Fencing, fighting, torture, revenge, giants, monsters, chases, escapes, true love, miracles... and vampires and magic, of course. There's something for everybody!"

"I know for a fact that there aren't any giants. And there isn't much fencing, either."

"Well, there's lots of verbal fencing."

"Harry. I appreciate your need for a break – you've been working very hard. I even reluctantly admire your ability to bend the truth – you've clearly been learning very well from Doctor Strange."

"But?"

"But there is no way, in this world or any other, that you will convince me that nightly marathons of _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ are in any way, shape, or form, 'constructive.'"

"I'll take that as a challenge… Willow."

"You're impossible."

"I've come back from the dead and you're only just realising this? Maybe I should revise the genius part."

"Well, I'm not the one who cast themselves as a short, shoe-obsessed blonde girl, am I? Especially since our closest parallel to Angel – tall, dark, handsome and ageless superhuman – is Bucky."

There was a long, mildly disturbed pause.

"You have a strange mind."

"You've known me for over three years and you're only just realising this?"

"… Touché. Also, considering how much brooding I've been doing over my dark and troubled recent past, the fact that I have a dark side which scares everyone including me, and the fact that I'm a superhuman who's also apparently tall, dark, and handsome, I think I fit the Angel model too."

"Which leaves Carol as your Buffy, I suppose?"

At that point, Harry wisely kept his mouth shut.

OoOoO

Despite the absurdity of his argument, there was actually something to what Harry was saying.

"You got the entirety of Gryffindor House addicted to _Buffy the Vampire Slayer?_ "

"Well. Most of it, yes."

Wanda threw back her head and laughed.

"What?" Harry asked. He hadn't expected a visit from his godmother, and technically, this wasn't one. Officially, she was consulting with Dumbledore on a group of necromancers known as the Heirs of Kemmler, who were believed to be plotting something related to Halloween, while also advising on security protocols for the Triwizard Tournament, and having a discussion with Professor Zatara about her brand of mixed magic from a standpoint of professional interest.

Unofficially, she was trying to wring some more information out of the still disguised Doctor Strange (which, since he seemed to be feeling in a particularly cryptic mood – and had decided that he need Ron and Hermione for some experiment for whatever reason – was an exercise in futility), and drop in on her godson to see how he was. And spoil him, just a little bit, with a quick trip to the _Three Broomsticks_.

"I was a technical adviser on the show," Wanda said, amused.

Harry's jaw dropped. "No. Way."

"Well, it wasn't an official thing," Wanda said. "Back in the late nineties, I got wind that there was this show in production, themed around a young woman in the modern world, slaying vampires that bore a reasonably close resemblance to Grey Court vampires. Normally, I wouldn't have paid much attention to this beyond idle curiosity and surprise it had rocked up on the supernatural grapevine, but as it turned out, the local Grey and Red Court Master vampires of that part of California had got wind of it too, and wanted to stop it dead, if you'll pardon the pun."

"Grey _and_ Red Court?" Harry asked, surprised. "Not Grey, White, and Black?"

"Yes," Wanda said. "And I'll get to why in a moment."

Harry nodded obediently.

"Anyway. Why this show specifically? Well, productions of _Dracula_ are one thing; there are so many of them that there's no point in trying to stop one. Additionally, they, and those that follow in their footsteps, tend to depict vampires as easily enough identified – permanent 19th century evening dress, archaic mannerisms, generally being wedded to the past. Clichés galore, in other words," Wanda said. "While they run down the list of vampire weaknesses pretty accurately, particularly those of the Grey and Black Courts, they also give all the wrong indications of what to expect when looking for a vampire, and above all, help them do the one thing that puts them among the most dangerous of supernatural predators: hide."

"Hide?" Harry echoed, surprised.

"Hide," Wanda repeated. "With the exception of the Black Court, vampires blend in with ordinary humans like practically no other supernatural predator on Earth. Some of the Fae can match them, but their disguises tend to be skin deep – they can _look_ human, but they can't _act_ human. If you know what to look for, they're easy to spot. Vampires usually aren't. Next time you walk down the street of an evening, look around you – anyone you see could be a vampire. They used to be human, and in the case of the White Court, they actually are human, until their demon manifests. And even after, they're damn near impossible to pick out if they're not using their powers, not without physical contact or the Sight. You're a psychic, so you might have better luck, but…"

She shook her head. "Vampires can hide what they are. They're wolves in sheep's clothing, and the more that the general population's mental image of a vampire is the standard depiction of Dracula, or something similar, the happier they are. It means that relatively minor mistakes in out-dated fashion and slang, that a vampire not quite up to date with modern times might make, are more likely to be overlooked than to serve as alarm bells. It means that people won't realise that they can and do use the most modern technology to their advantage, everything from computers and smartphones to serious military hardware. It means that they can hide in plain sight."

"… And they felt that a tv show threatened this?"

"A tv show that ultimately became a global cultural phenomenon, influenced the speaking patterns of a generation in the Western hemisphere, and spawned hundreds of imitators," Wanda pointed out. "Granted, no one exactly saw that coming, but there was enough in the basic production to draw the wrong eyes – it depicted vampires in a broadly modern context. Using modern technology, dressing in modern clothing, and passing for human until the moment they fed. And at the same time, it balanced that with their mystical roots, rather than completely demythologising them; a vital thing to remember, considering that more than a few vampires use or are intimately familiar with magic. In other words, it had the bones of a dangerously accurate take on Grey Court vampires – and, to an extent, Red Court too."

"Why Red Court?" Harry asked. "I mean, I know the basic similarities, but…"

"While the Red Court are similar enough that the depiction catches them out too, that's not the only thing: they deploy the same mix of modernity and mysticism that the Grey Court do," Wanda said. "Black Court, by contrast, don't look at all human for very long, so generally don't bother with the same charade. White Court, meanwhile, are human enough that they can pass under all but the most intense scrutiny. Therefore, it's the problem of the Grey and Red Courts, who've been enjoying exploiting the assumptions of what a vampire looks and acts like to hide in plain sight, and consequently aren't going to be pleased by the sudden arrival of a show that teaches those watching it to view vampires in an entirely different way, to imagine them joining the modern era, to underline the point that they can hide in plain sight. And, with the odd exception, it has a very clear lesson: don't trust them. And stake on sight."

"… That is considerably more in depth than I expected. Or intended, come to that."

Wanda ruffled his hair. "That's often how things turn out, darling," she said. "My advice? Nod, smile, and pretend you meant it." She waved a hand. "Anyway, I noticed that the bad guys were noticing the show, so I inveigled my way in as a technical adviser, and prevented real vampires from eating the cast, while adding a few tips for verisimilitude, as it were. I'm actually credited, somewhere, under a pseudonym."

Harry obediently nodded. "You had a chat with Professor Zatara?" he asked, with a little trepidation.

"Indeed I did," Wanda said. "She was most impressed by your progress, by the way."

Harry went pink. "Well, I've had some help," he said.

"That you have," Wanda acknowledged. "And both Stephen and my father seemed to be impressed by your progress as well. The rest of your teachers seem satisfied too; excepting your occasional habit of resorting to telekinesis."

"I'm getting past that," Harry muttered.

"That you are, darling," Wanda said fondly. Her smile faded to a more thoughtful look. "Yes, your Professor Zatara had a lot to say…"

OoOoO

 **A couple of hours earlier…**

"Professor Zatara?" Wanda said, knocking on the open door.

The younger woman looked up, an expression of surprise spreading across her face. "Wanda Maximoff?" she asked, soft Italian accent thickening in her surprise.

"I am her," Wanda said. "May I come in?"

"Of course, of course," Zatanna said, all but scrambling up from her desk. "It's an honour to meet you, Sorceress Maximoff."

"Please," Wanda said, shaking the pro-offered hand. "The honour is mine. And please, call me Wanda."

"Of course," Zatanna repeated, before taking a deep breath. "Sorry, I'm not usually this starstruck, but…" She shook her head. "Anyway, you must call me Zatanna." She drew her wand, drawing up a chair. "Can I offer you anything to drink?"

"Some tea would be lovely, thank you," Wanda said, taking a seat. "And don't worry; I was just the same way the first time I met Agatha Harkness."

Zatanna let out an impressed and envious whistle as she poured them both some tea. "You knew my parents, I think," she said.

"I did," Wanda said, keeping her voice level.

"They spoke of you often," Zatanna continued.

"They were good friends," Wanda said quietly. "I'm sorry they're gone."

There was a long moment of silence.

"If I may ask, Wanda, what brings you here – to Hogwarts, and more specifically, to my office?" Zatanna asked eventually. "A visit to your godson, perhaps?" Her expression became a little warier. "Or to discover how much of my parents' skills I have?"

"My primary reason for coming was to speak to Albus about a group of powerful wandless necromancers called the Heirs of Kemmler," Wanda said. "I've heard enough chatter on the supernatural grapevine, and from other sources – having a detective for both boyfriend and apprentice can come in _very_ handy – to convince me that they're planning something this Halloween. Something big. They were a little before my time, but I know that Albus has encountered them, and their very dead master, before, and I wanted his advice on what to expect and how to deal with them."

"If they are wandless, I would have thought that the White Council would be the best placed to advise," Zatanna remarked.

"The White Council and I have a somewhat… _difficult_ relationship," Wanda said wryly. "My father and my former teacher both give them nightmares, my apprentice is their biggest problem child of the last fifty years, and my godson… well." She forced a smile. "Let's just say that they're not very well disposed to me to begin with, and that's before one even gets past the tip of the metaphorical iceberg. They recognise I'm one of the good guys, and we cooperate if needs be, but for the most part, we go our own ways, and prefer it that way." She sat back and sighed. "I'll drop in to Edinburgh, of course, have a word with McCoy, maybe Captain Luccio, and perhaps Rashid, if he's around. But the main reason I'm coming here first is because, to be entirely frank, I think that getting information from Albus will be easier, and carry less of an undercurrent of suspicion as to my motives."

Zatanna nodded sympathetically. "The Council can be difficult," she agreed.

"They didn't like the fact that you didn't fit in a convenient little box, I take it," Wanda said dryly.

"No. No, they did not," Zatanna said, then shrugged. "The Wardens they sent to assess me when I was fifteen were annoying and intrusive, but no more than that." She smiled faintly. "Madame Maxime would not have stood for it."

"Yes, you attended Beauxbatons, didn't you," Wanda said. "Like your parents."

Zatanna nodded. "According to my grandmother, they were considering sending me to Hogwarts," she said. "But…" She trailed off.

Wanda leaned forward and put a hand on hers. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to bring up anything painful," she said. "I lost my mother when I was a baby, and I didn't meet my father until I was an adolescent."

"It is all right," Zatanna said, waving a hand. "Thank you for your concern." She regarded Wanda through thoughtfully narrowed eyes. "You said that speaking to Albus was your primary purpose for being in Hogwarts. But not the only one, let alone for being here."

Wanda was silent for a long moment. "As I said, I knew your parents," she said. "The very least I owed them was to drop in and see how their daughter was doing." She raised a placating hand as Zatanna arched an eyebrow. "Which, from what I see and hear, is just fine. More than fine, in fact." She smiled slightly. "And, well. I have to admit a certain curiosity, both as to your teaching methods and as to how my godson is doing."

Zatanna relaxed, and smiled. "He is doing very well, as it happens," she said. "Where I have to teach many of my students, particularly my older ones, to unlearn old habits, Harry has already done so. Thanks to your tutelage?"

"His uncle's, for the most part," Wanda said. "Though I have offered a tip or two, here and there."

"Ah," Zatanna said, nodding. "Well, I teach a simplified version of my skills, more suited for the Wanded. They continue to use their wands, but I teach them to tap into their magic, to consciously mould and wield it. Then, they choose a language to cast their spells in, like Wandless practitioners."

"What language do you use, may I ask?"

"sdrawkcab hsilgnE, fo esruoc," Zatanna replied impishly, without missing a beat.

Wanda paused, sounding it out, interpreting it, then burst into delighted laughter. "That's brilliant," she said. "No – or almost no, considering some of the stranger dimensions – risk of ever needing it to communicate in, and almost no chance that any opponent would be able to use a knowledge of languages to gain some forewarning of what kind of spell you're about to use."

"It has its advantages," Zatanna agreed.

"So," Wanda said. "You teach them to get more in touch with their magic, and to consciously manipulate it – essentially replicating what happens with accidental magic, and making it rather more than just mere accident. After that, they each choose a language for their spells. And then, the two are put together, and… hey presto, hybrid magic"

Zatanna nodded. "What I am trying to do is to teach them to create their own spells," she said. "More flexible than traditional wanded magic, but with a little more structure than traditional wandless magic."

"And they still rely on wands?"

"A necessity of the simplified version that I teach," Zatanna said, putting down her wand. "I myself can do without: thgiL."

A ball of light appeared in her up-turned hand.

"But that would take more time to teach than any of my students have," she continued, dismissing the light. "Only four could do without, and they already have the knack: your godson, Fred and George Weasley, and Hermione Granger."

"All four of Loki's apprentices," Wanda said, nodding.

"I prefer them to use wands to begin with," Zatanna added. "For purposes of control. But they are able to go beyond, Harry especially. It is an intuitive form of magic, and he is a very intuitive young man, and a very powerful one. It plays to his strengths, and he progresses in leaps and bounds."

"Well, that is good to hear," Wanda said, tone matching her pleased smile. "May I enquire after the curriculum?" Her grass green eyes danced with amusement. "It might help me make sure that my godson does his homework, come the holidays."

"But of course, Wanda, but of course."

OoOoO

Harry sighed into his butterbeer. "So, that brings the list of people looking over my shoulder to make sure I've done my homework to, oh… roughly everyone, ever?"

"Are you trying to tell me that Tony wouldn't connive to help you bunk off?" Wanda retorted, amused. "And Sirius? And Clint? And, most probably, Darcy?"

Harry paused. "Good point," he admitted. "And I suppose it is nice to have something relatively normal to worry about."

"That's the spirit, sweetie," Wanda said fondly.

"Are you patronising me?"

"Just a little; godmother's privilege."

"Speaking of," Harry said, glancing around. They were, of course, in the _Three Broomsticks_. "How did you arrange this?"

"Wit and charm," Wanda replied breezily.

"That's one of my lines," Harry muttered, before giving his godmother a pointed look.

Wanda shrugged. "I don't know what you're giving me that look for," she said. "All I did was ask Albus and Minerva nicely." Her lips twitched into a smile. "And besides, I think that they're rather resigned to you coming and going much as you please."

"I don't leave school grounds," Harry said.

Wanda raised an eyebrow.

"… Much."

"And what do you call visits to Avalon?"

"School trips?"

Wanda snorted. "I suppose that's one way of putting it," she said. "Now, I think I've missed rather a lot. Care to fill me in? I hear you're reading up not just on vampires, but blood magic – a dangerous, but useful area of study, especially where vampires are concerned. And even more so, considering how potent your blood could well be."

Harry, being a dutiful godson, obliged.

OoOoO

Across the Atlantic, things weren't quite as relaxed.

Clark made his way into the Mansion, body full of nervous energy. Security had let him in without a murmur – apparently, they'd been instructed to let him in whenever he asked, until instructed otherwise.

"Lex," he said, as he opened the door.

"Clark," Lex replied, looking up and standing up, a smile ready on his face. As he got a good look at Clark, however, the smile stopped, and a calculating look entered his eyes. However, he kept moving, and his tone didn't change in the slightest as he continued speaking. "Good to see you."

"And you," Clark said, automatic politeness cutting in. Before he could ready himself to ask the millions of questions bursting inside him, however, Lex was by his side, arm companionably slung around his shoulder.

"Nice day, isn't it?" Lex said, smoothly steering them both out the office. "I'm told that Smallville's climate is enviable, even coming into autumn – especially to a guy coming from New York, which goes from scorching to freezing like that."

"Uh, yeah," Clark said, puzzled. "Lex –"

Lex shot him an unmistakeable look of warning and then, as if nothing had happened, carried on chatting about how they should go outside and take advantage of the weather while they had it.

Clark, baffled, made polite and pertinent replies during gaps in the conversation, and in between wondering what the hell was going on, realised that one of his early impressions had been correct. Lex and Jean-Paul were most definitely cut from the same cloth, so to speak.

Once they were out in the vast garden, and clear of the Mansion, Lex turned to him.

"Sorry about that," he said. "But going by your expression, I figured I knew what you were going to ask, and that's the sort of conversation that I don't want my father overhearing."

"What?" Clark asked, startled.

"My father," Lex said casually. "He's probably bugged my office."

Clark stared at him in shock.

"It's one of the many tests he's likely lined up for me," Lex said. "Now. Something's bugging you, and I'm guessing it's that you've now realised that I know."

Clark paused, then nodded.

"And you want to sound me out on my reaction," Lex said. "Though I have to say, I was kind of expecting your father up here with a shotgun to warn me to keep my mouth shut."

"Dad wouldn't," Clark began hotly, before stopping in the face of Lex's raised eyebrow. "He wouldn't do it like that," he concluded lamely.

"Maybe not," Lex conceded. "By the way, I'm pleased that you didn't insult my intelligence by trying to deny it."

"Well, someone pointed out that you were smart enough to have figured it out," Clark said awkwardly.

Lex's eyes narrowed, but in thought. "You're in contact with someone," he murmured. "Makes sense, I suppose. Especially considering…"

"How much I look like Harry Thorson?" Clark said. "I know. I noticed."

Lex nodded, eyes darting around Clark's features, measuring them like a tape and calipers. "The resemblance is uncanny," he said. "But not between you and Harry."

Clark looked puzzled.

"Maybe a better way of putting it would be 'not between you and Harry the way he looks now'," Lex elaborated. "I haven't seen any pictures of you from about, oh, this time last year, about when I first met Harry, but I'm willing to bet that you'd have been near identical back then. Except for the eyes, of course. And a scar or two. He's changed a lot since then. A lot of it's in the way he acts, but some of it's in the way he looks, too." At Clark's expression, he added, "According to his dad, he's starting to look a little bit more like his mom."

Clark noted that that was more or less exactly what Jean-Paul had said, but kept his silence.

Lex shrugged. "It happens as people grow up. And he's grown up differently to you, too. Anyway, last year, you could have been twins. Now? Half-identical twins, maybe. Definitely brothers. Despite the fact that by all logic, you can't be…"

"You know him," Clark said, not entirely sure how to feel about this. His parents had definitively nixed the possibility of his being directly related to Thor. Thor had apparently been human when Clark would have been born, had been presumed dead for some months before the Smallville Meteor Shower, and to underline the point, he'd been found near a space ship.

"Better than most, not half as well as some," Lex replied. "I wouldn't say we're close friends, but we've got a couple of close mutual friends."

"What's he like?"

"When I first met him, he was short, skinny, and kind of sweet," Lex remarked. "But tough too. He stood up for Carol – a friend of mine who's now the closer of those mutual friends I mentioned. In short? The kind of kid you can't help liking." He regarded Clark. "You remind me a bit of him, actually, and not just the looks."

"When you first met him," Clark said. "He's changed?"

"A bit, yeah," Lex said. "When I met him, he was a kid. Wise for his years, smart, and tough, but still a kid. And he'd been an orphan, raised by people who make my father look like dad of the year – for all his many flaws, dad's never actually made me live in an under-stairs cupboard."

"And his dad, Harry's dad, didn't do anything?" Clark demanded, outraged.

"His dad didn't _know_ anything," Lex pointed out. "He'd lost his memory, had it removed because dying in mortal form drove him insane… which is a greatly simplified explanation for what happened, but unless you want to spend the afternoon discussing soul transference, psychic translation, and quantum metaphysics, it's the best one you're likely to get."

"Uh. I'll go with that one," Clark said.

Lex nodded. "And from the digging I've done, it wasn't your typical image of child abuse, when the kid shows up to school covered in bruises and with broken bones," he said. "So a lot of people overlooked it. And Carol hinted at some kind of meddling going on…" He waved a hand. "Anyway, as soon as Thor _did_ find out, well. It was all over the papers last year, but the short version is that his guardians got dragged off to jail before you could blink twice." He shook his head. "Anyway, like I said, he was a kid. He loved his dad to bits and was loved in return, was close to his uncle, and idolised the Avengers. You know the old saying, 'it takes a village to raise a child'? Well, they're the village."

"And he doesn't any more?"

"Oh, he does," Lex said. "We're hanging around Avengers Mansion earlier in the Summer and his dad gets back, first thing Harry does is go over to say hello and give him a hug. But there was a kind of innocence about him; not naivety, as such, but innocence. That's gone; now, he's faced things that at fourteen, have turned some of his hair white, left literal scars on his heart and left him with a service record fit for a special forces vet. That's the big difference between the two of you. And there's another one."

He met Clark's gaze. "I've met a few people in my life who I'd call dangerous, and I mean that in a very specific sense. It's not just about what you can do, it's about what you're willing to do. You aren't dangerous, Clark. Brave, smart, and capable, yes, but not dangerous, not like that. My father's dangerous, and I think that yours might just be too."

Clark frowned. "My father's a good man," he said coldly.

"So I hear," Lex said equably. "I did a little asking around, and there's not a man or woman within three counties of Smallville with a bad word to say about your father. But I think he could be dangerous, if someone threatened you or your mother. I think he could be very dangerous."

Clark frowned, but didn't disagree. "And you think I'm not dangerous," he said.

"Not on purpose, no," Lex said.

"And you think Harry is."

Lex was silent for a moment. "Think would imply I'm not sure," he said eventually. "He's a good kid, but like your dad, he'll get dangerous if people he cares about are threatened. And unlike you dad, I know that for a fact."

Clark frowned again, but said nothing.

The silence stretched out for a while, unlike Lex sat down on a garden bench. "Who found you, if I may ask? Professor Xavier?"

"No," Clark said, noting that Jean-Paul had mentioned that name before, in reference to a man who found and taught young people with superpowers how to control them. He sighed. "Jean-Paul Beaubier."

Lex's eyebrows shot up. "Well," he said, after a few long moments. "I can't say I was expecting that."

"You know each other."

It wasn't a question.

"He's one of mine and Harry's mutual friends," Lex confirmed. "Though what he'd have been doing out here, I don't know."

"It was Red Sky Day," Clark said quietly. "He ran through Smallville. We ran into each other, then I tried to catch him up. I didn't get anywhere close, but he noticed." He shrugged. "A couple of months after, he turned up again. We chatted, and then he left. After that, he came around, maybe once a week or so."

Lex nodded, not enquiring further.

"He wanted to get the measure of me," Clark said eventually, into the silence. "He figured out how powerful I was. And he was interested in me for the same reasons you are."

"I think Jean-Paul's reasons might be a little different than mine," Lex said dryly.

"I'm pretty sure he has a boyfriend," Clark replied, just as dryly.

Lex chuckled. "There's that," he said. "But Jean-Paul was probably scouting you out as a possible threat, at first at least."

Clark ignored the jab of pain that flat assessment elicited, and asked, "And you?"

"I'm mostly just curious," Lex said. "About what you can do, how you can do it, and why you look like that. And…" His expression shadowed. "I'm worried for you."

"I know," Clark said, and at Lex's surprise, elaborated. "Jean-Paul told me about your dad, how bad he was. And he suggested that there were other people, but he never exactly said it." He scowled. "There's a lot he never exactly said."

Lex chuckled. "Don't take it personally, Clark," he said. "Jean-Paul's that way with everyone. He has been ever since I've known him. He opens up a little around the other kids, but even then: he plays things close to his chest."

"Really?"

"Really."

"I thought…"

"That he didn't trust you?" Lex asked mildly. "I'd be surprised if Jean-Paul completely trusts anyone."

Clark's shoulders slumped.

"But I think he trusts you more than most," Lex said. "Just a hunch, but if you've figured out that he was originally sounding you out – and considering that you didn't look shocked at all when I said it, I'm guessing you did – then he probably does."

"How do you mean?"

"I mean he probably let you," Lex said. "I'm speculating here, but there's a good chance he let you see."

Clark just stared at him. "Why didn't he come out and say it?" he asked, baffled.

"He did," Lex said. "In his own way." He shrugged. "Probably. I don't know what happened – as I said, I'm just speculating." He gave Clark a serious look. "Clark, you have to realise that Jean-Paul doesn't think like you. He doesn't even think like me, though I think I'm a bit closer to him than you are. The only person I've ever met who really thinks like he does is the Black Widow. There's always a mask, always a bit of reserve." He smiled wryly. "And they don't do straightforward."

"Do you?" Clark asked. "And how is everyone but me, absolutely _everyone_ , incredibly good at reading people?!"

"Honestly? Not really," Lex said. "And it's not everyone – reading people is a skill you pick up. It helps if you hang around people trying to get one over you for long enough. It's a useful one in business, politics and diplomacy; you need it if you're going to get ahead."

"Which is why you picked it up," Clark deduced. "And Jean-Paul because his father's an Ambassador."

"Jean-Paul has plenty of other reasons to be paranoid," Lex said vaguely. This time, though, Clark was equal to it.

"His powers – people coming after him for them the way they could for me."

"That too," Lex said. "Though Jean-Paul is more than capable of looking after himself."

Clark noticed the implication that there was more that Lex wasn't elaborating on. He'd also noticed that when that kind of tone came out in both Lex and Jean-Paul (and his parents at times, come to think of it), no amount of pushing would get them to say anything more. On that subject, at least.

"He said that your father wouldn't go after him because his father, his connections, it would make it too difficult," he noted. "But that your dad might go after me because he thinks my family's a soft target."

"All true," Lex said. "And while I don't think I'm up to winning a war with my father yet, I'd prove his belief wrong if he tried."

"I… thank you," Clark said, touched.

"You saved my life, Clark," Lex replied. "When I was nothing more than the moron who hit you with my car and took us both into the river. And you risked revealing yourself to do it, despite doubtless having it drummed into you _not_ to do that." He smiled slightly. "Though going by what happened with Jeremy Creek, and joining the dots with some of the reports of what happened in Smallville on Red Sky Day, I'd say that's part of who you are. It's admirable."

"Lex…"

"Clark," Lex said seriously. "You saved my life. I owe you. And while I've got things to work on, a couple of people to try and find after Red Sky Day… no matter how busy I am, I'll have your back."

Clark smiled. "Thanks, Lex."

OoOoO

Apart from that, the next couple of weeks passed in relative peace and quiet. As the month of October wound on down, the nights drew in and the winds gained an extra bite. As the calendar rolled inexorably towards Halloween, however, the attention of Hogwarts School was not focused on the Halloween Feast, as it usually was. Instead, it turned to the soon to be arriving foreign students, and the soon to begin Triwizard Tournament.

Harry, for his part, generally kept out of it, making it very clear that while he was mildly interested in the visitors, he was not remotely interested in taking part in the Tournament. He'd been very clear on that:

"I don't need to prove how powerful I am, I've got more than enough fame, and I get enough near death experiences in my spare time. Do I want a chance at more? No, no I don't."

And that had been the end of it, partly because while Harry had mellowed significantly in the couple of weeks, no one really wanted to find out how far that went.

So, the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students arrived the night before Halloween, right on schedule, impressive conveyances and all, with their headteachers, Madame Maxime and Professor Karkaroff, being politely greeted by Dumbledore – and in Madame Maxime's case, by her former student Professor Zatara too.

And under normal circumstances, they would all then have adjourned to the Great Hall for the Welcome Feast. But there was one more formality to be observed.

"Well?" Fudge asked Dumbledore in an undertone. "Why are we still out here? All the guests have arrived and it's cold!"

Cornelius Fudge, Britain's Minister of Magic (for Want of Viable Alternative), was also present at the meet and greet, with a select few other officials, as part of an attempt to re-establish some small authority. Unfortunately for him, that was about to backfire, spectacularly.

"We are waiting," Dumbledore said in a loud voice, so that everyone could hear. "For those in charge of security arrangements to arrive."

Fudge began to splutter. He had offered, very reasonably in his opinion, Dumbledore the use of Aurors and DMLE operatives during the Tournament, but had been turned down. He had offered very generously, and out of respect for Dumbledore, he hadn't made it an order. Though, a small part of him added, the real reason he hadn't made it an order was that he hadn't wanted to see what would happen if Dumbledore said no...

"And if I am not much mistaken," Dumbledore said. "That is them now."

Indeed, two lights, attached to something huge, emerged out of the misty light with a roar. Excited babble rose up and Fudge found that he had absolutely no idea what it was. Before he could ask Dumbledore, though, the giant creature swivelled in place like a top, landing with its back facing them. The back opened, and a tall man in muggle clothing stepped out, a long muggle coat swirling around his ankles. For one moment, Fudge feared that it might be Nicholas Fury, then realised it was not.

The man, whoever he was, was quite young, tall, dark haired and had grey eyes. He strode purposefully out of the back of what Fudge realised was a muggle machine, followed by two men and two women. One of the men, Fudge immediately noticed, had giant, gleaming bird-like wings, and on seeing them, a cheer rose up from the older Hogwarts students.

Their leader made his way over and nodded curtly at the assembled Headteachers and Ministry officials. He was a man who Fudge recognised, Peter Wisdom, protégé of Fury himself, a wizard of sorts and a very scary man. All in all, Fudge felt, he'd probably have been better off with Fury. Fury looked at him like he, Fudge, was something that Fury had just scraped off his boot. Wisdom, on the other hand, looked at Fudge as if he was an insect he was considering whether or not to stamp on.

"Ladies and gentlemen, may I introduce to you Director Peter Wisdom of MI13, a long time colleague and associate of Director Fury of SHIELD, who I trust you will have heard of," Dumbledore said.

Judging by the look on Karkaroff's face, he recognised the latter name at least, and did not look happy. That said, very few people would be particularly happy if they had Peter Wisdom looking at them like a shark at a particularly lethargic seal. Madame Maxime looked more guarded.

"He has graciously offered to provide security arrangements for the Triwizard Tournament," Dumbledore continued. "In the form of a mixture of magical and non-magical operatives."

"While we appreciate this offer, Dumbledore, if the Tournament is attacked, it will take more than a few muggles with guns to defend the students, even if they did somehow find Hogwarts," Karkaroff said. "What proof do we have of their capabilities?" Fudge found himself agreeing. MI13 were formidable, within their limits, but really, what could they offer that a detachment of Aurors couldn't?

Wisdom... smiled, then glanced at one of the dark haired women on his right and nodded. She nodded in reply and raised a hand to her ear. "Trap Two to Hawk Major, go, go, go!"

And suddenly, what Fudge could only describe as a giant metal fortress, the size of a small town, appeared overhead to screams that were drowned out by the roar of colossal engines. Then, in the area around them, the sound of the engines disappeared. Outside, the engines were still heard, judging by the reaction of the crowds, but within, all was quiet.

"HMS _Valiant_ , reporting for duty," Wisdom said, with a strangely familiar sardonic smile. Maxime and Karkaroff seemed utterly stunned, while Dumbledore was simply smiling serenely. "Oh, and she's been there for the past twenty four hours. And no one has noticed. That good enough proof for you, _Professor_ Karkaroff?"

Fudge was caught between horror and disbelief. He had known that muggles had unusual weapons, their 'technology' to compensate for a lack of magic, he'd seen it at the Ministry when Lucius Malfoy attacked. But he'd never have guessed that they were capable of anything even approaching _this_. No human witch or wizard to his knowledge, wanded or wandless, had ever managed to create a castle in the sky, yet todays muggles seemed to manage it perfectly easily and make it invisible to boot.

The rest of the Ministry, he thought gloomily, would be screaming for his head this time tomorrow, and he'd likely be pelted with owls by concerned parents. He'd be lucky if it took a day to get into the _Prophet_.

Dimly, he noticed Karkaroff take a closer look at Wisdom, then rear away, expression one of absolute horror, as Wisdom's smile revealed more teeth. Then, the man signalled something to the woman, who spoke into her ear-piece. Judging by the reaction of the students, the giant muggle machine had gone silent, and Dumbledore had taken the opportunity to calm the students down, then lead everyone inside for the feast.

This, he inwardly concluded, was not a good day to be Cornelius Fudge.

OoOoO

Normally, the subject of conversation would be the foreign students, or their means of arrival, but even the sight of a sailing ship emerging from the depths was upstaged by MI13's flying fortress. Harry kept trying to explain that it was a helicarrier, but this name wasn't deemed to be as cool as 'flying fortress' and therefore was mostly ignored. Since 'flying fortress' was a pretty effective description of what a helicarrier was, Harry let it pass, and soon found himself much in demand to explain what it was, how it worked and where it came from.

"It's like a giant ship," he said. "They launch jets from it –"

"Jets?" Ron asked, a question echoed by many of those raised in Wizarding households.

"Combat aircraft, Ron," Hermione said. "Heavily armed flying machines."

"Oh, like planes," Ron said, nodding. "Dad..." He trailed off. "Dad always went on about them," he said quietly. Harry squeezed his shoulder silently.

"A fighter jet can go faster than the speed of sound," he said. "A quinjet, like the one Director Wisdom used, can take off straight upwards and can go twice or three times as fast as the speed of sound. Tony Stark designs them."

There was a series of admiring murmurs. Only the most experimental broomsticks had ever come close to breaking the sound barrier, and it tended to end very badly for the person flying it.

"What else can it do?" a fifth year asked.

"I don't know," Harry said. "I've only been on one of SHIELD's helicarriers once. I didn't even know that Britain had one." He sighed at the expectant looks. "But if I had to guess, there's a lot of muggle and magical weaponry on there."

"Magical?" one student scoffed. "Muggles can't use magic."

"MI13 doesn't just employ muggles, though," Fred said. "Bill said they approached him last year about joining them, but he turned them down."

"And McGonagall mentioned them during our careers meetings," George added. "Word is that their boss, Peter Wisdom, is recruiting as many wizards as he can. He's one himself."

"But doesn't muggle technology fail around magic?" Angelina Johnson asked.

"Tony figured out how to get around it in fifteen minutes," Harry said, shrugging. "Either he told SHIELD who told MI13, or they figured it out for themselves."

"Muggles are pretty ingenious," Fred said. "It's because they don't have any magic."

"And they have to figure out different solutions to problems that we'd normally solve by magic," George added.

"Well if they're using magic, then that's probably how they built that flying fortress thing they've got," a fifth year student who Harry vaguely recognised as being the one who had insulted Draco the previous year and annoyed Harry enough to squash a goblet in his fist, said dismissively. "Everyone knows that muggles couldn't figure something like that out on their own."

The air suddenly went cold, and everyone with even the slightest bit of common sense started to edge away from the fifth year in question.

Then, Harry spoke.

"Except that SHIELD's helicarriers don't use magic," he said, voice cold and biting. "Nor does the Iron Man armour. Nor does Captain America's indestructible shield. Nor do mobile phones, aeroplanes, cars, computers and a million other pieces of similarly advanced technology. So 'everyone' is a fucking idiot who doesn't know the first thing about muggles or their technology and should therefore shut their fucking mouth."

The fifth year opened his mouth to say something, then, on seeing Harry's expression, gulped and thought better of it.

Hermione was frowning. "Why did Professor Dumbledore ask MI13 to protect the school, not the Ministry?" she asked.

"Because MI13 know how to fight both magic and muggles," Bucky said quietly. "In one form or another, they've been doing it for centuries. And they've been recruiting heavily from the Ministry. I'd bet that two in every five of their wanded personnel are ex-Ministry, three in five if you're including non-combatants. They have every advantage the Ministry has and many more besides."

And so the discussion rolled on.

OoOoO

As the evening carried on, little enough happened; except, that was, for a part Veela Beauxbatons girl by the name of Fleur Delacour strolling over to request the _bouillabaisse_ that sat, largely untouched, on the Gryffindor table. As she did, she was somewhat surprised by the fact that an adult (Bucky) was sitting among the students and that he, and Harry, were both entirely unaffected by the aura that she unconsciously radiated. She was, if anything, even more surprised that both of them spoke fluent French, though little enough passed between them beyond basic pleasantries, confirmation that she was Veela and that Harry was who he was, and a confirmation that she could have the dish she was inquiring after.

"Honestly, Ron," Hermione said, scolding Ron as he all but drooled after the part Veela girl. "You'd think that you'd never seen a girl before."

"Not one like that," Ron replied hoarsely.

Hermione _glared_.

Bucky and Harry shared a look, then Harry took pity on his friend.

"He's right, actually," he said. "She's part Veela, Hermione."

Hermione scoffed. "Harry, just because –"

"Hermione. I'm a telepath. I can feel it, same way I can block out her… whatever it is," Harry said bluntly, before adding vaguely, "And I asked – her grandmother's a Veela."

"See?" Ron said pointedly.

"Still, Ron, that's no call to stare," Hermione said tartly.

"Not all of us are telepathic," Ron retorted.

"Bucky isn't," Hermione pointed out.

"I have psychic defences installed by some of the best in the Nine Realms," Bucky said quietly. His lips twitched. "And practice."

Ron looked vindicated, Hermione a mix between curious and annoyed, and shortly afterwards, they started arguing again.

Harry, meanwhile, felt that suggesting they get a room, satisfying as it might briefly be, would probably lead to Hermione doing her best to flay him alive, which would not be a productive use of an evening.

Instead, he tuned them out, finished his dinner, pretended to listen to Dumbledore's speech, regarded the Goblet of Fire with exceptionally limited interest, and returned to Gryffindor Tower, hoping to get a good night's sleep.

Once he nodded off, however, things turned a little strange.

For it 'twas the night before Halloween; in the middle of the night when all through Gryffindor House, not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse. For one thing, if rats had been unfashionable as pets before, the public revelation that Peter Pettigrew, betrayer of the Potters, had spent over a decade in hiding as a rat, would have driven them into the outer wilderness, so to speak.

The only person awake was Bucky, with the common belief among Gryffindor students being that he didn't actually sleep at all. Certainly, if he did, they'd never managed to catch him at it.

His charge, Harry, slept less than most, but was well away now. However, his mind was soon to be rather more active than most dreamers'.

OoOoO

"Well," Harry said, as he looked around at the empty darkness. "I've got to say, my subconscious is falling down on the job if this is the best it can come up with."

" _Harry?"_

Harry froze, setting himself in readiness for an attack, cocking his head to try and pick out where the voice came from, before letting out an impatient noise and snapping his fingers. Instantly, the darkness vanished, to be replaced by a facsimile of the Gryffindor Common Room. In it was the speaker, sitting in an armchair wearing little more than a nightie and a worried expression.

"Maddie?" he asked, startled, trying to ignore the fact that his cousin – or to be more accurate, the mental projection of his cousin – had nice legs. "Is that you?"

That got a raised eyebrow. "You were expecting someone else?"

"I wasn't expecting anyone else," Harry replied, glancing down briefly to make sure that he was, in fact, wearing clothes. This was technically a dream, and it was better to be safe than sorry. Thankfully, he was safe, in his usual pyjama bottoms and t-shirt combo, and with that confirmed, sat down in the chair opposite. "And this is a dream, sort of. I think. So, I was thinking that…"

"I might be an image conjured up by your subconscious," Maddie said, nodding. "Understandable."

There was a long moment of silence.

"Um. Leaving aside the fact that you are my cousin and therefore always welcome to visit," Harry said. "Even if it is quite literally in my head." He coughed. "Is there any particular reason for this visit? I mean, it would take a fair bit of effort, even for you."

"It is," Maddie said. "Though perhaps not as much as you are imagining. It is a matter of refined technique. I can teach you, if you like."

"I see," Harry said. "Well, okay, I don't, but I'll take your word for it." He rubbed his jaw. "And as for learning it… maybe? Like I said, for now, I'll take your word for it."

Maddie's eyes widened at that last, and she looked away sharply.

"Maddie?" Harry asked, more gently this time, moving their chairs side by side with a mere thought, reaching out to rest his hand on her shoulder. As he did, he got a slight shock, as the connection Maddie had established between them solidified and deepened. "What's wrong?"

Maddie was silent for a long time, but as it turned out, Harry didn't need a verbal explanation, as he picked the necessary information up from the open connection.

"You and Jean, you're going to stay with your parents tomorrow, for the Halloween weekend," he said slowly. "Not just that; the rest of the family, all your siblings, maybe some other relatives too. While it's not being put as a big 'welcome back' party for you, that's basically what it is. And…" He sighed, sitting back and rubbing his metaphysical brow. "And you think you're not worth it. You're afraid that they'll see you and that you'll fall short, compared to Jean. Maddie…"

"If you're going to say that I shouldn't worry, Jean's already said it," Maddie said flatly.

"I wasn't, actually," Harry said. "And since you're here, you knew that I wasn't going to." He paused, marshalling his thoughts. "I can't pretend that they won't be surprised. Assuming they even knew about you before, they'd have assumed that you died as a baby. Now… well, you look like Jean, but for the tattoos and the hairstyle, so that'll be their reference point. And, well, you act completely differently."

Maddie nodded tightly. "So I assumed," she said.

"Different, though, isn't bad," Harry added firmly, before merging the two chairs with another thought. "May I?" he asked, and when Maddie nodded her assent, he scooted up next to her, slipping an arm around her. "You're an amazing person, Maddie," he said gently. "Every bit as amazing as Jean is – Jean herself would be the second to say that, and the second to mean it too. And she'd only be second because I just said it, and meant it." He sighed. "They'll need to take a little time to adjust, I can't deny that. But they won't think of you as just another Jean and judge you as such." His lips twitched. "For one thing, I don't think Jean would stand for it. I certainly wouldn't."

Maddie nodded, though still a little doubtfully.

"You came here for a reason, though," Harry continued. "Professor Xavier, or someone else at the Institute, could probably have told you what I just did. Hell, Gambit probably would have said it, and I doubt he's more than six inches away from your physical body."

Maddie went bright red.

"I'll take that as a confirmation," Harry said dryly, before his expression sobered. "And, just taking a shot in the dark here, that reason is because I'm family. Why me, rather than Jean? Because Jean's lovely, loving, she doesn't judge, and will support the both of us until the sun burns out, and probably a long way beyond. Her love and support is the sort you can balance planets on. But she's also a little intimidating sometimes. Why? Because sometimes it feels like she's… well, perfect. Or as near as people get, anyway. Especially if you're very much not perfect. And if Jean's got one real flaw, beyond her temper, it's that she's so unconditionally loving that sometimes it just feels like she doesn't _see_ , let alone understand." He leaned back. "Close so far?"

"Entirely accurate," Maddie said quietly.

"Thought so," he said matter-of-factly. "Because I'm not. Perfect, that is. I'm a very long way from perfect. I've walked down some pretty similar paths to you. And I've got a pretty good rough idea of what you're feeling, what you're worrying about, the sort of things that all the warm, genuine, loving reassurances in the world won't make go away. Which means that I could talk, yes, but I could also listen. Listen, and understand." He paused, then coughed awkwardly. "So… fire away?"

Maddie, to both of their surprise, actually giggled. And then, once the giggling was done, she did just that.

OoOoO

"There's a rumour going round, Warrington got up early and put his name in the Goblet," Dean said, at breakfast the next morning. "You know, that big Slytherin who looks like a sloth."

"We can't have a Slytherin champion!" Ron said indignantly. "Right, Harry?"

His only answer was a rattling snore.

"Oi, Harry," Ron said, elbowing his friend.

That was a mistake.

OoOoO

 **Five minutes later**

"Well, that was an eventful way to start the morning," Dumbledore said mildly, retrieving a spot of porridge from his hat.

McGonagall was seething. Snape's lip had curled. Sprout and Flitwick both looked like they were fretting somewhat.

And 'Professor Bach', naturally, looked like he was almost crying with laughter.

"When I get my hands on those responsible," McGonagall growled.

"I believe it began as an accident, Minerva," Dumbledore said. "And no permanent damage has been done; Mister Finnegan's eyebrows have been doused for what I believe is the seventeenth time this term, Miss Parkinson's concussion from what I believe was a very well thrown and very hard-boiled egg is being treated as we speak and I personally ensured that the elder Mister Creevy was retrieved from the rafters, though he is still somewhat clueless as to how he got there." He smiled cheerfully. "All in all, I think that this will go down more in the order of a sprightly and enjoyable morning work-out than anything else. I certainly enjoyed myself."

"I saw," McGonagall said icily, lips thinning to the point of invisibility. "In fact, the _entire Hall_ saw. It is very hard to miss a tidal wave of jam, especially when it singles out and engulfs the Minister of Magic."

Dumbledore looked conspicuously and suspiciously innocent.

OoOoO

The first two lessons of the day had been cancelled while the Great Hall was cleaned up, and the students had been sent to their Common Rooms. Harry and Ron, meanwhile, had been identified as the responsible parties by their fellow students and, to Hermione's disgust, been heralded as the heroes of the hour, especially by the Twins. Or rather, Ron had mostly been heralded. A disgruntled Harry, by contrast, had selected an armchair, curled up in it, and promptly gone back to sleep, and after some pointed looks from Bucky, it was generally decided that it was best to leave him be.

"Marvellous, absolutely marvellous," George said, pumping his stunned little brother's hand.

"An excellent start to proceedings," Fred agreed.

"Really?" Hermione demanded. "And what about the impression it might have made on the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons students, their headteachers, the _Minister_ of _Magic_?"

Fred waved her complaints away with magisterial nonchalance. "If they can't stand a little food fight," he said.

"Then they shouldn't be trying to compete in the Triwizard Tournament," George finished.

"And I think Minister Fudge will be more concerned by the fact that he was covered in jam," Bucky observed.

"Yeah, who did that?" Lee Jordan asked. "They deserve some kind of medal."

"Dumbledore," Bucky said, amused.

"No _way_ ," the Twins breathed, in awed disbelief.

"He _wouldn't_ ," Hermione said, scandalised.

"I spent more than two and a half years fighting alongside him, back in the War," Bucky said. "I recognise his casting style." He shot a look at Hermione. "And yes, Hermione, he would."

"Uh," Ron said, managing to escape a crowd of admirers. "Does anyone know why Harry's asleep?"

"No, and I'm not going to be the one to wake him up," Fred said.

"You could try it, though," George suggested. "It turned out well enough last time."

Ron scowled at his brothers, and instead turned to Bucky.

"I think he didn't get as much rest as he would have liked," the older man said.

"Reading late again?" Fred asked.

George shook his head sadly. "Too much of that can be bad for you, you know," he said.

"It's an addiction," Fred said. "Claiming yet another promising mind."

Hermione glared at them both, before saying rather tartly, "He's been reading late most nights, and he's been perfectly awake the next morning."

"He wasn't reading," Bucky said, cutting off the incipient debate.

"He has done weird things while he was asleep before," Ron remarked.

"Well, that's hardly news," George retorted. "It's Harry – he does weird things all the time."

"Weirder than usual, I mean," Ron said. "Last year, there was that big battle outside London, just before Professor Cassidy and that grumpy bloke with the wings came to Hogwarts, remember?"

"Vaguely," Fred said, in a leading tone.

"Nightmares and all," George added.

"Well, that night, the night of the battle, Harry was glowing and floating in mid-air," Ron said. "I touched him and got burned. Then… he noticed, healed my hand, pointed south and said 'look', before he went out like a light."

"So… what was he supposed to be doing?" Hermione asked, puzzled.

"He sent an astral projection to the battlefield," Bucky said quietly. "I read the mission report – he tipped his father off that one of his comrades, an Asgardian, was in trouble."

"But that's hundreds of miles away," Ron said, surprised. "He couldn't…" He paused, then snorted. "He could, couldn't he? Sending his mind hundreds of miles away, that's a piece of cake for him."

"I'm not sure if it is," Hermione said. "I'm sure he's capable of it, but astral projection, it's a very advanced discipline. Getting out of your body isn't the hard part, but getting back in…"

"Is not half as easy," Bucky said quietly. "And Harry prefers to keep his mind where it is."

The Twins exchanged a look. "Can't really blame him," they said in blunt unison.

"But," Bucky continued. "I think that Ron was on the right track. He was using his telepathy, talking to someone. I recognised who it was, and left him to it. As to why he's tired, she's on the other side of the Atlantic – it's not that hard to see why he might be exhausted."

"Who –" Hermione began curiously.

"I also got the impression that the conversation was private," Bucky said, glancing over at Harry. "He'll be up and about in a couple of hours, don't worry."

"He'd better be," Ron said. "We've got antidotes with Snape; he'll be wanting to poison those of us he missed yesterday."

"And speaking of potions," Fred said, getting to his feet.

"We've got some preparations to make," George added.

"Where are you two going?" Hermione asked suspiciously.

"That, Hermione, would be telling," Fred said cheerfully. "See you later."

"In triumph, most likely," George finished.

OoOoO

As it happened, their use of potions – specifically an ageing potion to evade Dumbledore's age line – wasn't quite as triumphal as hoped. However, it had to be said, their beards were quite magnificent.

The school as a whole spent the day in heated speculation about who the Champions would be and, no matter how many times the now awake Harry vociferously denied it, his name was top of the speculated list.

"To be fair, mate, you are the obvious candidate," Ron pointed out. "You're more powerful than anyone else in the school, you've done more than anyone else too, and, well, you're _you_."

"I didn't put my name in, and if anyone's put it in for me, I'll ensure that they go through the rest of their lives thinking that they're a five year old girl," Harry said, in loud, ominous tones.

"You wouldn't!" Hermione said, shocked.

"I'd ask Ginny to braid their hair."

This proclamation was followed by several other dire threats. Namely, that the person responsible would be variously; made to think that they were a frog on the grounds that it was longer lasting and more economical than a full transformation, then minced and fed to Hagrid's new pets, the Blast-Ended Skrewts, and that their spirit would be torn from their minced body and banished to share a u-bend with Moaning Myrtle.

After the last one, needless to say, even the dimmest students got the message: Harry did not want to take part in the Tournament.

Unfortunately, destiny had other plans.

For, as the ceremony of selecting the three champions was winding down, Cedric Diggory, Viktor Krum, and Fleur Delacour having been chosen from their respective schools, the Goblet of Fire once again began to burn with an eerie blue flame.

The Hall went into a surprised silence as a fourth piece of parchment flew out of the Goblet, and Dumbledore caught it. In dead silence, he read it out.

"Harry Thorson."

There was an absolutely dead silence, as all eyes turned to the Gryffindor table.

And then, that silence was broken by a profoundly disgusted sigh.

"Oh, for fuck's sake."

 **Poor Harry. He can never catch a break, can he? Why is he a Champion this time around, though? What motives could Voldemort have for arranging such a thing?**

 **And more importantly, what is coming in the arc that this has been leading up to? That's right, ladies and gentlemen:** _ **Bloody Hell**_ **is kicking off next chapter, giving Harry yet another thing to be thoroughly annoyed about. You may have wondered about the contents of some this chapter, how it's relevant to what's coming but don't you worry – it'll all become clear in time.**

 **In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed it.**


	28. Chapter 28: Bloody Hell I - Preludes

**Well, here we are. The first chapter of** _ **Bloody Hell**_ **. And less than two weeks after the last chapter, you lucky devils. This one's the quieter chapter, though not without its important moments – mostly, it's reacting to what's gone before and, more importantly, setting the scene for the main arc, establishing where everyone is and, more or less, what they're doing. It's the prologue, really. I've done a lot of thinking to do about this arc, and eventually, I decided that it would all be set on Halloween night, at a direct contrast to** _ **Forever Red**_ **, which while I think it was some of my best writing, went on for a bit, and was exhausting to write. It also bounced between a** _ **lot**_ **of perspectives and theatres of operations, because I love to ramble on.** **So, I've imposed a little discipline on myself by cutting this one down to one night, (probably) three or four chapters, and three (narrowing down to two next chapter as Harry gets in on the action) theatres of operations: Hogwarts, Chicago, and New York. And while there will be unexpected characters, including a couple of big ones, and some key character points and choices, there won't be as many of either as in _Forever Red_.**

 **Normally, I wouldn't even have the Chicago side of the arc, but while its importance isn't immediately obvious, it** _ **is**_ **a key part in the game that Voldemort's playing, something he's carefully arranged – in other words, I'm not just throwing it in for cool points. As a result, this means that I had to do a chunk of exposition explaining what happened in the first two thirds of** _ **Dead Beat**_ **, which take place in the days leading up to Halloween, as altered here and there for this 'verse (the alternatives: skip over it entirely and leave the non-Dresden savvy very confused, or rewrite the entirety of Dead Beat with a dialogue alteration here and there, which would be very boring), but I stripped that down to the relevant points in dialogue.**

 **Anyhow… here we go.**

Harry stalked into the room, temper burning hotter and hotter with every instant, irritated disbelief evolving into a slow-burning rage. Viktor Krum, Cedric Diggory and Fleur Delacour were grouped around the fire, silhouetted against the flames. Under other circumstances, in another life, Harry might have found them impressive; Krum, hunched up and brooding, was leaning against the mantelpiece, slightly apart from the other two; Cedric, standing with his hands behind his back, staring into the fire; and Fleur Delacour, long, silvery hair glowing in the orange fire-light.

He, however, had seen and done far too much to be easily impressed, and was in a sufficiently bad mood that their presence barely registered with him.

His, by contrast, registered with them, even their basic mystical senses picking up the bow wave of seething, angry psychic power, and they looked around when Harry walked in. Fleur threw back her sheet of long, silvery hair.

"What is it?" she asked brusquely. "Do zey want us back in ze Hall?"

"Not exactly," Harry said coldly.

There was a sound of scurrying feet behind him, and Ludo Bagman entered the room. He reached out for Harry's left arm, and made contact with Bucky's instead. Meeting the older man's icy stare, he coughed, looked away and muttered, "Extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary."

Cedric cleared his throat. "Harry, what's going on?"

"Behold," Harry said sourly. "Your fourth Triwizard Champion." One of the chairs drew itself up in front of him and he flopped down into it, expression darkening rapidly.

The three other champions shared a baffled look, before Krum's expression settled into a frown, Fleur's into an expression of scepticism, and Cedric's into one best summarised as 'oh Merlin, here we go _again_.'

"Zhis is some kind of joke, surely, Mister Bagman," Fleur began.

"As unbelievable as the idea may seem," Bagman replied. "It is reality. Harry's name came out of the Goblet of Fire."

"Well," Harry said bitterly. "At least now I know what the annual school based murder attempt it is going to consist of. First year, it was a teacher possessed by Voldemort. Second year, it was a fragment of Voldemort's spirit controlling a basilisk. Third year, it was Dementors, then HYDRA _and_ Dementors. And that was just the parts _at school_. Now, I'm part of a tournament with the words 'death toll' in the description, which should serve as a wonderful light interlude. Wonderful. Just bloody wonderful."

Fleur and Krum stared, then turned to Cedric, who sighed and nodded.

"You did not enter your name into the Goblet?" Krum asked slowly, as if having trouble comprehending this.

"No," Harry said sourly. "No, I didn't." He glanced around the room. "I'm not interested in this tournament, and I don't want or need any more fame. I've got more than enough to be going on with as a Prince of Asgard and 'the Boy Who Lived'." This last was accompanied by an even more sour tone and air commas.

None of the other champions really knew what to say to this, so fell silent, until their headteachers arrived, and all verbal hell broke loose. Harry, for his part, kept to an angry, brooding silence.

Then, someone troubled to press his buttons.

"Don't blame Professor Dumbledore, Karkaroff. The boy has been crossing lines ever since he came to this school," Snape said silkily.

"Says the former Death Eater," Harry said in cold, cutting tones, getting to his feet.

Snape turned on him, glaring. Harry stepped forward and very pointedly looked down his nose at Snape, taking advantage of the fact that he was now the taller of the two. Snape's eyes narrowed.

"So if we're talking about lines crossed," Harry said, without taking his eyes away from Snape's. "I really don't think you're one to talk. _Professor._ "

"You are just like your father," Snape ground out.

Harry smiled a smile that did not reach his eyes. "Thanks," he said. "I'll be sure to tell him you said so. He'll be so pleased." He shrugged, a movement at odds with the sudden gleam in his eyes. "Personally, though, I'm not so sure. I mean, I look like him, yes – or the way he did when he was human. But he and everyone else tells me how much I'm like my mother."

Snape's teeth ground even harder. "Then they are mistaken."

"Or perhaps you didn't know her as well as you thought you did," Harry retorted. Then, he smiled a disconcertingly nasty smile, one that looked far too old for his face. "In fact… I think that I'm living proof that you _didn't_."

There was a dead silence. Snape's eyes bulged and he went chalk-white with rage. He seemed too angry to speak. Harry's smile widened, baring teeth. His days of being frightened of Snape, even on the slightest level, were long over, and that part of him that wasn't seething with anger at being forced into this _stupid_ tournament, was on the point of whooping with glee at scoring such a palpable hit. Telepathically, he could feel the emotions of everyone else in the room. Most of them were baffled and curious, not understanding this outwardly relatively innocuous exchange. Others recognised Harry's barb for what it was, though.

Snape was full of rage and more than a little pain. McGonagall was shocked that he had said such a thing. And Dumbledore was giving Harry a hard look.

"Harry," he said. "While Professor Snape's comment was unnecessary and designed to provoke, yours was no better. You will apologise and attend a detention with me this Saturday."

Snape, further infuriated by Dumbledore denying him the opportunity to punish Harry to the full extent of his malice, looked utterly apoplectic. Dumbledore, however, wasn't paying attention, his gaze boring into Harry's. For a long, long moment, Harry said nothing.

Then, he nodded, turned to Professor Snape and said, "I'm sorry, Professor. What I said hurt you."

The fact that this was a very carefully structured apology that was, in fact, absolutely nothing of the kind and carried undertones of 'and I'm glad it did, because it was meant to', went unremarked. For the sake of world peace, this was probably a good thing.

"Does this usually happen?" Krum asked in an undertone.

"Snape and Harry hate each other," Cedric said softly. "It's never been this bad, though."

Fleur simply sniffed in disdain.

Harry's next comment drew the attention of the room.

"I am not competing in this tournament."

"But you have to," Bagman began.

"Two months ago, I held the power to burn stars," Harry said coldly. "A few months before that, I held all of reality in the palm of my hand. While I don't have quite that much power at the moment, I have more than enough that I don't 'have to' do anything." He shook his head. "No, I don't care. I have spent most of the last few years of my life with someone or something trying to kill me, especially over the last few months. I am getting rather bored of it. I don't _care_ if you give me zero for every task. Let the three legitimate champions compete, because not only do I not want to, I am not going to."

"I am afraid that you have to," Dumbledore said quietly. "This piece of paper has your hand-writing on it."

"So he _did_ put it in," Snape said, eyes glinting nastily at Harry.

Harry opened his mouth to snap back at Snape, then stopped as Bucky's arm clamped on his shoulder. Instead, he settled for visibly rolling his eyes in a way that had a lot to say about idiots.

"Vhy vould he put his name in vhen he does not even vant to compete?" Krum asked.

"Thank you," Harry said, gesturing pointedly.

"The piece of paper is ripped," Dumbledore said, giving Snape a quelling look. "I suspect that this writing came from a homework assignment or a letter." He examined it. "And an old one at that."

"I'll have my people check the security feeds," Wisdom said.

Karkaroff sneered slightly. "I think that the person who did this," he said, before casting a glance at Harry. "If there was one, would know to hide themselves from view."

Wisdom bared his teeth. "There's only so much someone can do to hide, Karkaroff," he said. "Everyone's luck runs out eventually."

Meanwhile, Fleur said something sniffy to Madame Maxime, and to the surprise of most, Harry interjected in curt, fluent French.

"You speak French?" Madame Maxime asked, more surprised than most.

"Obviously," Harry said curtly, then at a look from Dumbledore, added in more conciliatory tones, "I'm a telepath, _Madame_. I have a gift for languages, thanks to being what I am, and I have a couple of French friends."

"Just like Barty here," Bagman said, trying to sound hearty.

Krum eyed Harry, then spoke, first in one language, then another. Harry frowned at the first, then replied to the latter, perfectly fluently.

"What was that?" Bagman asked, puzzled.

"The first one was Bulgarian, if I'm any judge," Bucky said. "The second was Russian."

"'ow do you speak it, Mister Barnes?" Maxime asked, curiously.

"Now there is a question," Snape murmured.

Dumbledore shot his Potions Master another quelling look.

"During the war, the Commandoes ran a few missions with the Soviets, and our linguist already spoke French and German and wanted someone else to do some of the heavy lifting," Bucky said calmly, ignoring Snape. "So I did. And Agent Romanova has helped me brush up on my skills."

Bagman chortled jovially. "I'm sure she has," he said, winking conspiratorially, tone leaving in no doubt as what he meant.

"Ludo," Crouch said curtly.

"Oh come on, Barty," Bagman said heartily, smiling. That smile faltered, however, in the face of Bucky's expression, which was positively Antarctic. "I didn't mean anything by it," he added, fumbling his words. "Merlin's beard, Sergeant Barnes, it was just a joke."

Bucky's expression got even colder and Bagman was reduced to incoherent mumbling.

"Be quiet, Ludo," Crouch said. "You're embarrassing yourself."

"Right," Bagman said, and stole a glance at Bucky, shivering. "Now, the four of you –" he began.

"Three," Harry said flatly. "I'm not getting involved in this."

"Come now, Harry," Bagman said, trying to take a fatherly tone with Harry. He got a cold look that, while not quite as icy as Bucky's, stopped him in his tracks.

"I wasn't making a request," Harry said, with cold precision.

"Magical law dictates that you must," Crouch said.

Harry's eyes widened. Then, he moved in a blur, a slashing motion of his right arm that sent Crouch slamming into the stones of the wall, one nearly as abrupt, violent, and furious as the echoing words that accompanied it.

" _ **No one**_ _dictates to me!"_

The entire room stared at Harry in shock; Bagman, the Durmstrang and Beauxbatons contingents at the effortless display of what they thought was wandless magic, the Hogwarts staff at the sudden display of violence. And there was plenty to stare at, as power burnt gold around his outstretched right hand, his entire body hummed like a power line with energy and tension as he breathed fast and shallow, while his eyes were wide and wild with unreasoning rage. Rage… and fear.

"Harry!" Bucky snapped. "Calm down. Breathe."

" _He was –"_

"Enough, Harry," Bucky said, voice even. "Even if he was, he can't now, see? You're fine. You're safe. Just breathe."

There was a long moment. Then, Harry, shaking, closed his eyes and lowered his hand, as Bucky slipped an arm around his shoulder. Crouch slumped to the floor.

"Is this what you teach your students, Dumbledore?" Karkaroff demanded. "To attack whenever they hear something they do not like?"

"No," Harry said, before Dumbledore could, speaking in a low, cold voice. "It's what experience taught me. No one _dictates_ to me. No one _controls_ me. _No one._ " His gaze swept the room. "It doesn't matter what magical law dictates," he said, tone unchanged. "Because it does not apply to me. I'm not going to do this. You can't make me. _And if you try I will not leave you enough brain to regret it!"_

It was not an angry protest, or a petulant complaint. It wasn't even a threat. It was a statement of intent.

Crouch opened his mouth.

"You put my godfather in Azkaban for twelve years without trial, Mr Crouch," Harry said, voice not rising one iota. "Remember?"

Crouch's lips thinned, and he began to reply, before his mouth was snapped shut with a crunching of teeth.

"I'll take that as a yes," Harry said. "He does. He still has nightmares about it. Screaming nightmares. I can feel the psychic scars when I'm around him. They'll never fade away. We haven't forgotten that, you know, dad and me. We've just been busy with other things. You weren't important enough to deal with. And you're not that important now, are you? A tiny little man who wanted to be king of his own tiny little world. You wanted to play the saviour, the hero, to be someone willing to make the 'hard choices'. All for power. I'm not reading your mind, Crouch, because I don't have to. It's written all over your face." He looked away from Crouch, who was still struggling to stand, helped up by Bagman. "You're not my priority right now. If you want to become one, then by all means: keep annoying me, keep telling me about what magical law 'dictates' I should do." His eyes flashed. "And then I'll give you some psychic scars of your own."

"Harry," Dumbledore said, voice hard.

Harry arched an eyebrow. "What, Professor? You're going to say that I should treat him with respect? Or perhaps that I shouldn't make a scene in front of our esteemed guests? Keep everything calm, and smooth, and normal?" he asked, voice rising, the simmering rage he'd felt ever since his name had come out of the goblet pouring out at last. "No. No, let's make a scene."

He jabbed a finger at Crouch, who now looked very much afraid.

"He put my godfather in prison with some of the most evil creatures I've ever encountered, psychic voids, demons that feed on minds, on everything that makes us _people_ , without a trial. Respect? You want me to give him _respect?_ You're lucky I'm not giving him an _aneurysm!_ " He glared at Crouch, who shrank away. "Fear. Good. You're not completely stupid."

He looked at Dumbledore, at that crooked nose and those sapphire blue eyes. "And as for making a scene… _good_. I don't care. Throw detentions at me, take house points off me, ban me from Quidditch – oh, no, wait, you can't, there aren't any matches this year, and I was going to quit the team anyway. Never mind. Anyway, do all that, throw everything you've got at me once this is done, because I. Don't. Care. Why would I? After all I've been through, they mean _nothing_ to me. I have fought enough foul things, been in enough life or death contests, for a _dozen_ lifetimes. And I have _never_ complained, no matter how many times I've been bitten by basilisks, stabbed by superhuman psychopaths, kidnapped by the lunatics of the week, or otherwise been _completely_ fucked over! But you know the difference between those things and this? I _chose_ to get involved those times. I _chose_ to fight. Why?"

He let out a bitter, savage laugh.

"There's a question. So let's have it out, once and for all. First of all, I'm not trying to win. I don't do it because I want to beat someone — or because I hate someone, or because I want to blame someone. It's not because it's fun, because yes, I like a good fight, but the scars I wind up taking far outweigh it. And gods know it's not because it's easy!"

The entire room stood, transfixed before this rant.

"Hell, it's not even because it _works_ , because it hardly ever does – I knock down one monster, one organisation, one HYDRA, one Gravemoss, one Chthon, one Voldemort, even one Red Room, and what happens? The thanks of a grateful populace, sometimes, a few moments of peace while the dust settles. And then another steps up and takes their place, and we're back to square one."

He turned slowly, taking in everyone in the room.

"So why do I fight, when I choose to fight, why do I do it? I do it because it's right! Because it's decent! And above all, because it's kind! It's just that. Just kind. Because if I don't, good people will die, or worse. Because if I step in, if I stand and fight, I can make a difference. Some people might live, some of their lives might get better — maybe not many, maybe not for long, but so what? It's right, it's decent, it's kind, and it means that I can leave the universe a better place than when I found it. _That_ is why I choose to throw myself into one fresh hell after another, to add to my collection of scars. Because sometimes, just sometimes, I can send evil running, and give someone a helping hand out of the dark."

He waved a hand. "Of course, all of this probably means less than nothing to most of you," he said. "Well, it's context. It's context for why I'm so annoyed about being selected for this tournament, compelled to be a part of it. Because I didn't chose this. I didn't sign up for it. And there sure as hell isn't some higher cause behind it. This isn't some case of fighting the good fight, standing up to the monsters, or helping someone who needs it. This is just some _stupid_ bloody _game!_ It's supposedly all about 'international cooperation', and it is to Professor Dumbledore, but for the two of you," he snarled, the pointing finger settling on Karkaroff and Maxime. "All it's really about getting one over each other, maybe even proving that you're a better headmaster than the great Albus Dumbledore. You're so _petty!_ And don't even _try_ to deny it. Lying to a telepath is pointless for you and annoying for me."

He glared around the room, one stunned into silence by his tirade. "You seem to be having trouble understanding this. I don't care. I don't care about your little game of 'Best Wizard' or 'Best School'. I don't have some urge to prove myself, if only because I don't _need_ to, and with the possible exception of Professor Dumbledore, I am more powerful than the lot of you put together."

Fleur made a sceptical noise.

"Don't believe me?" Harry snapped. "How about you look out a window, over at the Lake?"

There was a moment of puzzlement, then Dumbledore cast a sharp look at one of the walls. A window appeared, and everyone in the room, save Bucky and Dumbledore, gasped, swore, or both. Because the Durmstrang ship was hovering a good fifty feet above the water. All six thousand tons of it.

"If you like, I can make it do backflips," Harry said curtly, inspecting his fingernails, as the ship started flying in a leisurely figure of eight. "Or take it on a trip to the upper atmosphere and fly it back to Durmstrang. Maybe even take the lake with it, so it can _really_ sail the skies. I'm not sure if I could do that, but that's only because I haven't tried." He raised an eyebrow. "What? Surprised? Let me make it very simple. I don't know what you've heard, what you know, or what you think you know, but it boils down to this: you have limits. _I don't._ "

"Harry," Dumbledore said, in a tone that brooked no dissent. "Put it down. Gently. _Now_."

There was a long moment, then Harry looked away, and the ship slowly settled back down onto the water.

"You have made your point," Dumbledore said.

"No, Professor. _That_ was punctuation," Harry said. " _This_ is my point. I. Have had. _Enough_. All I want is to have a normal school year, and to be left _alone_ ," he said. He paused for a moment, and some of the fire seemed to go out of him. "I mean… is that really too much to ask?"

"No," Dumbledore said quietly. "It shouldn't be. And you are right, Harry. You have been through more than anyone your age ever should, more than anyone of any age ever should. You have endured things that have broken men, women, even gods, many years your senior. But I am sorry. When Mr Crouch was speaking of magical law, he did not mean that which was made by the Ministry. He meant the laws of magic itself. Which, regrettably, are heavy on the technical details."

Harry stared at him, lost for words.

"What do you mean, Professor Dumbledore?" Bucky asked quietly.

"Harry wrote on the piece of paper that entered the goblet of fire, in his own hand, of his own free will," Dumbledore said heavily. "The goblet is a remarkable magical artefact, one capable of judging the quality of a person against preset standards by the thaumaturgic connection made to entrants by the scraps of paper inserted into the goblet. But it was never designed to discern whether the entrant truly wanted to enter the tournament, simply because it was assumed that anyone who entered had chosen to do so. That was part of the reason I instituted the Age Line, aside from the sheer risk: most students below the age of 17 would have no idea of what they were getting into and might regret it later."

"What's the penalty for not taking part?" Bucky asked softly.

Dumbledore looked old and weary. "When a champion is chosen, a magical contract is made," he said. "At the very least, the penalty for breaking it would involve long term damage to the breaker's magical ability."

"Why would 'e want to break it in the first place?" Fleur asked, confused.

"Because, since you apparently weren't listening, I've had enough near death and actual death experiences in the past few months to be going on with," Harry said, voice flat. It was no longer cold and dangerous, or fizzing with fury. He just sounded tired. "Because I've got more fame and money than I ever wanted. And because I risk my life enough without doing it for public entertainment too."

Then, Bucky spoke up.

"Professor Dumbledore," he said quietly. "I have a question. Where is Professor Bach?"

There was a moment of dead silence, as Dumbledore's eyes slipped out of focus, before sharpening, as did his expression.

"He is not on the school grounds," he said grimly.

"Vanished this morning," Wisdom supplied. "He's a suspect?"

"If he didn't do it, he almost certainly knew about it," Bucky said flatly. "Which most probably means he let it happen."

"How?" Bagman asked, baffled.

"Gwion Bach is his original name, but it is not the one he is best known by," Dumbledore said grimly. "He is more usually known as Doctor Stephen Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme."

Wisdom swore foully.

"Are you saying then, Dumbledore," Karkaroff said, in arch tones. "That a member of your staff is responsible for this?"

"Perhaps," Dumbledore said, frowning. "I have learned to never assume anything where Doctor Strange is concerned. Furthermore, I have been hearing of disquieting events that have been set in motion across the globe over the last couple of days, any one of which Strange could be occupied by – the return of the Heirs of Kemmler, a dramatic intensifying in the War between the White Council and the Red Court that has drawn in the Avengers, separate increased activity by the Grey Court of Vampires... this may be a part of it."

"I insist upon resubmitting the names of the rest of my students," said Karkaroff, expression ugly, tone cold. "You will set up the Goblet of Fire once more, and we will continue adding names until each school has two champions. It's only fair, Dumbledore."

"But Karkaroff, it doesn't work like that," said Bagman, pleading. "The Goblet of Fire's just gone out – it won't reignite until the start of the next Tournament –"

"– in which Durmstrang will most certainly not be competing!" exploded Karkaroff. "After all our meetings and negotiations and compromises, I little expected something of this nature to occur! I have half a mind to leave now!"

"Empty threat, Karkaroff," growled Wisdom. "Weren't you listening? You can't leave your champion now. He's got to compete. They've all got to compete. Binding magical contract, like Dumbledore said. Convenient, eh?"

"Convenient?" said Karkaroff. "I'm afraid I don't understand you, Wisdom." Harry could tell he was trying to sound disdainful, as though what Wisdom was saying was barely worth his notice, but his hands gave him away; they had balled themselves into fists. Moreover, he was radiating fear.

"Don't you?" said Wisdom quietly. "It's very simple, Karkaroff. Someone put the kid's name in that Goblet knowing he'd have to compete if it came out. And Strange let it happen."

"Evidently, someone 'oo wished to give 'Ogwarts two bites at ze apple!" said Madame Maxime.

"I doubt it," Wisdom said, eyeing Harry. "I think they had bigger game in mind. And I have my suspicions about who, why, and even how."

Bucky looked up sharply. "Voldemort."

"It fits his method," Wisdom said.

"And he practically said that he was going to do something like this," Harry said quietly. "At the Quidditch World Cup. He said that he wanted to test me. To find out how mum's protection worked, so he could get around it." He wrinkled his nose, then added, almost as an afterthought, "And kill me."

Wisdom swore again. "If it weren't for the consequences, I'd be almost tempted to let the bastard try," he growled. He eyed Harry. "I'm almost minded to send you home instead."

"But the consequences for Harry," McGonagall began.

"Better magically crippled than dead," Wisdom said bluntly.

"Or worse," Harry said.

"Or worse," Wisdom agreed. "Besides, if anyone can repair the damage, it's Strange or Asgard."

"This is absurd," Karkaroff said. "I know, Director, that as a spy your job is to seek out threats in the most unlikely of places, but –"

"Do you have any idea how many times people have tried to kill that boy?" Wisdom asked coldly. "Do you have any idea _who?_ He might have very good odds of winning, and easily at that, but considering the context? An assassination attempt, or a prelude to one, is a good deal more likely than someone trying to rig a competition in Hogwarts' favour."

Karkaroff looked like he was prepared to argue.

"How this situation arose, we do not know," said Dumbledore in a quelling tone, speaking to everyone gathered in the room. "And the motive is still not certain, though Director Wisdom's supposition seems worryingly plausible. Before we consider such drastic measures as he proposes, however, I think we should discuss this further." His gaze swept the room. "In the meantime, whatever the motive or method behind this, it seems to me that we have no choice but to accept it, and consider what alterations and accommodations must be made. Both Cedric and Harry have been chosen to compete in the Tournament. This, therefore, they will do…"

"Ah, but Dumbly-dorr –"

"My dear Madame Maxime, if you have an alternative, I would be delighted to hear it."

Dumbledore waited, but Madame Maxime did not speak, she merely glared, confusion mixing with anger. She wasn't the only one, either. Snape looked furious; Karkaroff an unpleasant mixture of livid and afraid – the latter no doubt caused by the way Wisdom continued to regard him in much the same way as a cat does a three legged mouse. Bagman, however, looked rather excited.

"So, I'm stuck in this bloody Tournament, then," Harry said.

"Yes," Dumbledore said evenly. "It would seem, Harry, that you are."

"Right," Harry said. "Thanks for clarifying that, Professor. Now, if none of you mind, I'm going to bed." He paused. "Oh, wait. I don't actually care if you mind or not."

"I say, Harry," Bagman said, having found his voice. "Hold on a moment. We need to tell the four of you about how the tournament is going to work."

"Like Professor Dumbledore said, you're going to have to mix it up to deal with me," Harry said, halfway out the portrait hole, Bucky having already gone through. "Plus if all else fails, I'm sure I'll figure it out. I always do. So good bloody night."

The portrait slammed shut behind him.

OoOoO

"You, Harry Dresden," Wanda said, with a mixture of exasperation and relief as she tied off a bandage. "Are a worse trouble magnet than my godson, I swear."

Wincing, I tested my arm, then said, "Wanda. _No one_ is that bad."

Wanda opened her mouth, paused, then wrinkled her nose. "Fair point," she conceded grudgingly, before prodding me in the chest. "But you're a close second."

It was mid-afternoon and I was at Wanda's place. Alas, this was neither a lesson, nor something less formal and more fun.

"I can take that," I said. "Besides, it was more a case of me being in the wrong place at the wrong time."

"You consciously unleashed a previously unknown dark side of your monstrously powerful spirit of intellect lab assistant on yourself in your pursuit of information, despite said spirit warning you repeatedly that it might be dangerous," Wanda said bluntly. "Said spirit nearly killed you in less than a minute. You then managed to pick fights with two of Kemmler's senior disciples, top of the White Council's most wanted list for centuries, one of them accompanied by a ghoul warrior, narrowly escaping with your life both times, as well as one of the most powerful Warlocks I know of, and his apprentice, who is no slouch either. In the case with the ghoul, you had help in that regard from young Bruce."

"I didn't want him to get involved," I protested. "I'm not even sure how he found me."

"He's a brilliant and resourceful young man with an enquiring mind, extensive magical and technological knowledge, and almost limitless personal resources," Wanda pointed out. "More to the point, he knows you rather well. I'd be more surprised if he hadn't found you." She sighed. "And much though I sympathise with your desire not to get him involved, take it from someone with her own headstrong teenage boy with a nose for trouble to watch out for, by hook or by crook, he'll find a way." She raised an eyebrow. "Though I am somewhat surprised, and very impressed, that he managed to run off both a ghoul warrior and a powerful and very nasty Warlock. Especially since you mentioned that he doesn't like guns."

"The cops were coming," I said.

"Ah."

"And he used a flashbang."

Wanda raised the other eyebrow. "A resourceful young man indeed," she said mildly. "Oh, and then you, Thomas, and the coroner friend of yours, Waldo Butters, who seems to have accidentally stumbled upon the key to the location of quite possibly the most dangerous books of magical lore written in the last hundred years, holed up in your apartment. Said apartment was later besieged by the necromancer Grevane, his accomplice, and an army of zombies, who were then ambushed by the Corpsetaker and _her_ accomplice, and their army of spectres. Oh, and those necromancers are also after _Der Lied der Erlking_ , a book of lore collected by a White Council Wizard, full of bad poetry and titled in worse German, about one of the High Fae called the Erlking, who they wish to summon with the Wild Hunt as part of raising as many powerful spirits as possible, to maximise the potential power of the Darkhallow. Have I missed anything?"

"That more or less covers it," I said. "Corpsetaker swiped the book from me."

"You have had a very busy couple of days, haven't you?" she mused.

"Just a bit," I said. "Oh, Butters is at Murph's house, with Thomas, Bob, and Mouse."

"Karrin is aware of this?" Wanda asked sceptically.

"She's out of town," I said. "She asked me to water her plants."

"Oh?"

"In Hawaii."

"Good on her," Wanda said firmly. "She deserves a holiday. Though admittedly, the timing could be better…"

"With Kincaid."

Wanda blinked. "Kincaid?"

"Yep."

"Jared Kincaid."

"Yep."

"Jared 'the Hellhound' Kincaid, assassin, bodyguard, and one man army extraordinaire."

"Unless there's more than one, yes."

Wanda blinked again. "Good god," she said mildly.

"You know him?" I asked.

"By reputation, in the main," Wanda said.

"Is Murph in danger?"

Wanda shook her head. "No," she said. "Kincaid's no angel – quite the opposite, in fact. But he's got integrity, and he's fairly straight-forward."

"Straight-forward?" I asked, eyebrow raised. "He once told me that he was just plain folks, when he is most definitely not."

Wanda snorted. "No," she said. "No, he isn't. But when I say that he's straight-forward, I mean that subterfuge isn't his style. If he's invited Karrin to Hawaii with him, on what sounds very much to me like a romantic getaway, then that's all he's doing."

I grunted suspiciously.

"Harry," Wanda said seriously. "If he wanted to hurt Karrin, he'd have shot her or arranged a bombing, something like that. She'd already be dead. He's the Winter Soldier of the supernatural world, and very nearly as good. I have no way of knowing for sure, but everything I know about the man says that he doesn't mean her any harm." She shrugged. "Of course, I can't say that she's made the safest choice in boyfriends, but that's her call."

"That's how she put it," I said.

"She was right," Wanda said firmly. "And besides – on the off-chance that Kincaid does hurt her, then I'll…" She trailed off and scratched her jaw thoughtfully, before shrugging. "Channel my father, I suppose." She shot me a wry look. "Of course, if she comes back hale and hearty, she may do horrible things to you if you, Thomas, Butters, or your dog has damaged her house."

"Mouse is perfectly well-behaved," I said. "And so is Butters."

"Whereas Thomas seems to generate a field of slobbishness that a teenager would envy," Wanda said dryly.

I opened my mouth to defend my brother, before sighing. It was true. Thomas had many virtues, but cleaning up after himself was not one of them.

"I'm surprised Bruce didn't offer the Wayne Mansion," Wanda added.

"He did," I said. "But I want him out of it. I set him onto cracking the code to get at the _Word_. It should keep him busy."

"And provide a convenient excuse to keep him away from you, as he'll need his state of the art computers," Wanda said. "Which he'll need not to be hexed."

I nodded.

Bruce had been helpful, not just in bailing me out with the ghoul and Corpsetaker, but in getting me to hospital to get me patched up. He had also been very eager to get involved in helping out with this particular case, but I was damned if I was letting him anywhere near it. The body count was already stacking up, and it was getting more dangerous by the hour.

For example, not long after Bruce had dropped me off at the hospital, John Marcone, the undisputed ruler of Chicago's underworld, who I cordially despised, had then rolled up accompanied by his statuesque Nordic bodyguard, who I increasingly suspected might be part Asgardian, and made a few very dry jokes about my state. Normally, I would have told him to take a long walk off a short pier.

This time, though, I'd asked for the meeting, on the grounds that I had accurately suspected that he had relevant information – the smuggler who'd been selling the _Word_ and who had hidden the information in code, which in turn had dragged Butters into the mess, had been one of Marcone's.

Among other things, though, he'd pointed me in the direction of an EMT who'd seen something profoundly weird, even by supernatural standards: a necromancer, not simply raising the dead as minions, but saving someone who'd just died. Even Wanda raised her eyebrows at that.

"I've heard of it," she said. "But only once, and a rumour at that. I certainly haven't seen it done before."

I, however, had.

Most of a year ago, I'd been working a case with SHIELD, and descended into the catacombs of Paris with Agent Ward, investigating HYDRA's necromantic ally, Gravemoss and his _veidrdraugar_ , the so-called 'Hunting Dead', which I was supremely glad the Kemmlerites didn't seem to have managed to replicate. We'd been joined by Lady Sif, and confronted Gravemoss himself. Long story short, Gravemoss had flattened us with next to no effort, then ripped Sif's heart out with his bare hands, looking to make her one of his super zombies. I'd got mad and unleashed my Death Curse. It had vaporised the _veidrdraugar,_ created a pillar of flame seen over a thousand feet in the skies above Paris, and blasted Gravemoss several hundred miles away into the North Sea.

However, I'd played my last card in doing so – it's called a freaking Death Curse for a reason. I'd been dead. Except that Doctor Strange had turned up, and regenerated Sif's heart. That was astonishing enough. Then, for reasons of his own, and apparently without breaking a sweat, he'd decided to deal me a whole new hand and bring me back from the dead, something I hadn't even known was freaking _possible_. I mean, not just to raise me as a spirit or a zombie, but to actually raise me as a living, breathing human being, lifeforce intact.

Of course, I also hadn't known that it was possible for humans to live for millennia. And yet, Doctor Strange was, by his own account and the best corroboration that could be found, over one hundred thousand years old. Hell, he was probably closer to half a freaking _million_. It was quite possible that he'd forgotten more about magic than the rest of humanity had ever known. If, you know, he forgot anything at all. He'd been trained by, and alongside, freaking Merlin. And more to the point, he was an immensely skilled time traveller – he could go wherever, and whenever he liked, and learn from history's magical all-stars.

That kind of knowledge equalled colossal amounts of power – Bob, my spirit in a skull and handy-dandy wise-cracking oversexed porta-geek, had been working with Wizards for 'merely' a few hundred years, forty years of which he'd spent with Kemmler. And as Wanda had mentioned, when I'd let him out briefly and unwisely compelled him to dig up the Kemmler memories that he'd buried, he'd nearly killed me in sixty seconds flat.

And Evil Bob had been chief minion of Kemmler, who'd been the Optimus Prime (or perhaps the Megatron) of necromancers, who had in turn been chief minion of Gellert Grindelwald, Wanded Dark Lord, peer of Albus Dumbledore, consorter with demons, and generalised continental scale nightmare. And Strange had in turn punked Grindelwald, _singlehandedly_.

In other words, while Strange rarely flexed his muscles, I was beginning to realise that his resurrection of me had been one of those moments. He'd already established himself as a couple of rungs above the grand-daddy of necromancers on power, and that was significant enough, in an abstract sort of way. But having heard from the witnessing EMT how it had gone down, deduced from what he'd said and Wanda's reaction just how difficult (and apparently, somewhat botched) it had been, then contrasted it with how smooth his resurrection of me had been and how much finesse it had been done with, I was also coming to realise just what a casual display it had been not just of power, but _skill_.

Power's not _that_ common, but it's not that rare, either. I wasn't exactly awake for Strange's resurrection act, but going by what I'd got from Kumori, it didn't take an impossible amount of power. A lot, sure, enough that it would take a fairly heavy-weight Council class practitioner. But even so, I know a lot of people with that kind of power, a lot of _human_ people. Hell, _I_ have that kind of power. But the key to that little party trick is knowledge, rare knowledge, knowledge to turn that power from merely 'dangerous' to potentially 'cataclysmic'.

Just like the knowledge in the _Word of Kemmler_.

I had to find that book before it fell into the wrong hands.

"It's a rare trick – that kind of nigh-resurrection, I mean," Wanda continued.

"Could you do it?" I asked suddenly.

There was a moment of frozen silence, and I cursed myself for a fool. I had a list of dead friends, of people I'd failed to save, to protect, as long as my arm, with all the attendant regrets. But I'd never had the extra regret of knowing I had the power to raise the dead. And Wanda's list was most likely a good deal longer than mine.

"'Could' and 'should' are two very different things," she said eventually, with barely a hint of tremble in her voice.

"Sorry," I said quietly.

She shot me a quick, strained smile, then looked me up and down before nodding her satisfaction and giving me a gentle swat on the chest. "All done," she said, standing up.

"Thanks," I said, getting up in turn and carefully stretching, testing my leg – which amazingly didn't twinge any more than a pulled muscle, Wanda having applied some foul-smelling but undeniably effective salve to the shuriken wound – before looking around for my shirt.

"It's over there," Wanda said helpfully, pointing at a chair just out of her arm's reach, across the room.

"Thanks," I repeated. "Could you…"

She looked up at me, grass green eyes suddenly sparkling with mischief. "Pass it to you?"

"Well, yeah."

"What, and ruin the view?"

I promptly blushed.

She laughed merrily, then grabbed the shirt, balled it up and tossed it over. "It's not like you would have reacted any differently if the roles had been reversed, after all," she said.

I went even redder, and wisely said nothing. There was no point in trying to lie. So I changed the subject instead.

"How did your searching go?" I asked.

"It went," Wanda sighed. "I didn't get a clear location, but I confirmed my worst fears."

That did not sound good. Wanda had got wind of the Kemmlerites coming to town a week or so ago, and had gone to do some research, tapping up old contacts. Among them was Albus Dumbledore, who had apparently fought them before, back when Kemmler was working for Grindelwald. Also, Wanda's proclamation that her worst fears had been confirmed made me disposed towards cynicism.

"And those worst fears were…?"

"There are two more Warlocks in play, after the _Word_ ," Wanda said. "And they're the worst of the lot."

Considering how bad Cowl, Grevane, and Corpsetaker had managed to be, that was not reassuring.

"Anyone I know?" I asked.

"Perhaps. Tom Riddle and Selene Gallio."

"Tom Riddle?"

"Voldemort."

"The one who…" I began slowly.

"Killed my best friend, seemed to kill her husband, and who only the intervention of Phoenix prevented from killing my godson, who he has repeatedly attempted to murder following his return from the not quite dead?" Wanda said. "Yes."

"And he can do everything that Albus Dumbledore can, plus he's an exceptionally powerful telepath now," I said. "Just to clarify."

"Yes," Wanda said. "And he's the junior partner in that relationship. Selene is Wandless, immortal, and much, much, worse."

I blinked owlishly. "Well, crap," I said, after a few moments.

"My thoughts exactly," Wanda said grimly. She shook her head. "I can take one or the other, but not both. Between us we might take both, but only with a very careful ambush and a lot of luck, and that still leaves the other three and their accomplices. We'll need help if we're going to fight them."

"I called the White Council," I said. "Asked for a Warden team to help deal with the necromancer problem."

Wanda looked troubled. "What did they say?" she asked.

"Captain Luccio answered the phone," I said, not elaborating how much of a sense of foreboding I got from the fact that the commander of the Wardens was answering the phones. Wanda would know well enough that that didn't portend anything good – especially considering her expression. "She said that a team would be here later today."

"It'll most likely be a small team," Wanda said.

"What do you mean?" I asked carefully.

Wanda took a deep breath. "I only just heard this myself," she said. "Or rather, I only just heard about the fall-out. You recall that I mentioned that the White Council was launching a major offensive, with the support of the Avengers?"

I nodded. A Warden Commander in Cairo had been captured, and considering the fact that the Red Court couldn't just kill their enemies, but turn them and make them one of them, I wasn't in the least surprised that even the defensive Council had responded by pulling out all the stops, and even asking a favour of the Avengers, a group with whom the Council did not generally get on. "They're still resting up after the battle?" I asked.

Wanda closed her eyes briefly. "Not exactly," she said.

Then, she told me.

The story was long, but the gist was this: a global offensive had been launched on Red Court strongholds. The White Council's captured personnel had been tracked to Belize. The seniormost members of the Red Court, including the Red King, and his lieutenants, ancient vampires, godlike in their power, had been believed to be present. Accordingly, the Senior Council had taken the field, as had the Avengers, who after all, had a couple of gods of their own, and in the Hulk, something that might as well be one.

It had been the bait of a trap. The Red King had been nowhere to be seen, and while the rescue had gone as planned, the hospice in Sicily they'd been taken to had been attacked. Twenty six Wardens had been killed in action. If not for the Avengers and the arriving Doctor Strange, it would have been more. And it only got worse. A retreat into the Nevernever had led to the Red Court unleashing Outsiders, demons from outside reality, foot soldiers and lieutenants of Elder Gods like Chthon. They had killed nearly two dozen more Wardens in moments, before Loki and Strange had set about banishing them, and the Merlin and the Gatekeeper had raised a ward to stand them and the vampires off.

The worst wounded, numbering in the hundreds, had been diverted to a hospice in the Congo, while those of the Avengers still standing, Strange, and select teams of Wardens had gone on the counter-attack. That hospice was walled up mystically, enough that it would take a demon-god to crack the wards.

So the vampires had used different means: enthralled humans and Sarin gas. Enough to kill everyone in the hospice, and for six blocks around. The death toll, Wanda said grimly, was in the thousands, and still rising.

"And among them," she said. "Are two thirds of the White Council's two hundred Wardens." She met my gaze. "The Avengers aren't coming. Stark and Romanova, are down for the count, in a SHIELD hospital last I checked, and Banner is exhausted. The rest are spread across the globe and the spirit world, out of contact range. Stephen is who knows where. Any Warden team that comes here is going to be small, exhausted, and most likely, it'll barely even up the numbers – we'll still be outmatched."

I stared at her for a long moment. "Have you got access to Doctor Strange's library?" I asked.

"Yes," Wanda said, somewhat taken aback. "And a considerable one of my own. Why, do you want a copy of the _Word?_ "

"I wouldn't mind a look to know the details of what we're dealing with, but no," I said. "I still need to find the other copy and destroy it. I was thinking about the Erlking book. Do you have a copy?"

"I do, as it happens," Wanda said, frowning. "Why…" Her eyes widened. "Oh."

"It could work," I said.

"It could," Wanda agreed, looking troubled. "It would cripple them, even if they got hold of the _Word_. It's also absolutely insane. If it wasn't the Erlking rather than Oberon, I wouldn't even countenance it." She looked very worried. "But Harry… he'll hold a grudge. And I'm not sure if I can protect you from him."

"Do you have any better ideas?" I asked bluntly.

She sighed. "Not at the moment, I have to admit."

"Then it's worth a shot."

OoOoO

On the other side of the Atlantic, a blissfully unaware Gryffindor House was in the swing of a delirious party, celebrating that one of their own had been declared Triwizard Champion. Indeed, considering that it was Harry, some were already saying that victory was assured.

Hermione thought that it was rather fortunate for all concerned that Harry was not around to hear that.

"He's not going to be happy," she said bluntly.

"Hermione," Fred said bluntly. "You could count on the fingers of one hand the amount of times that Harry's been happy since he came back to Hogwarts."

"He does angry, grumpy, and miserable well enough without needing a supporting cast," George said, glancing around the room. "Besides, after the last few months, everyone could do with a party."

"Hmm," Hermione said, not sounding convinced.

"Relax, Hermione," Fred said. "No, he probably won't be too pleased, but it'll probably be fine if everyone leaves him to go and sulk."

"And how likely do you think _that_ is?" Hermione asked, gesturing at her ecstatic housemates, some of whom seemed to be in the process of transfiguring an impromptu crown and ermine cape for Harry's return.

The Twins followed her gaze, shared a long, then said in unison, "Fair point."

"But don't worry," George said. "Harry won't kill anyone."

"Probably."

"And besides: if he tries, Bucky won't let him."

Hermione let out a disgusted sigh, before turning to Ron. His expression was unreadable.

"Ron?" she asked, a little tentatively. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah," he said.

Hermione frowned. "Ron?" she pressed.

"I'm fine, all right," Ron snapped. "I know, Harry doesn't want this, he didn't put himself in for it, and whoever did is probably trying to kill him. Again. Even though it doesn't work." He glowered at Hermione. "I know, Hermione."

Before Hermione could reply, though, the portrait hole opened, and Harry stepped through, followed by a grim looking Bucky. His expression was thunderous, and only darkened further at the roar of acclamation that greeted him. Hermione braced herself.

And then, suddenly, he vanished, and the cheers of the crowd turned to murmurs of confusion, as they looked everywhere. Everywhere but, it seemed, where Harry was. A moment later, Hermione found herself doing the same, looking around fruitlessly for her friend.

"Don't bother," Bucky said quietly, having drifted over to them, once again displaying the silence of movement that had led more than a few students to seriously speculate that he was part ghost. "He's gone. And he doesn't want to talk to anyone right now."

"How," Hermione began.

"Misdirection," Bucky said. "It's a telepathic trick, like muggle-repelling charms. In short: if he doesn't want to be seen, he won't be." His gaze swept over Hermione, Ron, and then the Twins, who were now amusing themselves by using their mastery of wandless fire magic and illusions to conjure increasingly lewd and inventive fireworks.

Ron grunted. "So, he doesn't even want to bother talking to us now," he said.

Bucky's gaze focused on him, icy blue eyes seeming to see straight through him. "The mood he's in right now, you wouldn't want him to," he said. "He smashed Crouch into a wall downstairs. Let him sleep it off."

"What?" Hermione gasped in a strangled whisper.

"Harry was exceptionally agitated to begin with, he hates Crouch as it is, and Crouch accidentally triggered Red Room memories, memories about being controlled," Bucky said quietly. "Harry panicked and lashed out."

"I thought he said those memories were locked away," Ron said, eyes wide, bitterness forgotten.

"The details are," Bucky said. "The way Harry once described it was that it's like picking up a book in a shop – he can read the title, the blurb, even have a quick look at the contents to get an idea of what's inside… but anything more than that comes with a price. He remembers enough."

"Blimey," Ron whispered.

"He tried to _kill_ Mister Crouch," Hermione said, horrified.

Bucky shook his head. "He didn't."

"But you said –"

"I said that he threw him against the wall," Bucky said quietly. "You know how powerful Harry is, Hermione. He demonstrated how strong he was to all and sundry by making the Durmstrang ship fly, in a figure-of-eight, without breaking a sweat. If he wanted Crouch dead, Crouch would be dead, no question about it."

Hermione had to concede that much. "But that should just prove that Harry can't be part of the Tournament, if even talking about it sets him off like that," she said. "He's meant to be getting better here, not thrown back into trouble!"

"I agree with you," Bucky said quietly. "But he doesn't have a choice; that's why he's so angry, that's why Crouch and his poor choice of words set him off so badly. Whoever put his name in – and I have a pretty good idea who, and how." His gaze shifted to Ron. "I know for a fact that it wasn't a student, or someone else, simply trying to get Harry to take part to ensure a Hogwarts victory." Ron went red, but said nothing. "They used a piece of paper he'd written on, of his own free will. The Goblet would take that as his freely entering; and even if it didn't, it was tampered with. Furthermore, such an entry functions as a magical binding contract. And magically binding contracts, in my experience, are heavy on the technical details."

"That's not fair," Hermione said quietly.

"No," Bucky said. "It isn't." He sighed. "A lot of things in Harry's life haven't been fair. In all three of your lives, come to that. I'd just add it to the list."

There was a pocket of a reflective silence, occasionally punctuated by cracks, bangs, and cheers from the other side of the Common Room, as the Twins started doing requests.

"Why didn't Doctor Strange stop it?" Ron asked eventually. "I mean, he's, well… Doctor Strange. Who could get past him?"

"That assumes that they had to get past him in the first place," Bucky said quietly.

"What do you mean?"

"Hogwarts is a fortress of wards, especially since HYDRA's attack," Bucky said. "Everyone is on guard, and MI13's heavy troops are covering every possible angle. The Goblet was watched at all times from its arrival at Hogwarts." He sat back. "In theory, maybe, just maybe, someone could have got past all those people and security measures."

"Someone like Doctor Strange," Hermione breathed.

"He'd never," Ron said. "Harry's dad would kill him, his uncle too."

"I'm sure they'd try," Bucky said quietly. "And Wanda would most likely look to take her pound of flesh too. But Strange has successfully outmanoeuvred, defeated, and outright bullied beings far older and more powerful even than Thor and Loki. Do not be fooled by his quirky façade: he is by far the most dangerous man I have ever met." He shook his head. "And besides, the way it played out… my instincts tell me that it wasn't him. The way it was done, it's not his style. But." He met both their gazes. "That doesn't mean he didn't let it happen." He waved a hand to ward off questions. "Don't ask me why. People a lot smarter and a lot older than me have spent centuries trying to figure out why Doctor Strange does things, and haven't got anywhere. While I do know his ultimate objective, I haven't got the faintest idea on how he plans to get there."

"But even if he let it happen, that still leaves a lot of security," Ron said. "I mean, the Ministry, MI13, _Dumbledore_ …"

"Which is why I don't think they went past any of that security at all," Bucky said quietly. "My theory is that it was done before the Goblet even got to Hogwarts. Harry's name was the first one entered into the Goblet."

"Who by?" Ron asked, after a moment of stunned silence. When Hermione shot him a disbelieving look, he shrugged defensively. "What? It used to be just You Know Who, but now, Harry's got half the world after him!"

"It's a fair question," Bucky said, a hint of amusement in his voice, before that hint vanished. "But considering the emphasis on the magical world, the necessity to be both intensely familiar with the magical world and with magic in general, as well as exceptionally magically skilled… I would say, and Director Wisdom agrees with me, that it is most likely Voldemort." His expression creased into a grim frown. "What worries me, though, isn't that."

"It doesn't?" Ron managed.

"Voldemort has been after Harry for a very long time," Bucky said. "And Harry has proved in the past that he can beat him in a straight fight. If he is behind this, as I believe he is, I'm guessing that he's trying to get at Harry indirectly. But the Triwizard this year was designed to be safer than before, for, no offence, human wizards. Harry is a lot more powerful than any of the other champions, and has survived much, much worse." His frown deepened. "So I have to wonder: what's his game?"

OoOoO

Back on the other side of the Atlantic, the sun was beginning to set, behind thick, dark clouds, clouds that had been covering the city for the last two days.

Normally, even this much sunlight would be a mild irritation for the likes of Dracula, and a lethal problem for most of his subordinates, even seething as the clouds were with dark power, power that set the instincts of a city on edge, adding an undercurrent of real fear to the pretended terror that children and adults alike prepared to revel on this Halloween night.

Even still, the source of these clouds and the subtle sense of fear, anger, and other, darker emotions that they pushed before them like a bow-wave, preparing the way, Dracula himself, stood watching the screens before him. Popular perception held that vampires didn't rise until the sun set. As a matter of fact, though, they merely didn't emerge until the sun set – and with the rise of the digital age, the limits that placed on them were diminishing by the year. Soon, if all went as planned, it would diminish to nothing at all.

For the time being, though, there were still some restrictions, and they would have to settle for simply seeing the sun as it shone on the streets they were surveying.

Or rather, to be more specific, they were surveying a floodlit football pitch next to the thriving inner-city school of Midtown High, on which the school's ladies football team was training, via a drone. Many would have been puzzled by this – vampires are not generally known for their voyeurism, which would seem to be the only conceivable purpose that surveying such a group would have. If a vampire sees something that they decide they want, they generally take it and have done with it. But Dracula, the man, or the creature that had once been a man, that had commissioned the survey, was not particularly interested in such things.

True, he watched the footage with a hunger, as such a person might do, and he had a reputation for having an eye for the ladies that was at least partially based in reality. But that was not his concern today. His hunger was controlled, utterly focused, and subordinated to his will, the hunger of one anticipating the achievement of an objective rather than sating a lust.

Tall, lean, with the coiled power and unblinking gaze of a bird of prey, he was Vlad Dracula, former Voivode of Wallachia, who had left the fields of Europe steaming with the blood of his enemies long before he had started drinking it, earning the nickname 'the Impaler'. Now, he was a King, King of the Grey Court of Vampires, and he was about to set in motion a plan to bring about a long-standing ambition: to break the Seal of the Dawn.

"The networks?" he asked quietly, without looking away from the screens.

"Our people are in position under the city, sire," one of his subordinates said. "Ready to sever power and communications lines at your command."

Dracula looked up. "And wireless communications?" he asked, in a deceptively mild voice.

The subordinate gulped. "Also ready to be dealt with, sire," he said. "The hex that the Wizard Voldemort provided has been prepared by our mages, and backups are in place should it prove insufficient."

"Should it be intentionally flawed, you mean," Dracula said dryly, before waving a hand in dismissal. "Our agents?"

"In position, sire, and in the shade for the time being."

"Good. The other asset?"

"In place, and under control, sire."

"Good," Dracula repeated, before glancing at the clock. "Now, sunset should be in thirty two minutes."

One of the younger vampires rolled forward, making a rumbling sound of anticipation.

"No," Dracula said. It was a word and a tone that brooked no disobedience, and for all his youth and lack of brains, the other vampire recognised it for what it was, and froze in place. "You will be deployed when, and only when, you are required." He looked over his shoulder, and regarded one of his newest vampires with narrowed eyes, reinforcing the message. The fledgling met his gaze for barely a split second, before ducking his head and retreating, body language submissive.

Dracula regarded him for a moment, then nodded his satisfaction, turning back. This one had been barely a month turned, and normally, would not have been even close to such a mission. However, the fledgling's raw power, in directly inverse proportion to his brains, was impressive and Dracula wished to ensure total control over what could either be a very useful asset, or a considerable annoyance. Additionally, since this fledgling had been provided as a good faith gift by Voldemort, to seal their temporary alliance, Dracula preferred to keep him where he could see him. Just in case.

"Now," he said quietly. "Let us begin."

 **And so it has begun: Harry is a Triwizard Champion, with no obvious way out of it, most likely thanks to Voldemort's scheming. Dresden and Wanda are gearing up for a fight that they feel they are unlikely to win, with minimal support from elsewhere, since that support is injured, dead, or scattered to the four winds. And Dracula's preparing to make his move.**

 **Also, this is a fairly fast paced arc, so some things that look like they aren't having consequences will, just after the arc is done: Harry's going to be in a fair bit of disciplinary trouble, considering his behaviour, understandable as it is. Not that he particularly cares, mind you. A number of people are going to be unhappy with Strange (though it's not like there's anything new there). And Ron, while he won't have the same resentment as canon (though there are shades of it, as shown in his dialogue), will have another reason to be unhappy with Harry, as will Hermione. Why? Well. Wait and see.**


	29. Chapter 29: Bloody Hell II - Vows

**Hey guys – I'm back again, and perhaps rather sooner than you expected. Sooner than I expected, to be honest. It's only been… oh, nine, ten days? What can I say, I had a bunch of this written up, and I got in a great writing groove with the Carol scenes, and the Dracula ones. Speaking of, this is going to be a relatively Harry-lite chapter. Harry Thorson, there is. There's plenty of Dresden and Wanda in this one, mostly to set up the other side of this arc, which heavily involves Voldemort, and just what he's doing while he has Dracula taking the Carol shaped bait, and thus awakening and distracting the Harry shaped dragon (and no, Harry isn't turning into a dragon. Or anything else, for that matter. It's just a turn of phrase). It's also the most we'll see of him this arc – basically a bunch of groundwork to ensure that Dresden and Wanda's scenes next chapter actually make some kind of sense.**

 **Our hero, though, doesn't appear much for the simple reason that while most of this is going on, he is asleep, and any scenes involving him wouldn't be very interesting. Don't fret, though, he appears towards the end of this chapter, and in such a fashion as to make it very clear that he's about to make with the arse-kicking. And in the meantime, there will be action, a taster for the big fights in chapters to come, there will be ominous stuff, and there will be at least one very unexpected character.**

 **Welcome to part II of** _ **Bloody Hell**_ **.**

I'd already gone through the awkward process of meeting and greeting the Wardens at Mac's and the similarly awkward one of hiding my dismay at just how battered they looked and how few in number they were (though after what Wanda had told me about what was going on, I shouldn't have been surprised). Still, the fact that it was just Captain Luccio, Morgan, and three baby Wardens; the confident looking Ramirez, who had the battle-scarred equipment and hardness in his eyes to back up the cockiness, Yoshimo, who mostly looked exhausted, but capable enough, and the haunted looking Kowalski, who spent most of his time staring into the middle distance at things only he could see. All three of them looked green as grass, and looked nearly as battered as their elders.

All in all, not the sort of strike team I was hoping to have backing Wanda and me up when we went to take on three horrifyingly powerful necromancers, three who were 'merely' scarily powerful, and assorted minions, both alive and undead. It was enough to drive a man to drink, so I let it, performing the much less awkward process of buying myself a bottle of Mac's beer shaped ambrosia. Hell, it was better than ambrosia – the Olympians wished they drank this well. Certainly, it gave some of the Asgardian beers I'd had a run for their money.

I'd also done the basic briefing: attempted ascension via eating lots of badass ghosts, multiple badass necromancers looking for a special book with instructions on how to attempt it and another one on how to get more bang for their ghostly buck, lots of undead, even more badness. Pertinent questions had been asked, and I had answered them as best I could.

Then, the door opened.

I looked up, then stood up, as a woman of above average height, dressed in a mixture of practical, padded leather, including a long coat not unlike mine, and military tactical gear, strode in. The Wardens turned and stood with me, and I glanced over my shoulder. I knew who she was. The question was, did the Wardens?

"Who is this?" Ramirez asked, half guarded, half... interested. I narrowed my eyes at him slightly.

"Mistress Maximoff," Warden Luccio said in a tone of wary respect, bowing her head slightly. Morgan had settled for a suspicious glower that seemed to be his default expression, albeit dialled up a little for the occasion, while Ramirez and Yoshimo's eyes nearly popped out. Even the haunted looking Kowalski blinked in surprise. Wanda, otherwise known as the Scarlet Witch, is something of a legend, even more infamous in Council circles than I am, and about as popular with the old guard of the Wardens. The only practitioner more infamous, and less popular, that I knew of, was her old mentor: Doctor Stephen Strange.

"Captain Luccio," she replied, evenly, dipping her head just a little bit less than Luccio had. She was the Sorceress Supreme in Waiting and she knew the respect due to her. "Am I late?"

"Just on time," I said, going to stand by her side.

"You contacted her?" Morgan asked, surprised. Wanda's also built up a reputation for being very hard to find over the last decade and a half. For the two decades before that, it had been next to impossible, due to her apprenticeship to the famously reclusive Doctor Strange, unless you happened to run with the Order of the Phoenix. Or be Peter Wisdom, apparently. As a general rule, you did not find her, she found you.

Of course, it could be said that I had an unfair advantage.

"Sure," I said.

"How?" Morgan asked suspiciously. A not so small part of me started dancing gleefully on the inside. While I'd been Wanda's apprentice for a few months now, it seemed that news had been slow to get out – even the Senior Council hadn't known until I'd told Ebenezar a couple of months back, in the aftermath of my namesake being bodynapped by the Red Room, having his body used as a living weapon, and his resultant extremely violent vengeful rampage. Luccio didn't look surprised, having either figured it out, or been briefed by the Senior Council. But Morgan, it seemed, hadn't been told yet.

What the hell. On nights like this, you take your pleasures where you can get them. So, I savoured the moment and smiled serenely, causing Morgan to give me one of his trademark suspicious glares. I merely smiled wider. I was _really_ going to enjoy this. Rather than say anything, however, I paused and glanced at Wanda, ceding the matter to her. She rolled her eyes, amused, then turned to the Wardens. Luccio, who already knew, had arched an eyebrow.

"He's my boyfriend," she said casually. "And my Apprentice. You could say that he's got my number."

Yoshimo nearly choked on her beer and Kowalski stared at me, astonished, while Ramirez let out a low whistle. Luccio, for her part, didn't bat an eye.

And Morgan had gone completely white. He looked like he was having a stroke.

I didn't laugh in his face. Much.

However, regrettably I couldn't enjoy the moment for too long. Instead, Wanda and I had to brief the Wardens on just what we were facing.

Thankfully, aside from describing Corpsetaker's current body, Li Xian her ghoul minion, and Grevane's drummer, there wasn't too much to go over. Grevane and Corpsetaker were known quantities to the Council, Li Xian had shown no sign of being anything other than an ordinary ghoul (deceptively human looking, disgustingly hard to kill, and disgusting in general) beyond an unusual aptitude for weapons, and as for Cowl and Kumori, there wasn't too much I could really say about them. They were human, they were wandless practitioners, and they favoured Ringwraith chic. Their only distinguishing features were clothes, and in Cowl's case, terrifying raw power and a similarly scary level of skill.

"Magically, he's more or less as strong as Wanda, Albus Dumbledore, or Ebenezar McCoy," I said bluntly. "The only human I've met that I can say for sure is magically stronger is Doctor Strange. Wanda might have the edge on him, but I can't be sure. What I do know is that I dropped a car on him and he didn't seem much more than winded. His apprentice isn't even close to as strong, but she's easily Council class." I grimaced. "And I've run across them both before – they were guests at Bianca's Ball."

"You're certain?" Luccio asked sharply.

"Cowl admitted it when I asked," I said. "And said something about how a lot more of significance had happened that night had happened than I realised."

"Unfortunately, Cowl is not the limit of our problems," Wanda said, sweeping her gaze across the Wardens. "There is another Master and Apprentice pair in Chicago, looking to claim the _Word_ : Selene Gallio and Tom Riddle. The latter is better known as –"

"Voldemort," Morgan growled.

"Who?" Ramirez asked, eyebrow raised.

"A wanded Dark Lord," Luccio said grimly. "The strongest since Gellert Grindelwald, advancing a similar agenda of magical supremacy, but primarily limiting himself to Britain."

"He travelled across Europe, across the world, before he declared himself," Wanda said, in tones of addition, rather than contradiction. "Gathering knowledge and power, in the process developing particular gifts for mental magic and necromancy. He is a particularly skilled practitioner of the three Wanded 'Unforgivable' Curses: the Cruciatus torture curse, the Imperius enthralment curse, and the Avada Kedavra – the Killing Curse. The latter is distinguished by a flash of cold green light, a rushing sound, and the fact that when cast by a sufficiently powerful practitioner, it destroys any physical object in its path. Voldemort is one such practitioner. It kills on contact, instantly and without leaving a mark. There is only one defence… but that requires invoking a Power that none of us have access to."

Luccio nodded. "His followers, anonymous, masked, and branded with his symbol, the Dark Mark, became known as the Death Eaters," she said. "They committed atrocities against ordinary humans, sentient magical beings, practitioners whose blood wasn't 'pure' enough, and anyone who dared oppose them, acting across the British Isles. Owing to their use of masks, wands limiting the corrupting effects of dark magic, the ability of any caught to claim they had been under the Imperius Curse, with few foolproof methods of proving otherwise, and the British Ministry of Magic's authorisation of the use of dark magic in capturing or killing Death Eaters muddying the waters, it was almost impossible to weed them out." She looked grim. "As for Voldemort himself, only Albus Dumbledore and Stephen could face him in single combat and have reasonable odds of victory." She looked at Wanda. "Are we likely to encounter any of his Death Eaters."

"He was a match for Dumbledore," Wanda said distantly. "Though he avoided him where he could, and outright fled from Stephen on the one occasion they faced each other in battle – he remembered what Stephen did to Grindelwald, I suppose. I faced him twice, and barely escaped with my life on both occasions. Granted, I was younger and less experienced then, but even so. A few others likewise faced him and managed to escape alive, but never alone. Everyone else died. Until he attempted to kill my godson. Which backfired, killing his physical body, and leaving him as a wandering spirit."

"A form which until recently, he was believed to be confined to, despite Albus Dumbledore informing the Council of his attempts to regain a physical body," Luccio said, watching Wanda with a hint of concern in her eyes. She wasn't the only one. "At best, we thought that he had simply managed to gather enough power to create a construct body." She leaned over. "Mistress Maximoff? His Death Eaters, are they present? What state is he in?"

"Wanda?" I said quietly, prompting her.

Wanda blinked, coming out of a haze of memory, then her gaze sharpened. "None that I have seen or detected," she said. "I doubt that he has involved them. His use of them at the Quidditch World Cup was an opportunistic move – before and since, there has been no sign of his even contacting them. Which makes sense; there are quite a few people, even gods, who would enjoy the prospect of stringing him up by his entrails, and as a result, he's been keeping his head down and keeping on the move. While he's apprenticed to Selene, he seems to have a certain degree of freedom of movement – he was acting in England while my sources had her pegged as being in Ukraine. Without them, he's harder to follow, harder to track, and thus harder to find."

She folded her arms. "As for his body," she said grimly. "From my godson's testimony, and my own investigation, he has acquired a new one, either created or stolen and reshaped to his whim. And he has all his old powers; all the skills of a wanded wizard, and many more besides. Once skilled at Possession, he is now an Alpha class telepath, capable of controlling multiple people at once, displaying the ability to switch minds between bodies with ease. He nearly killed Elizabeth Braddock, an Alpha Class psychic in her own right and a prize student of Charles Xavier, with a psychic sucker-punch, went toe to toe with my godson and matched him in psychic combat by draining power from multiple victims, and by the use of hostages, forced him to disengage. While Voldemort lost the ensuing rematch, he escaped intact. He is as powerful as any member of the Senior Council, and had a similarly extraordinary degree of knowledge, particularly pertaining to the Dark Arts, even before his apprenticeship to Selene."

"So… he's bad," Ramirez said.

"And Selene is worse," Wanda said, nodding. "She is a relict of Atlantis, and most of twenty millennia old, so far as anyone knows. Like Voldemort, she specialises in necromancy and mental manipulation, though her skills are similarly far broader, including manipulation of darkness itself, and she possesses healing abilities that beggar comprehension. The true extent of her powers is unknown, and she can increase their scope by draining the lives of others in her vicinity. She was most likely was the one to teach Voldemort how to do it. And so far as it is known, her ultimate ambition is to ascend to godhood. Greater godhood, to be specific." She shook her head. "Either one of them, I could beat. It wouldn't be easy, but I could do it. Both of them? No."

"Can they be persuaded to turn on each other?" Luccio asked.

"Voldemort has no true loyalty to anyone but himself," Wanda said. "He willingly, and effectively, gathers servants and followers, but all they are to him is a means to an end, and that end is power. He wants my godson dead, and to discover a way around the protection that thwarted him last time. Perhaps –"

"Selene knows something," I said suddenly, cutting Wanda off before I realised what I was saying.

"Harry?" Wanda asked, eyebrow raised.

"Selene knows something," I repeated, as the train of thought came together. "She's incredibly ancient, incredibly powerful, and that kind of power doesn't come without one hell of a lot of knowledge. She knows something that can help Voldemort end run that protection – or that he thinks can – and he's swapping that knowledge for the _Word of Kemmler_."

"Why wouldn't he just take the _Word_ and use it himself?" Morgan asked. He was frowning, but in thought, rather than his usual frown of suspicion.

"Even if he managed to pull it off, he'd just make himself a very big target for Thor and Loki, who're both out for his blood," I said. "He'd become a Greater God, sure, but that's just putting him in the same weight-class as them. And that's if more of them didn't get involved: he personally murdered the mortal form of the Crown Prince of Asgard and nearly drove him insane from what I heard, murdered his wife, the woman who'd have been Asgard's next Crown Princess, and tried to murder their kid, the next in line. If he stepped up to the Greater Godhood, Odin might step in." I thought about the raw power I'd felt Odin radiate in the past, especially when his family was threatened, and reconsidered that statement. "Or step on."

"Step on?" Morgan echoed, with an eyebrow raised.

"Like squashing a bug," I said seriously, for once forebearing sarcasm. "And the protection on the kid…" I shared a glance with Wanda, then with Luccio, who'd most likely been briefed on the Phoenix. "It's not something you can just power through. Not even if you've got the power of a Greater God."

"Seriously?" Ramirez said, raising his eyebrows.

"Seriously," I said flatly, as the memory of the Dark Phoenix's enraged, agonised scream echoed through the vaults of my mind. "I've seen it in action a couple of times, and that was a couple of times too many."

"That all makes a lot of sense," Wanda said, nodding slowly. "Selene is ancient, and the product of the most advanced magical society the Earth has ever seen. She's the most likely person on Earth to have that kind of knowledge – the most likely to have it and be willing to share it, anyway, for the right price. The only other plausible option I can think of is the Darkhold, but Voldemort's not stupid, he knows the price of using that book, and that's even if he could get at it."

There was a long moment of silence.

"So, that would be a no to turning them against each other, then?" Ramirez said, forcing a cheery tone.

"Whatever plans Voldemort has to betray Selene, they will be on his schedule, not ours," Wanda confirmed.

There was another long silence, this one increasingly grim. The situation looked pretty hopeless. Our enemies consisted of five major Council Class Warlocks, three of whom were Senior Council Class, a ghoul, and Grevane's drummer, a practitioner of unknown power, but again, he was probably Council Class.

On our side, we had Wanda, who was a match for any of the three super-heavyweights.

Then we had me, and Luccio and Morgan, two veteran Wardens who were more or less as powerful as was and far more skilled, but with enough wounds to make even an experienced punching bag like me wince. We might be able to take one of the other super-heavyweights. Might. With a sucker punch.

And finally, we had three kid Wardens who might have seen some action but were still greener than spring grass. The remaining heavyweight would swat them like flies – and that's if they survived the likes of Corpsetaker, Grevane, or Kumori, and related minions, which frankly I doubted.

Even taking into account intra-necromancer squabbling, we were way outgunned.

"Captain," I said. "Could the three of us." I gestured to her, me, and Wanda. "Have a word?"

Morgan scowled and said in a hot voice, "Anything you have to say to her you can say to all—"

Luccio put her hand on Morgan's arm, a gentle gesture, but it cut him off. Then, she regarded me steadily. We'd met before and I knew that unlike most senior members of the Council, she respected me. Which, hopefully, meant that she wasn't going to dismiss my idea out of hand.

"Morgan. Perhaps you would be so kind as to get me another bottle. And I'm sure McAnally would be willing to provide us all with some dinner."

Morgan stared at her for a second, then at me, then at Wanda. Then he rose, smudged the chalk circle with a boot, and broke the circle around the table, releasing the buzzing tension from the air.

"Come on, kids," Ramirez told the other two younger wardens, rising. "We have to go sit with Uncle Morgan while the other adults have a serious talk." He put a hand on my shoulder on the way past and squeezed in silent support. It was a small gesture, but one I appreciated. "Hey, bartender! Are those onion rings I smell?"

I waited until they had all settled down at the far end of the bar and Mac began to bring them some food. Then I turned to Luccio and Wanda, and said quietly, "We can't win this. We need help."

"Who do you propose we ask?" Luccio asked quietly. "Barely half the Avengers are still standing, and the rest are split between the Congo and the counter-strike teams. Doctor Strange was last seen covering our retreat from the Outsiders, and while he was still fighting, he did not look in a good way. SHIELD joined our assault on the Red Court, but they took losses they could ill-afford after HYDRA gutted them earlier this year. Who is available who could get here in time, and make a difference?"

"I can think of one guy," I said, and turned to look at Wanda, who stared at me, before closing her eyes and sighing as she realised who I meant. "Sorry," I said. "I know you don't like him, but –"

"This is more important by far than my issues with him," Wanda said. "And he could tip the balance."

"Who are you referring to, Dresden?" Luccio asked quietly.

"He's talking about my father," Wanda said bluntly. "Erik Magnus Lensherr. Better known as Magneto."

Luccio's eyes widened, weather-beaten skin going pale with horror and possibly, fear. " _Dio_ , are you both mad?" she demanded. Considering that we were talking about someone who was not only master of one of the fundamental forces of the universe and owner of his own personal space station, but also until recently, one of the greatest individual terrors the Earth had seen in the last millennium or so, it was a fair question.

"If he'd suggested it a year or two ago, I'd have thought so," Wanda said bluntly. "But I have to admit, despite my deep-seated scepticism, my father has turned over a new leaf. And with the powers he possesses –"

"I know the extent of the powers he possesses, Mistress Maximoff," Luccio said bluntly. "I have seen him fight. I know what he is capable of."

Having seen Magneto cut loose recently, and heard about his private space-station, I privately doubted that. Then again, as he'd demonstrated against the Red Son, even fighting with the metaphorical gloves on, he was a force of nature.

"So you know that even if he was still evil, the Darkhallow wouldn't be any use to him, because he's not a practitioner," I interjected.

"And he hates Voldemort," Wanda added.

I blinked. That I had not been expecting. "He does?"

"I was born on Mount Wundagore," Wanda said quietly. "As my mother went into labour, Voldemort was attempting to raise and claim the power lying dormant within the mountain – in fact, the disruption he set off might have triggered my mother's labour in the first place. My father went to confront Voldemort, and the two fought. The backlash caused a cave-in that killed my mother, and nearly killed me. Voldemort fled, and my father departed in grief, thinking I was dead as well." I took her hand, and she shot me a brief, strained smile, before standing up. "If he can, he'll come. Newly rediscovered conscience or not, I somehow doubt he'll pass up the opportunity to tear Voldemort in half."

I turned to Luccio. "Captain?"

There was a long, tense moment, then she sighed and nodded. "Contact him," she said, looking at Wanda. "It is not like we are spoilt for choice, after all. If between the two of you, you can defeat any two of Selene, Voldemort, and this Cowl that Dresden speaks of, then our chances of success are greatly increased." She sighed. "And such rituals are often delicate. Hopefully the disruption of two such battles will disprupt the ritual." Then she turned to me, fixing me with a steady, weary gaze. "Which leaves just one thing." Then she drew her hands from beneath her cloak and held out a folded bundle wrapped in brown paper, offering it to me. "Take it."

I took the bundle and unwrapped it. It was a folded grey cloak.

"Put it on," said Luccio in her quiet, steady voice. "Warden Dresden."

OoOoO

Carol strolled out of the changing rooms, relaxed and satisfied after a good afternoon's soccer – or as Harry insisted on calling it, 'football' – training. The team had finally managed to get the free-kick routine down pat, and despite the crappy weather, everything had been shiny. The rest of the school day hadn't been too bad either – classes had gone fairly well, and there had been the amusing sight of scrawny arch-nerd Peter Parker turning the tables on typical jerk jock Flash Thompson.

Usually, Thompson did something humiliating to Parker, like give him a wedgie, or stuff him into a locker. This time, however, with what looked like a crude wrestling move, Parker had up-ended Thompson and stuffed him head-first into a bin. Parker had ended up with a detention, Thompson with a dose of public humiliation, and Carol with an unfulfilled craving for popcorn.

"Heya Stevie," she said cheerfully, picking out her older little brother, who was standing in the hall with a somewhat pensive expression. "How was art club?"

"Pretty good," came the shrugged reply. "Come on, let's go."

Carol arched an eyebrow, then shrugged in turn and strode out. As she did, she vaguely noticed that the detention kids were getting out too, and Parker, moving at a comfortable stroll himself, was watching the two of them as they headed down the steps, onto the twilit streets. For a few minutes, they walked in silence, before Carol finally broke it.

"All right," she said. "What's got you? Don't like me walking you home when you've got art club?"

"No," Stevie said.

Carol waited for a moment, to see if anything more would be forthcoming, and when it wasn't, sighed. "Well, look, it's not like mom has much choice," she said patiently. "She's got the three of us – me, you, and Joe. Joe's at elementary school, and he's got baseball practice most days. If you've got a normal day, fine – she can pick you up, then him. Or vice versa, if it's the other way around. But if you've got art club and he's got baseball, then she can't be in two places at once. Grandma's moving back into the city, but her work has weird hours, and often means working late, and dad's work has taken him out of state. We both go to Midtown High now, I'm older and bigger than you are and I can –" She paused. "Well, if we're gonna take public transport, especially now it's getting dark early, mom prefers us to do it together. Especially since it's your first year and you're still getting used to the route."

"I know," Stevie said, voice quiet, but carrying an edge.

"Sooo… you just don't like being walked home by big sister, then?" Carol asked, eyebrow raised. "Guys giving you a hard time about it?"

"No," Stevie said, then at Carol's sceptical expression, amended it. "Not much."

"Yeah, they're assholes," Carol said. "Try and tune 'em out."

"Easy for you to say," Stevie muttered.

"Yeah, I wish," Carol said.

"Whatever. That's not what I meant."

"What did you mean, then?"

Stevie looked up, blue eyes serious.

"Something's going on, especially with you," he said. "It has been since last year. Since you met your boyfriend, Harry, and his friends. And it's been going even more since you brought him round to dinner."

"First, for the umpteenth time, he is _not_ my boyfriend," Carol said, throwing up her hands in exasperation.

"You spend hours on the phone to him, and you talk about him a lot," Stevie retorted. "In fact, he's just about the only guy you ever talk about."

"I talk about Jean-Paul. And Lex," Carol said defensively. "And Uhtred. And those Twin guys. Sometimes."

"Jean-Paul's gay," Stevie said. "Very gay. Uhtred's kind of his boyfriend from what you've said. If you've mentioned those Twins, it hasn't been more than about twice. And Lex is like your possibly evil big brother or something. You talk to, and about, Harry more than you do all of them put together."

"What, you've been keeping track?" Carol asked, rolling her eyes.

"For about a week," Stevie said matter-of-factly.

Carol stared at him for a moment in disbelief, before shaking her head. "I have the weirdest family, I swear to god," she muttered, then paused. "No, wait, hang on. Second weirdest, after Harry." She shook her head again. "Whatever. It was dad who invited him for dinner, anyway. What are you driving at, Stevie?"

"Whenever he's around, something's up," Stevie said.

"And in other news, water is wet, fire is hot, and the sky is blue," Carol said, before glancing up at the fading twilight, filtered through dark grey overcast skies. "Mostly."

"He invited you to go skiing at Easter," Stevie said. "And around the ski resort you were at, there was a massive storm, an even bigger explosion, and you came back with bruises, like you'd been in a big fight."

"You try going downhill at about forty kilometres per hour and falling over without getting a few bumps and bruises," Carol retorted. "As for the other stuff…" She shrugged. "Search me."

"Then, over the summer, everything went crazy," Stevie continued, as if she hadn't spoken. "And you vanished. About a day after, there was the Battle of London. After that, you come back, tired, and with more bruises, and a shield like Captain America's. You start spending a lot of time up at the Avengers' place. Then, Harry comes round to dinner, and he's… nice."

"He stuck up for you," Carol said quietly. "When dad was being… dad."

"Yeah," Stevie said, just as quietly. "He did. And he was cool." He looked up again. "Him and dad went out back, to talk. Then, Harry comes back in a coupla minutes later, looking angry, and dad's out cold. After that, he left, taking you with him." Carol coughed awkwardly. Stevie noticed. "You know what happened. And you know why."

Carol just grunted.

"Fine," Stevie said flatly. "Be that way. But that's not the last thing, either. Just as school's about to start, the world goes crazy, again, and you vanish, again. And this time, when you came back? No bruises, but crying." He stared at her. "You. Crying. _You_."

"What, I'm not allowed to have feelings?" Carol snapped.

Stevie shrugged. "You don't cry much," he said. "Before that, I'm not sure I can even remember the last time I saw you crying."

"Dad kind of expected it from me, me being a girl and all," Carol said. "So I didn't. Even when I wanted to."

"And now dad's not around," Stevie said, tone neutral.

"No," Carol said. "He's not."

"You were crying," Stevie repeated. "Harry's nowhere to be seen. Grandma's suddenly around a lot. And completing the trifecta of weird, you and mom start getting on way better. Finally, about a month back, dad tells us he's got a promotion, that takes him out of state. Funnily enough, he didn't look all that happy about it." He fixed Carol with a pointed stare. "And he'd been sleeping on the sofa, too."

Carol sighed explosively. "Where are you going with this, Stevie?" she asked.

"I'm not like you or Joe," Stevie said. "I'm not fast, strong, or whatever. I'm not loud, either. People don't see me. But I see stuff."

"Yeah, I got that from your little Cliff Notes of the last year or so," Carol said. "The point, Stevie. What is it?"

"You've changed," Stevie said. "A lot of weird things have been happening to you, around you. Now, the rest of us are starting to get caught up in it." He stopped and folded his arms. "You know what's going on and why. Including why dad suddenly upped and left. And I'm sick of being in the dark."

"Stevie –"

"Don't try and lie to me," he said. It wasn't snapped, shouted, or even pleading. It was calm, flat, and even, with only a hint of tremble. "Don't, Carol. Don't treat me like I'm dumb. I'm not strong, but I'm not stupid, either." He took a deep breath. "Mom's in on it, grandma probably is too, whatever 'it' is. But I've noticed it, and so has Joe."

"What's he noticed?" Carol asked neutrally, matching his posture.

"Nothing much," Stevie said. "Except how dad's gone. He knows something's off about that. But he's only nine – he doesn't understand why, or how to put it." He looked away. "He cries, sometimes. Usually at night, when he thinks neither of us is listening." He glanced at Carol. "Of course, you usually aren't at any time of day."

Carol looked away. There wasn't any accusation in his gaze, but somehow, that made it all the worse.

"Sorry," Stevie said, after a few moments of silence.

"No," Carol said quietly. "That's fair." She looked around. New York being New York, no one had paid them the blindest bit of attention. Save, it seemed, for one Peter Parker, who'd seemingly been staring at her, before jumping and looking away guiltily when she met his gaze. Carol, used to such stares, knowing that Parker took the same line to get home that they did, and having long since pegged him as 'dork, harmless', simply rolled her eyes and returned her gaze to her little brother.

In truth, he wasn't so little these days. Slim, sure, and shorter than everyone in the immediate family but Joe – who was shooting up like a weed and well on the way to rectifying that. However, it wasn't physical 'little' that she was thinking about; even though he was now up to her shoulder, rather than just her elbows, and slim rather than skinny. There was something in his eyes, something older, wiser, and more serious. Harry had commented when he'd come around to dinner that he didn't think much went over Stevie's head. At the time, she'd mostly dismissed it. Now, though… she could see what he meant.

"You're right," she said quietly, picking her words carefully. "A lot of stuff has changed. With me in particular. And our family. I can't tell you about it here and now – and honestly, we should probably talk about it with mom. But… you should know."

Stevie met her gaze. "Promise?"

"Promise," Carol said solemnly. "Now, come on, or we'll miss the train."

"They come every ten minutes, you know."

"Which is ten minutes too many on a crowded subway platform at Broadway-Lafayette during rush hour," Carol retorted. "A piece of big sisterly wisdom, born of hard experience: during summer, brace yourself. It feels like a sauna and smells worse than a recently used locker room."

Stevie made a face of disgust, undercut by a giggle. "Yuck."

"Very yuck," Carol agreed with a half-smile, as the station came into view. "Speaking of, here's our stop: Very Yuck Station."

The two of them trooped down into the station, through the turnstiles, and onto the train in short enough order. All seemed normal. Except, Carol thought, that something felt off. To be honest, she wasn't sure whether it was the fact that she was a super soldier now, with requisite training and honing by Steve, her grandma Alison, and Natasha, that it was a side-effect of her connection to Harry, the fact that she spent a lot of time around the supernatural and superhuman, or a combination of all of the above. Hell, it could be common or garden paranoia, dialled up by her decidedly not common or garden experiences over the last year or so.

Remembering what she'd been taught, she casually swept her gaze around the carriage, maintaining a bored and disinterested expression, never seeming to focus on anything in particular. After a couple of sweeps, she was reasonably certain. There were at least three people – four, she amended, after a closer look at the young black woman who'd got on at the last stop – who were being a little too careful _not_ to watch them. And there was something else… something off, not just about their studied lack of interest, but _them_.

Carol had spent a lot of time around people with superhuman physical abilities, and unless they were consciously trying to mask it, they moved with a smoothness, balanced with an ease, that stood out a mile. If you knew what you were looking for. If you were looking for it. Carol did. Carol was. And while this lot were trying to mask it, they kept slipping up in the little things – like not stumbling or swaying the way everyone else did when the train rocked on the tracks, or went around a curve. As a result, it was currently setting off about half a dozen alarm bells.

Slowly, carefully, she pulled out her phone, making like she was about to change her music, and checked. No signal. And no wifi, either. Not good. She looked up at the station list and quickly ran through her mental map of New York. Normally, she and Stevie stayed on until Forest Hills – 71st Avenue. They were still at least twenty minutes away from that. 57th Street was next, just being pulled into, in fact. After that, Lexington Avenue – 63rd Street.

That was near Central Park; specifically, 5th Avenue. And what else was on 5th Avenue? Avengers Mansion. Even if these super-creeps, whoever they were, wanted to try something in the open, in rush hour, in the middle of fucking Manhattan, then they'd still have to catch her, and she could make it in, oh… a minute?

Stevie's arm brushed hers and she glanced down at him. She'd have to carry him. Okay, maybe a minute thirty? Two minutes, at the outside. Now, how to warn him without setting off their stalkers…

Then, for one fateful moment, her gaze slid back to Peter Parker's. There was an instant of utter stillness as both of them rapidly realised several important things.

Carol realised that the odd sense she'd been getting off Parker, noticing him more than usual (which, to be frank, meant noticing him at all), his suddenly having the strength, grace, and confidence to upend Flash Thompson, a guy twice his size, weren't coincidence: he – or whatever had replaced him – wasn't human. She didn't have four people to worry about. She had five.

Peter Parker, meanwhile, realised that he and his buddies had been made, and looked up sharply, standing up. His friends all looked up in unison, and began moving casually – one to each end of the carriage, and one to each door.

Carol both grabbed Stevie's arm and reached for the duffel bag containing her sports gear, resting one end on her right knee and pinning the other with her left boot.

"Wha –"

"Stevie," Carol said quietly, using a tone their mother and grandmother did when they meant serious business. "Shut up and do exactly what I say. Okay?"

Stevie opened his mouth in an instinctive demand to know why, before catching the half resolved, half frightened expression on her face, nodding rapidly.

For a couple of minutes, nothing happened. The super-creeps pretended to be just standing by the doors, utterly casually, while bizarro Parker stood about halfway between Carol, Stevie, and the far end of carriage, holding a strap and apparently no longer bothering to pretend to be just an ordinary teenager, Stevie shivered, eyes wide as tennis balls, tensed to run, and Carol had one hand buried deep in the duffel bag.

The rest of the passengers, meanwhile, seemed oblivious to this tableau, even as the train began to pull into Lexington-63rd.

The super-creeps, Carol noticed, seemed to expect her to wait until the train stopped to move. They also seemed to want to move discreetly. They were, she decided, very much out of luck on both counts.

As soon as she glimpsed the platform through the window opposite her, she moved, right arm emerging from the duffel in a blur of red, blue, and gold that immediately drew every eye in the carriage as it shot towards Parker. This was good, since it meant that they weren't watching her left hand, which also dipped into the duffel and emerged with a football boot, which she hurled at the goon at the door behind her and on her left.

A football, or soccer, boot might seem like an odd choice of weapon. Her shield, while unconventional in its own way, was modelled on Steve's and made of the same stuff as Mjolnir. It was thus a perfectly balanced piece of nigh indestructible metal that weighed about a dozen pounds and had enough of an edge to – when thrown with sufficient force – decapitate an adult human, as Steve had pointedly demonstrated on a dummy in the Mansion's training gym. Her boot had none of those things.

What it did have, however, was eight metal studs screwed tightly to the bottom, a moderate degree of aerodynamics, and the advantage of being flung at about two hundred and fifty miles per hour. A normal person would have, at the very least, had a cracked skull, a severe concussion, and likely brain damage, along with a number of deep gashes and at least one likely destroyed eye. If, that is, they survived.

Carol didn't stop to check her success, ignoring the cracking crunch, the sudden foul swearing and shocked screams. She was already on the move, exploding forward, grabbing her brother with her now free left hand and stuffing him under her arm. A half instant later, with one foot on the opposite row of seats, she snatched the rebounding shield – which had sent bizarro Parker flying – out of the air, with a brief spike of pleasure at how she'd got it just right, slipped her arm through the straps, ducked her head behind it and Stevie's under her chin, smashing through the train window.

There was a brief moment of weightlessness, then they hit the platform, a crude attempt at a tuck and roll leading to what felt to Carol like the beginnings of some prize bruises, a little sideways rolling, and a lot of shocked yells and screams on the platform. Since Stevie was in one piece – one shocked piece admittedly – bar a couple of scratches and scrapes, and so was she, having got both a head-start and a lot of public attention, which everyone she knew who was familiar with the spooky side of things agreed that supernaturals hated (and in her experience, covert ops groups liked it even less, just in case it was one of those), she decided as she scrambled to her feet that this qualified as a success.

"What are you doing?" Stevie managed, in a muffled, baffled half-scream from the region of her left shoulder.

"Saving our asses," Carol snapped as she slipped an arm under her brother's butt and hitched him onto her hip, accelerating towards the escalators. It was rush hour, so they were quite full. Time to get creative. "Now shut up and hang on tight!"

" _Whyyyyyyyyyyyohgodohgodareyoucrazy?!"_

This garbled shriek was caused by the fact that Carol had disdained the normal escalators, and had instead taken a running jump onto the the metal rise in between the ascending and descending escalators, and had then proceeded to run, no, sprint, up it. To say this caused a scene would be an understatement of the highest order, and reactions were generally a) scream, b) swear, c) stumble, or specifically to Stevie, d) wrap his legs around his sister's waist and cling like a limpet while wondering just what the hell was going on and what he'd done to deserve this.

About fifteen seconds later, they were at the top of the escalator, and Carol was still accelerating, this time, heading for the stairway.

"MOVE!" she bellowed, loud enough that every New Yorker who wasn't actually deaf couldn't fail to hear her, and in a fair impersonation of her great-grandfather's 'I-am-Captain-America-and-shit-is-getting-real-so-do-as-I-say' voice. That and the fact that she was most of six feet tall, carrying a teenage boy like a handbag, carrying a very large round metal shield, and bidding fair to break the local speed limits and probably the bones of whoever was in her way, contributed to them rapidly obeying.

The two of them practically flew up the stairs, and the flight after.

"What about the turnstiles?" Stevie demanded.

"What about 'em?" Carol asked, with the even breathing of a runner who'd hit her stride, as she lined up a free turnstile.

"Oh, you're not serious."

"Nah. Sirius is a guy."

" _Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaohgodnotagain!"_

This was caused by Carol jumping forward, one foot landing on the top of the turnstile, and springing off it, all in one smooth move, as if it was an exceptionally long stride, one only foiled by a weight and momentum misjudgement that led to a momentary stumble. Even still, it was only momentary, and in an instant, Carol was picking up the pace again, rocketing towards the stairs to the exit, already planning her route from there. Left down East 63rd Street, down towards Central Park Zoo, then right up Fifth Avenue for a couple of hundred yards, and they were home free.

Hope stirred in her as she and a hyperventilating Stevie burst out onto East 63rd, and she paused for a moment to get her bearings, vaguely noticing that the temperature had dropped like a stone and it was now pelting it down with snow from dark, dark clouds, snow which was already beginning to settle.

Then, the lights went out.

Not slowly, not ominously, like an encroaching wall of darkness, herding the victim _du jour_ of a horror film to her doom. It wasn't done dramatically, or for effect. Instead, it was like someone had simply reached out and flicked a switch, plunging the block into darkness.

And it wasn't just the block, the street, or even the neighbourhood, she realised suddenly, looking around in stunned shock. No, as far as the eye could see – and her eyes could see far these days – everything had gone dark. The only lights were small squares of light from iPods and phones, and headlights, and the occasional ominous flash of lightning far above, all refracted through the falling snow to form an eerie collage of half-light.

And all around were the sounds of dismayed and frightened New Yorkers, as the oppressive meteorological and psychic atmosphere of the last few days culminated in this. The entire city grinding to a halt, and the darkness that had been creeping around the edges rushing in, on Halloween: the night where the monsters when the monsters came out to play.

"Carol?" Stevie asked, in a very small, frightened voice. Despite the fact that they weren't moving, he hadn't stopped clinging to her, or made any effort to get down. If anything, he'd dug his fingers in deeper. "What's going on?"

"I… I have no idea," she said. "But it's a bit bigger than I thought."

Then, she stiffened as a voice came from behind her, one that made her every instinct stand up and scream.

"You're right about that much, Miss Danvers."

She spun, dropping Stevie, pushing him behind her, snarling and raising her shield.

"Please, don't bother," the same speaker said, in a mild, polite and reasonable tone belied by the cold, predatory look in his eyes, one that turned cautious when it settled on her shield. He was of average height, with dark hair, and wearing fashionably casual clothing. Carol also recognised him as one of the super-creeps who'd been following her and Stevie, the one who'd been covering the door onto the platform. And while he didn't look like he was armed, she knew enough to not trust her own judgement on that. Besides. Depending on his powers, he might not need weapons.

"There are five of us, and one of you," he continued. "And while you are impressively fast, faster than we'd expected – especially with a not inconsiderable burden – and a great deal more ruthless and resourceful, you won't be able to get away."

"I only see one of you," Carol retorted, while inwardly cursing herself for stopping when she'd got out of the station.

The creep smirked. "Look again," he said.

Carol did, and right on cue, the other four – Parker included, now with a nasty burnt weal on his chest visible even through his shirt, and a sullen expression – seemed to melt out of the shadows around her and Stevie, boxing them in. One of them was giving her a look of pure hatred, one that if looks could have killed, would have not only killed her, but done it slowly, painfully, and with exquisite attention to detail. It was quite impressive that he could convey that much with a look, considering that he only had one eye. The other one had been crushed to jelly by the same blow that had left a large purpling bruise, a broken cheekbone, and several other nasty gashes on his face, though they were already healing.

"We've been waiting here," Creep Leader continued. "For you." He glanced at Stevie, before adding, seemingly as an afterthought, "both of you." He smiled, in a way that was probably meant to seem amused and impressed. It managed the former. The latter, less so. "Not for very long, mind you. Even considering your headstart, you got out of the station _very_ quickly. You have my congratulations. However, we have certain advantages: you are human, enhanced though you may be." His eyes gleamed red, and his canines lengthened, his entire face shifting from that of an ordinary human to something else; gaunter, longer, and… hungrier. The others mimicked him, save for Parker. He still looked mostly human. Physically, anyway. "We are much, much more."

Stevie's eyes widened like tennis balls. Carol instinctively pulled him closer to her, shooting a murderous glare at one of the other male vampires, who was regarding him the way most men would a hotdog, and as she did, she could feel him shivering. She couldn't blame him – she wasn't too far off shivering herself.

"What do you want?" she asked, playing for time, trying to figure out an escape route. "And while I think I've worked out what you are, who the hell are you?"

That got another smile, this one toothier than before. "Where are my manners?" He delivered a flourishing little bow. "I am Syrus." His smile widened. "As for what I want, that is not the matter at hand. You have an appointment with our superior. We are here to ensure you keep it."

"You want this fairly quiet," Carol said. "Or you'd have pulled a snatch and grab on me already." She gestured at Parker. "And you wouldn't have gone to the trouble of turning, replacing, or whatever-ing him to make him evil but daylight functional just to keep an eye on me, either."

Syrus inclined his head. "We would prefer that this be settled in a civilised fashion, yes," he said. "Though your… penchant for property damage has made that more difficult." He glanced at his one-eyed colleague. "Particularly for Gregory. He'll heal, faster if he has someone to eat, but your creative use of a football boot has left him rather put it out."

"Cry me a river, Hammer Horror," Carol said flatly. "Point being, what if I scream? Make a fuss, make a scene? Because if you wanna take me, I'm not going to go down without a fight."

"And I am sure that you could do quite some damage," Syrus agreed. "But look around you – you, a pretty young woman holding a glowing shield and clutching a frightened child to her breast, surrounded by five vampires with their fangs out, having just fled rather spectacularly from a crowded subway station. And yet…" He pointedly looked around. Everyone was milling around, babbling, crying, yelling, swearing, and car horns melding into a tsunami of background noise. And not one was looking their way.

"They're all far too busy with their own troubles, and probably would be even without a city-wide blackout. But we prefer to be sure, so we engineered one anyway." He folded his arms and transferred his gaze to Stevie. "Besides, Miss Danvers, the invitation was only for one. If you made a public scene, and succeeded in drawing widespread attention, then our already limited incentive to let your younger brother live would vanish." His red eyes gleamed. "And our incentive to grab an early evening snack would increase. Dramatically. And then we will take you anyway, gaining our objective, a meal…" He eyed Stevie. "And perhaps a toothpick."

Carol stepped forward in a blur, a surge of rage unlike any she'd ever felt before running through her as she swung her shield upwards in a diagonal strike that would have smashed through a concrete cinder block. But it did not, for it never landed. Instead, Syrus caught it in a grip like a vice, with no noticeable sign of effort, or even surprise, though he carefully touching avoided her shield. A small part of Carol also noticed a brief revolted look on Parker's face. But it was a small part indeed, beneath a howling storm of frustrated rage.

"If you touch him," she snarled.

"You'll kill me?" Syrus asked, with a mocking arch of an eyebrow, glancing down at her trapped arm. "Somehow, I doubt it."

"No. That would be too fast," Carol spat. "You lay one finger on my baby brother, and by any god or goddess that's listening, I swear that I will spend the rest of my life making you regret taking me alive."

"How so?"

"I'm thinking Chinese Water Torture. With holy water. _For starters_."

Syrus raised the other eyebrow, actually looking genuinely impressed this time. "Not bad," he said mildly.

"I'm glad you think so," Carol said. "Here's the deal: I come quietly, you let my brother go, unharmed." Struck by a sudden memory of something Harry had mentioned, about supernaturals and their fondness for old-fashioned legalese, she added, "And give me your word that neither you, nor anyone who works for or with you, nor even one of your buddies, or whatever, will touch him afterwards."

"And leave him free to go for help?" Syrus said. "I think not. I'll make you a counter-offer: you come quietly, accepting your invitation like a good girl, and I will bring your brother along as your… plus one, shall we say?"

Carol bristled at the 'good girl' comment, but thought it over.

"You won't get a better offer, Miss Danvers," Syrus said silkily. "And Gregory is looking hungry."

The one-eyed vampire did look hungry. In fact, he seemed to be salivating.

"He'll be looking without a head if he makes a wrong move," Carol retorted coldly, and jerked a thumb at Parker. "You think I missed what my shield did to your tagalong? The way you've been looking at it, not touching it? This thing was blessed by Odin himself, King of Asgard, boss of the Norse Gods, which I guess makes it a holy object. It also cuts through things pretty nicely. Like necks."

Syrus sighed. "Fine," he said. "Take a minute. It's not like you're going anywhere – or like any back-up is coming." He chuckled at Carol's sudden brief look of dismay. "I know what you were planning. The Avengers live just around the corner and you were hoping to make a break for it, that we would stop and think twice before entering the domain of Earth's Mightiest Heroes. A simple move, but a good one, especially for something made up on the fly. But they are all far away at the moment, involved in the wars of Wizards and the Mayan scum. As for this city's police services, well…"

He looked around and smirked. "Right about now, they should be busy trying to figure out which way is up. And by the time they've done that, the city will practically be in flames. They'll hardly have time for a few reports about a girl who supposedly leapt through the window of a moving train with a little boy and a large shield, ran up the middle of an escalator, before jumping the turnstiles. They'll think it's a prank, if they think of it at all – if they get it all. We went to some trouble to disable the mobile networks too."

Carol, who had been holding out some hopes in that regard, felt them wither and die. She only had one more card to play… and that was if she could figure out how to play it. If she could even play it at all. She'd need time for that.

"Give your word that my brother will be unharmed," she said flatly. "That he will not be injured or altered in any way – no turning him into one of you, or making him your 'early evening snack'. That whatever you and your boss intend with me, when you're done, he's allowed to go, safe and free and is left alone afterwards."

Syrus considered this for a moment, then nodded. "I give you my word," he said. "And while I cannot speak for my superior, I believe that he will accept such a deal."

"Fine," Carol said, in the same flat tone. "Take me to your leader."

OoOoO

I sat at the table in Mac's and stared at the package in front of me. After a few moments, I managed to get my vocal chords under control.

"Oh, _hell_ no," I said. "This has got to be some kind of sick joke."

"I don't think it is," Wanda murmured, though her eyebrows had shot upwards.

"It is not," Luccio confirmed, before glancing at Morgan.

"Even though some people would like it to be," I said, catching on.

Wanda said nothing, and for the first time, turned her gaze on my former parole officer, actually focusing rather than merely glancing in passing. It was not a friendly one. Not a friendly one at all. I hadn't dwelt much on my past with Morgan when swapping stories of our respective pasts with Wanda, but he had come up, and while I hadn't gone out of my way to paint him in a bad light, noting how he'd saved my life, his other actions had spoken for themselves. Wanda, who had her own experiences with Javert types, including Wardens – hell, possibly including Morgan, considering that the man had been a veteran back when I was a kid – had not been pleased.

"Indeed," Luccio said.

"Leaving aside the fact that I didn't even know that Morgan had a sense of humour," I said. "And thought that it had been surgically removed around the same time as his senses of nuance, tolerance, and humour, why? I'm going to fight anyway. I've _been_ fighting anyway."

"Your combat record speaks for itself," Luccio agreed. "This is for protection. Specifically, yours."

Wanda's eyes narrowed sharply as they returned to the conversation, and I felt a sudden tension in the air around us, a sense I'd come to identify as Wanda preparing not her magic, but her other, much stranger power-set. She didn't use it much, and wasn't all that forthcoming on how it worked, but since she'd once used it to turn a piece of space junk the size of my car into a giant fly swat, I didn't really need any persuading that it was dangerous.

"Is that a threat, Captain Luccio?" she asked in a deceptively mild voice.

Luccio, to her credit, didn't even bat an eye. "No," she said. "It is a warning. There are factions of the Council, powerful factions, that are suspicious of Dresden, that worry that he is still tainted by dark magic." She raised a hand before I could muster a hot reply. "I am not among them." She looked at us both, expression serious, before her gaze settled on Wanda again. "And you know better than most how Outsiders require mortal magic to be summoned."

Wanda's eyes narrowed further, before widening in comprehension – unhappy comprehension, judging by her expression.

Luccio then returned her gaze to me. "The Council has been betrayed, Dresden," she said bluntly. "And you are the most infamous wizard in it. There are many who have spoken out against you. Many who say that you began the war with the Red Court intentionally so that you could create an opportunity to bring about the fall of the Council."

I burst out in bitter laughter. " _Me?_ That's insane. For crying out loud, I can barely even balance my stupid checkbook! And that takes help."

Luccio's eyes softened a little, and she sighed. "I believe you." She shook her head. "But you have a reputation, and the members of the Council will be badly unsettled by this loss. Their fear could easily turn upon you. That is why you are going to join the Wardens."

I shot a look down at the grey cloak on the table in front of me. I'd seen ones like it many times before: usually in my nightmares. And I'd given Luccio my reasons for not wanting to join the Wardens before, when she'd made a half-offer.

"I told you why I wouldn't join the Wardens before, Captain," I said coldly. "They haven't changed."

"And my reasons for thinking that you might not be an ideal recruit haven't either," Luccio said bluntly. "But circumstances have."

"I'm the Apprentice of the Sorceress Supreme in Waiting," I snapped. "Isn't that enough?"

"No," Luccio said. "It will make them worry all the more."

"Why?"

"The office of Sorcerer or Sorceress Supreme requires a familiarity with dark magic and capacity to wield it without being changed by it," Wanda said quietly.

"And not every Apprentice of the Sorcerer Supreme has passed that particular test," Luccio said. "You may have heard of a Warlock called Mordo. He calls himself Baron Mordo."

"Vaguely," I said.

"He is a former apprentice of Strange's and after the fall of Kemmler, he was a fair competitor for the position of most powerful Wandless Warlock of the 20th century," Luccio said. "But he isn't the chief worry."

"He isn't?"

"No. His student is: Victor Von Doom," Luccio said. "Ruler of a stable and increasingly influential sovereign nation, a brilliant scientist and alchemist, and on-course to be the most powerful Warlock since Kemmler, or even Grindelwald."

I blinked slowly, taking this in. Hells _Bells_. I could see why the Council was worried. Kemmler had kicked off World War I and come back from the grave so often that they might as well have installed a revolving lid on his coffin. Grindelwald had been the most powerful wanded wizard of his generation, excepting possibly Albus Dumbledore, and that was before he'd dived headfirst into demonology.

I was foggy on the details after that, but I knew he'd had a hand in Hitler's rise to power and the early successes of HYDRA, as well as making Kemmler his bitch and ruling a magical empire that stretched from Lisbon to Moscow, before finally facing off against the Sorcerer Supreme in a cataclysmic duel that had levelled Berlin and stripped him of most of his unnatural power. After that, he and Albus Dumbeldore, had had their famous duel, which Dumbledore had won. Barely.

A Warlock of Senior Council power levels with the intellect of a genius and the full resources of a country, even a small one, at their disposal was a terrifying thought, even before you thought about how the War had stretched the Council. He could be a new Grindelwald – hell, he could be worse, considering the starting point he had, and all the chaos in Eastern Europe and Russia.

Russia looked at risk of disintegration, and those countries the Red Room had temporarily extended their aegis over were in chaos. Latveria, by contrast, was an island of stability in a sea of chaos – all in all, the sort of situation that a man like Von Doom could easily exploit. And the news that their perennial problem child had been chosen as apprentice to the woman in line to be Sorceress Supreme could hardly have been welcome.

"And many on the Council fear both Ms Maximoff and her old master," Luccio said, nodding at Wanda. "Few have forgotten how Strange stepped in all those years ago."

"Damn right he did," I said, jutting out my jaw. "The Council was set to execute a little girl because it was easier than teaching her to control her powers."

Wanda shot a fleeting smile at me, but said nothing, having apparently decided that this conversation was between me and Luccio.

"I know," Luccio said. "I counselled strongly against it." Her gaze turned to Wanda. "And I was glad to see her delivered."

"Thank you," Wanda said, tone somehow entirely sincere as she stood up, before leaning down to kiss me on the cheek. "I'll leave you two to talk," she said, before giving Luccio a nod that was returned, and heading up to the bar. I watched her go.

"I was glad to see her delivered," Luccio repeated quietly, after a moment. "I was then, and I am more so now. But I was not glad of the manner in which it was done." She gave me a very serious look. "The method probably appealed to you, but it damaged the Council's prestige."

I made a rude noise that showed exactly how little I cared.

"Don't be a child," Luccio said quietly, an edge of anger there. "The Council's prestige is important. It is what allows the Council to intimidate other powers, to prevent them from preying on mortals as they would like to."

"SHIELD does that pretty well," I retorted. "So do the Avengers."

"SHIELD is embroiled in internal crises and is permanently at war with almost every hostile party on the Accords," Luccio said. "Its power is respected, but its word is not. As for the Avengers, they are, for the most part, a reactive group with a limited scope and while their power is both respected and feared, enough that almost none dare cross them, almost none dare treat with them either."

"Great, so you people have the red telephone," I said. "And you don't like the idea that people might learn how to deal with dark magic without being changed by it." I leaned forward and added in a cold undertone, "Should have thought of that before you came up with the Blackstaff."

Luccio went still, then closed her eyes and sighed. "McCoy told you."

I weighed up how much to tell her, then leaned back and said, "Only after a guy called Kincaid put him on the spot."

"You have had dealings with the Hellhound?" Luccio asked sharply.

"We met back when I had the duel with Ortega; he was security for the Archive. After that… I had a Black Court problem and he's good at killing things," I said, shrugging. "Doesn't mean I like the guy."

Luccio nodded. "The Blackstaff is a necessity," she said.

"Heard that one before," I said.

"And it is an office never given to any who is not over a century old and has not undergone rigorous testing to prove that they are steady," Luccio said. "Furthermore, the Blackstaff itself buffers the use of dark magic and serves as a warning. You have encountered the Fellowship of Saint Giles?"

I nodded. A woman I had once loved was a member. They were a collection of, mostly, part-humans of one kind or another – hence their name. Saint Giles, patron saint of lepers and outcasts. Most of them, though, had been part-turned by the Red Court – until they drank the lifeblood of another human, they had most of the dark powers of the Red Court, but remained mostly human. Among other things, they had tattoos that helped hold their dark side in check and started showing more and more clearly when it emerged.

"It is much like their tattoos," Luccio said. "The Apprentices of the Sorcerer, or Sorceress, Supreme, have no such protection. To many on the Council, you, who have been brushed by dark magic in the past, are the last candidate they want. Wanda worries them enough as it is."

"Why?" I demanded, perhaps a little aggressively. "Why?" I repeated, more quietly.

"There are a number of reasons, one being that some think that Strange should never have intervened," Luccio. "Another is one where she has much in common with you."

I stared at her, puzzled. "Say what?"

"Where people look at you askance because of your mother, others treat her much the same because of her father," Luccio said. "And worse: your mother was mostly… challenging. She liked to point out holes in the Council's laws, to dance on the edge and make life difficult for us. She may have consorted with dark powers, but there was no true evil in her."

I raised an eyebrow, but said nothing. That consorting, I knew, went deeper than most realised – it was why I had Thomas, a White Court vampire, an incubus, for an older half-brother.

"Ms Maximoff's father, on the other hand, was a very different story," Luccio said. "He is not a Warlock – indeed, there are several competing schools of thought on what he actually is – but he is every bit as bad, with the strength and darkness of a fully fledged Dark Lord. He was and remains potentially one of the greatest terrors the world had seen since the end of the Frost Giant Wars. He was still in the process of his rise to power, though already formidable, when Ms Maximoff was –"

"Put on trial," I interrupted. "I know what he's like, Captain. I've met him, a couple of times now. He's actually pretty friendly – terrifying, but friendly." I paused. "Oh, and he's human, by the way."

Luccio nodded, frowning. "So I have heard," she said, then raised a sceptical eyebrow. "And human?"

"Ever hear of a guy called Charles Xavier?"

"Yes, I have… ah," Luccio said, nodding in comprehension. "I understand. It explains much." She regarded me. "You think he has reformed?"

"I've met evil, and I've met crazy," I said. "He didn't strike me as either. And in both of the two fights I've seen him in, he went out of his way to protect civilians." I paused for a moment. "During the most recent one… I saw him almost kill himself to save a child. He scares me, but I'm pretty sure he's on the level."

"His activities had, until recently, died down significantly over the last twenty years," Luccio said slowly, considering. "And he has not resumed the more… objectionable ones."

There was a long moment of silence, and I coughed awkwardly. "Uh, I don't want to push, Captain. But we're not exactly long on time or options. And even if he wasn't reformed, like Wanda said, he's got motive to help."

Luccio sighed. "Agreed," she said. "I can accept his assistance."

"Great," I said. "So if you can do that, why worry about me? Or Wanda?"

"Concluding a temporary alliance with an uncertain ally in a time of desperate need is very different to considering the long term implications of potential successors to the mantle of Sorcerer Supreme," Luccio said bluntly. "I do not worry about either you or Ms Maximoff. I do not think that she intends to follow in her father's footsteps, and even if he is as he was, historically she has opposed him. As for you, I think that, like your mother, you are dissatisfied with the Council and the way it works, but that you are nevertheless loyal. But others do not see it that way. Others still do not care, seeing you as a pawn, a means through which to strike back against Doctor Strange. Others simply look for someone to blame and see you."

"And why should I care?" I asked coldly. "Why shouldn't I go Wanda's route and leave the Council behind?"

"Because this would confirm you in the eyes of your enemies as a traitor to the Council," Luccio said bluntly. "And you would be hunted down like a dog." She regarded me steadily. "And in any case, I think that you are not the sort of man to turn your back in the Council in its hour of need."

I glowered and thought it over. She was right, on both counts.

"Fine," I said eventually, grinding it out. "But first, I don't leave Chicago. Second, fuck Morgan. I'm not taking orders from him. Not now, not ever, not after how he and the Merlin attempted to serve me up on a platter back before we got the Ways through Winter."

Luccio frowned. "This is true?" she asked sharply, and there was something else there. I reached out with my senses. Once, I would simply have felt an enchantment, but now, I could feel more. It was very delicate and designed to winnow truth from lies.

"Yes," I said firmly. "Morgan tried to provoke me into a fight. He'd have beaten me up and dragged me off to the vampires."

Luccio's frown deepened. "There were rumours about how Morgan treated you," she said. "But…" She shook her head. "In any case, I will have to reassign Morgan."

"Great," I said. "What'll I have to do?"

Before Luccio could answer, the pub was lit up by a sudden flash of light, blinding and fearsome in its purity, that engulfed Wanda. It held for a moment, forming into the shape of a bubble, then just as quickly imploded, leaving Wanda apparently none the worse for wear.

The main difference, it seemed, was that her outfit had changed. Now, she was wearing an open gold edged scarlet coat, belted at the waist with a chunky and carefully inscribed golden amulet. More than that, though, she wore an expression of utter shock and dawning horror.

Before I could ask what was happening, Luccio broke the silence in a quiet, numb voice. "The Sorcerer Supreme is dead. Long live the Sorceress Supreme."

OoOoO

"My lord?"

Dracula turned. "Yes?"

"Syrus reports that the girl has been captured, confirming it with pictures."

Dracula examined the pro-offered screen and examined it, before nodding. "Where are they now?"

"In transit, my lord, in the helicopter. They'll be transferred to the cars in approximately ten minutes."

"Good," Dracula said. "Were there any complications?"

"Yes, my lord. She deduced his team's presence and their inhuman nature –"

"Even the half-turned?" Dracula asked abruptly.

"Yes, my lord. She did not know them for what they were, but she did recognise their superhuman nature."

"Hmm. Impressive. She attempted escape?"

"Yes, my lord, once she realised that communications were impossible. With her brother, who was accompanying her. Syrus had intended to separate the two, but she took her brother with her, and departed the train via a window as it pulled into a station." The reporting lieutenant cleared his throat. "A station close to the Avengers residence, my lord."

Dracula chuckled. "Clever girl," he said. "A decent stratagem. Not that it would have done much good. Syrus caught her in short order." It wasn't a question, and implied that if he hadn't, there would be hell to pay. And not simply in a figurative sense.

"Outside the station, just as the blackout hit, my lord. She was prepared to give herself up for her brother's release, and once that was denied, she was willing to fight. However, once Syrus informed her of the consequences to her brother, and gave her his word that he would not be harmed and would be released unharmed once you were finished with her, she surrendered," the lieutenant said, then paused and cleared his throat again, nervously.

Dracula turned, arching an eyebrow. "What is it?"

"He says that he suggested that you would honour the pact he made," the lieutenant said. "But, my lord, he did not state it explicitly. And since the boy has the same blood as his sister, he could be useful if the ritual –"

The lesser vampire stopped mid-sentence as Dracula was suddenly in front of him, crossing twenty feet of floor at speeds that even vampiric eyes could hardly follow.

"Are you suggesting that I reward an honourable surrender with petty sophistry?" Dracula asked softly, a silken fury under the words.

The other vampire wisely said nothing.

"No," Dracula said, after a moment. "Deception, deceit, and manipulation have their place, true, but such word games are the past times of the likes of the Fae, Riddle and…" His fangs lengthened briefly, voice turning into a snarl reminiscent of a large predator. " _Strange_." He turned away sharply. "For those who skulk in the shadows, who twist like leaves in the wind. I am Dracula. I am _not_ as they." He was silent for a long moment. "Has she attempted escape?" he asked in more human, clipped tones.

"No, my lord. Syrus reports that she has since been in every respect a model prisoner."

"Then honour has been shown. So it shall be rewarded with honour. If it were an unreasonable request, or Syrus had explicitly presumed to speak on my behalf, then perhaps… but no." Dracula glanced over his shoulder at his subordinate. "The request is reasonable, and presents no real inconvenience. I am Dracula. And I say that it shall be honoured."

The lieutenant bowed, still trembling slightly. "Yes, my lord."

"Besides. The boy's potential remains locked away. And if the ritual fails…" His eyes flared red. "I will have other matters to attend to."

"Yes, my lord.

"The ritual's progress?"

"It is ready and awaiting your final inspection, my lord. Once that is completed, if all is to your satisfaction… all that is required is the girl."

Dracula nodded sharply. "Very well," he said. "I shall perform the inspection immediately. Let all know that the boy is not to be harmed – restrained, but not harmed. The pact is to be honoured. The consequences for breaching it, breaching my given word, will be… _prolonged_."

"Yes, my lord."

Before he left the room, Dracula paused. "Oh, and the girl… she has already proven resourceful. Inclined, and able, to escape, even from a contained area that had every exit covered, whilst burdened by a useless child. Inform Syrus that if she succeeds in tricking him and escaping again, then he had best recapture her swiftly. The time he takes to do so will dictate the parts, and numbers of parts, of his body that I will remove."

"Yes, my lord."

"And let him also know that if she does attempt escape, she will have breached her word. Therefore the bargain is void, and so long as it does not delay them, they may indulge themselves."

OoOoO

Across the Atlantic, in a Tower in a dormitory in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, five boys slept. All was peaceful, all was quiet, and even those few mice that had not been caught and devoured by the many cats and owls that inhabited the Tower were dozing.

Even the one man who resided in a small room off the dormitory, through a door that had not been there until he and his charge arrived, and that all logic and physical laws dictated should open into empty air, was asleep. Though, of course, as far as he was concerned, 'asleep' did not mean 'unaware'.

While on the other side of the Atlantic, it was still in the early stages of the evening, with many rounds of trick-or-treating in progress, and many parties just beginning, here in Scotland, it was approaching the middle of the night, the midnight hour. Dark creatures emerged from their lairs at their fullest strength, and black magic was rising towards its peak – and on such a night as this, Halloween, on such a year as this, that strength and those magics were far greater than they usually were. Darkness and evil swirled around the world, pooling in some places sufficient to drown multitudes, while touching others only lightly, and doing so enough that the wicked exulted.

But as the wicked tended to forget, they were not the only Powers in the world. Some were already active, stemming the torrent of evil. And others… others numbered among them a young man sleeping in one of those beds. His name was Harry Thorson.

And as the clock struck midnight, his eyes snapped open, each burning an unearthly, furious white like miniature stars, as the smell of woodsmoke.

This particular Power was, if not awake, then certainly aware.

And it was _angry._

 **Welp, that's not good. That's not good at all. But not, I think, entirely unexpected – I have been hinting for a while that Strange's personal clock is on a countdown. He's said it himself, several times, it's why Wanda recruited Dresden in the first place. And Carol's escape attempt failed, largely because vampires are more powerful than she is.**

 **Now, she's firmly in their grasp, while Dracula is preparing a ritual of some kind, and her justifiably little brother is one failed escape from becoming a midnight snack. Meanwhile, Peter Parker is part Grey Court vampire, well on the way to becoming** _ **all**_ **Grey Court vampire, and Harry is showing ominous signs of an attack of the You-Know-What. Oh dearie, dearie me. Whatever shall the good guys do?**

 **Good question. You'll find out in the next chapter. It'll be a bit more interesting, I think, than previous arcs, because I intend for this one to be a bit different. I'm trying something fairly new. In previous arcs, the structure has mostly been either good guys or bad guys catching the other off-guard, then striking hard and fast enough to a careful plan that has been long engineered, and the other side generally doesn't have much chance to really respond coherently. This one is a bit more back and forth, a bit looser, a bit more kinetic – while Dracula's got a clear, carefully structured plan, that's about to go out the window, and Strange isn't around to perform direct on the ground intervention, the way he usually does when a big problem reaches its peak. He's set a couple of things in motion, such as the many books he set Harry to read, but he's not able to get directly involved.**

 **Anyhow, next up is chapter 30, the big three zero. Questions will be answered, and new ones will be set, and relatively innocuous important events will take place. But on a bigger scale.**


	30. Chapter 30: Bloody Hell III - Switches

**Well, well, well - welcome, ladies and gents, to chapter 30 of this epic sized sequel. At this point, I'd like to think those of you who've been here since the beginning – I love each and every one of my reviewers, but you guys, who know who they are, have been there since I started this not-so-little project. Thank you, one and all.**

 **Now, onto the chapter. This one took both longer than I expected, and less time than I expected. I'm trying to be a little more methodical with this arc, and perhaps it shows. Anyhow, this one is where Harry gets involved, and the action dials up. There isn't as much as there will be later in the arc, but since 'later in the arc' includes 'Harry versus Dracula' and 'Wanda and Magneto vs Selene and Voldemort', and yes, That Moment from the Dresden book the Chicago half of this arc is adapting, that's not entirely surprising. In any case, never fear, there's plenty of arse-kicking.**

 _ **Point of clarification:**_ _ **Peter Parker is NOT Spider-Man at the moment; he's just an ordinary, unlucky, adorkable and snarky nerd. He hasn't had the spider bite. People were asking when he'd be bitten, so I decided to be evil (as usual) and have him be bitten by a Grey Court vampire. This, I felt, was entirely in line with Peter having the worst luck in the known multiverse. Oh, and Grey Court are part vampires for three days after being bitten before fully turning, and Peter's been part vamp for two days now. He's on the clock.**_

 **Guest:** **I have little interest in Betty Ross. Nothing against her, just not much really for her, either. Frankly, I'm not especially interested in the Hulk corner of the MU as a whole. And I don't believe that both partners in a relationship require superpowers to be equal – Clark and Lois, and Peter and MJ, (one of which is canon again, and one of which should be) worked it out just fine. I also do not like it when people post multiple anon reviews under different names, which is why I've deleted a couple of your other reviews.**

They were in a van. Quite large, but not enough to be particularly distinctive. Quite a powerful engine too, enough to keep it smoothly running along at 80 miles per hour for the last, oh… hour and a half? And they were on a fairly empty and well-maintained road, too – the van hadn't shifted direction more than twice.

No traffic to delay, nothing to overly distinguish the vehicle to witnesses, and the route seemed to be fairly straightforward too.

Oh, and the van was, for the most part, filled with hungry vampires.

All in all, Carol felt, the situation did not look good. Well, 'look'. It didn't 'look' anything at all, because both her and Stevie had first been forced to strip out of their clothes, even their underwear, and get into a set of overalls. Or at least, Carol had. They hadn't had a set of overalls for Stevie, so after a quick conference, one of the vampires had vanished, before returning a few minutes later.

When she had, Steve had had a pair of jeans and a shirt that more or less fit roughly foisted on him, clothes that Carol strongly suspected had either been stolen. Or more likely, going by the sharp scent of blood, had outlived their previous owner. It was, she thought, a measure likely designed to deal with any trackers that might be in their clothes.

The only one of their possessions that she knew for sure had been kept was her shield, which she could sense, and that was probably because a glowing magical shield tended to stick out and draw all the wrong attention – especially if it was separated from its owner. When she'd realised that, a jolt of hope had gone through her; the shield could almost certainly be tracked. Of course, that would require someone to know that something was wrong…

In any case, afterwards, they had had their heads covered by solid black bags, and been brusquely manhandled into a helicopter which, after a half hour flight, had landed somewhere outside the city and they had been transferred to the van.

If there was one mercy, it was that the vampires were silent. Normally, she'd enjoy a bit of banter, try and trick them into giving her something she could use against them, but not this time. Likewise, so was Stevie. He was normally quiet, but now, nestled in her arms, he was utterly silent. She suspected he was in shock. He'd cried earlier, but with silent, terrified tears, his body shaking with silent, terrified sobs, doing his best not to draw the attention of the hungry predators surrounding him, predators restrained only by the flimsy word of their leader and enlightened self-interest.

It was that, Carol had decided, that made her hate these vampires, that fuelled a deep, throbbing rage. Not because of what they wanted to do to her, nor even what they had done to her city, and to an otherwise innocent boy she hardly knew, to get at her – she was fairly accustomed to threats to her, bad guys wanting to get at her, as well as the kind of collateral damage they left behind. She didn't like it, _per se_ , but she accepted it as a hazard. This, though? Terrifying her baby brother, a kid who had very little idea of what he'd stumbled into, who the vampires themselves admitted they didn't need – and who, it seemed, they were frightening partly as leverage on her, and partly for their own sick amusement? Now _that_ made her mad.

Normally, that rage would have her plotting a number of horrible ways to dismember their captors, before and/or after escaping. But she had more important things to focus on. Comforting Stevie as best she could, by her presence; as he clung onto her with a single-minded desperation, she reciprocated. Mostly. Mostly because, while she'd made it very clear that until they absolutely had to be, she wasn't being separated from her brother (in fact, he was staying within arm's reach of her) she had something else to think about.

Specifically, she was focusing as hard as she could on the nebulous psychic link between her and Harry, drawing on every bit of knowledge of psionics that she had, and every bit of willpower that she could muster. The former didn't amount to much, unfortunately. The latter, on the other hand, she had in spades.

She wasn't especially hopeful, she had to admit – while she didn't think that the vampires had any fancy counter-measures to stop a connection, that wasn't the problem at hand. She didn't really know much about her psychic connection to Harry, and to be frank, neither did he. All it had really manifested as so far was a vague awareness that he was around when he was, well, around, and an inclination to slip from verbal to telepathic in conversation. Plus, to put no finer point on it, as she had once told Hermione, she was about as psychic as a turnip. And, you know, she had no idea what Harry's telepathic range actually was. He'd alluded to being able to reach across Europe, but could he reach across the Atlantic?

She shrugged inwardly. It wasn't like she had any better options. Or ideas, come to that.

So, she continued to mentally shout as loudly at the connection as she could.

 _HARRY!_

 _HARRY!_

 _HARRY!_

This went on for about an hour. And then, suddenly, she felt… something. A faint shift, at first, then more like someone sleepily stirring, simultaneously right next to her and miles and miles away. But just as suddenly, it stopped, and her rising hopes and excitement died a swift and brutal death.

 _Well, that was fucking useless,_ she thought bitterly.

 _What was fucking useless?_

Carol froze, not daring to believe it.

 _Carol?_

It was definitely Harry's mental voice, sounding less groggy and more puzzled, and now she could feel it – his mind was unmistakeable. It was like standing near a warm hearth fire after being caught in a bitter winter gale. Of course, she mused, that fire could get one hell of a lot hotter and less manageable if given the right – or wrong – fuel. Like anger. She could feel a lot of that roiling about in him, much more than usual. Something had pissed him off.

 _Harry?_

 _Yeah. What's going on? How are you doing this? Are you near Hogwarts or something?_

Carol let out a brief, choked laugh, as tears of relief began streaming down her cheeks.

 _Carol?_

She took a deep breath, calming herself. Now was not the time to give away what she'd been doing, nor to waste time doing a mental victory dance. Especially not since, for all she knew, they could be mere moments away from the latest big bad's base of operations.

 _Okay,_ she said. _I'm not totally sure about the answer to the first question, as to the second and third… I'm in New York, or somewhere near, or near-ish, to it, and by thinking really hard. I think. As to what's going on…_ She paused. _Take a look. It'll be quicker and easier._

There was a surprised pause, but credit to him, Harry didn't ask if she was sure, knowing her well enough to know that she wouldn't say it if she wasn't. Instead, that comfortable golden-warm presence reached into her mind with delicacy, care, and rather more finesse than the first time she'd let him in. Even still, letting his mind inside hers, beyond mere surface communications… it startled her, just a little. It was a good startling, though, a pleasant shock, making her gasp. And… oh lord, she was blushing. It really didn't help that Harry was radiating amusement. Embarrassment too, but mostly amusement.

 _Shut up._

 _I didn't say anything._

 _You didn't need to. I can FEEL you grinning._

 _Guilty as charged. Well, probably. I'm asleep, so I don't know if I'm grinning or not. But I am on the inside._

 _How nice for you,_ Carol retorted impatiently. _Now, are you going to get up to date, or what?_

 _Already doing so – I can multitask, you know,_ Harry said, then abruptly went silent. He was still there, Carol knew that much, since she could feel his mind. She could also feel his mental presence beginning to burn hotter and hotter, as anger poured into his internal furnaces, a surge of raw fury, of the kind that burned stars to ash.

While a dark part of Carol welcomed that – she'd more than once seen the kind of mayhem an angry Harry was capable of leaving in his wake and relished the thought of his unleashing it on the vampires – the more practical part of her was worried, for two reasons.

First, she needed Harry rational, and sensible enough to wake up and call for help.

Second, she _really_ did not want to be the cause of the second coming of the Dark Phoenix. She'd talked him down the first time, but that had been with help. And it hadn't been at all easy. Plus, if he went Dark Phoenix when they were connected like this… well, she didn't know what would happen, but it probably wouldn't be good.

 _Harry!_ She snapped. _I, we, don't have time for you to be Mister Angry-Pants! I need you to wake up and do something! Now!_

There was a brief, startled, even incredulous, pause. _Mister Angry-Pants?_

 _You heard me. Wake up, call for help._

Then, the sense of anger faded somewhat, becoming more focused, and edged with what Carol could only call a kind of hard, anticipatory, amusement.

 _Help, I can do. Wake up? Who said anything about_ _ **needing**_ _to wake up?_

 _What do you mean?_

 _I can reach through you._

… _You can_ _ **what?!**_

 _Use my powers, through you,_ Harry replied, as if this was perfectly normal. _I didn't know I could even talk to you like this. Maddie can – we had a chat last night – but I thought it was a bit much for me. But now we're doing it… I know I can. I'll be limited, yeah, but –_

 _Stop. How limited?_

 _Well, I won't be making a battleship do figures of eight, but I could probably psychically bench-press a couple of tanks._

 _Oh, is that all?_ Carol responded, snark on automatic, before fading back to stunned. _You mean… you could…_

 _Get you both out? Give me a couple of moments for reconnaissance, and sure. Going by what I saw in your memories, the Grey Court vamps who had you aren't too heavy-weight. One, Syrus, is a Master. We'll have to be careful with him. But the rest are just minions. That Parker bloke – who, incidentally, I think I might have met once – hasn't even fully turned. He's still got a human mind, more or less, though he'd be vulnerable to his sire's control._

Which, Carol thought, would explain his serving as a minion, but also the brief look of revulsion she'd seen when Syrus had referred to using Stevie as a snack and source for toothpicks.

 _Yeah, he's probably still in there. For the moment, anyway – Grey Court take three days to turn, and by the sounds of things, he's well into the process. I can knock him out._

 _Right. And the others?_

There was a pause. _Once I've got tactical intel out of their brains… I don't think that I have any use for creatures that do what these things do. You?_

Carol smiled a smile full of teeth. _Me neither._ She paused. _You do realise that we're in a moving vehicle, right?_

 _Leave that to me. May I?_

Carol paused, then nodded. _It's your show, maestro. Just…_

 _Yeah?_

 _Try not to make it too messy, okay? Stevie's scared enough as it is._

Harry paused. _Of course,_ he said, tone softening.

Then, Carol felt his mind rush into hers in a torrent, bringing with it a feeling of heat, energy, and above all… of power.

Her eyes snapped open, visible even through a black cloth sack. And they were burning gold.

Every single one of the vampires reacted on instinct, surging forward in response to the threat.

Or rather, they tried.

Carol's hands snapped up in a blur, arms sweeping up and out, pinning the vampires to the sides of the van like butterflies to a cork.

" _Bad news, boys and girls,"_ she said, two voices speaking at once. _"Time's up… rules change."_

OoOoO

 **45 seconds later**

The remains of the van, torn to shreds from within, lay beside the otherwise empty highway, smouldering and sparking.

Half a dozen patches of blackened, melted asphalt, lay around it. All of them were still bubbling. And all of them were still visible, as a human sized blazing comet plummeted from the skies, burning with the furious radiance of a magnesium flare, and trailing a dying scream.

Only four figures remained.

One, Peter Parker; a young man in the liminal state between human and vampire, with the scales tipping ever more swiftly towards the latter, was unconscious and by the roadside.

Another, Steve 'Stevie' Danvers; an otherwise ordinary, artistic teenage boy with the potential of a super soldier within him. He had managed to swallow his understandable terror and confusion, and had dragged the unconscious Parker out of the line of fire.

The third, Syrus; a Master Vampire of the Grey Court who for the first time in many years, felt afraid of something other than his King. He stepped back, drawing a modified MAC-10 machine pistol in a blur.

And the fourth, Carol Danvers; a profoundly pissed off teenage super soldier channelling some of the considerable power of her demigod best friend. She was advancing on Syrus, hands and eyes burning gold.

" _Bullets aren't going to work,"_ she said, in that stereo voice that was a melding of hers and Harry's.

Syrus snarled and opened fire, with a sound like hail on corrugated iron. His bullets had a similar amount of effect, spalling off a translucent shield.

" _Told you,"_ Carol said.

Vampires are unusual creatures, Grey Court more than most. They come in a number of different varieties, with the Grey Court being the oldest of them all. A creation of the ancient Atlantean Empire from the magics of the Darkhold, they were an attempt to create the ultimate warrior for the ultimate war. Something stronger and tougher than humans, that feared neither pain nor death, but could also think and reason. Something that required only the blood of a living thing to sustain it, capable of increasing its numbers from even the most ordinary people, which it could pass for under all but close examination. The result was a being that could only be described as one of 'the living dead'. From them sprang the Black Court, an application of the same spells to a corpse, an attempt at improving the breed, an experiment that went horribly wrong.

But if there was one thing all breeds had in common, it is that beneath their facades, some more convincing than others, they are predators. They strike at weakness, and flee from strength – when they strike in earnest, they prefer not to be seen at all. However, there is also something very human about them – they think, and in a bastardised sort of way, they even feel. Predators in nature hunt and kill without malice and without anything resembling ego. Vampires, on the other hand, have a very human capacity for both sadism and pride. Which meant that they could be tricked. Manipulated.

It also, Carol reflected as she processed all of the information pouring into her mind about vampires and what they could do, might be why this vampire, Syrus, was now hammering away at her shield.

There was a pointed cough inside her head.

 _All right, it's your shield,_ she said. _Also, why isn't my homework reading this interesting?_

 _Because your teacher isn't Doctor Strange? And you'd be amazed at how quickly it becomes mundane and kind of boring,_ Harry replied.

 _Boring. Seriously?_

 _You're getting the summarised version. Even with Doctor Strange bookmarking bits, there was a lot to get through, and a lot of those writers really like the sound of their own voice._ His tone turned serious. _And don't underestimate this last one. The other ones were young. This one's at least a century old from what I can tell of his mind, and he's a Master._

 _Which means?_

 _Which means that he's powerful – all the classic powers, stronger than any of the others, but far less than someone like Dracula. He couldn't drop a mountain on your head, or summon a hurricane, but he wouldn't have any problem using a bus as a fly swat, or hitting you with a lightning bolt. Normally, I could turn him to pulp without breaking much of a sweat. Now…_

Carol frowned. _You're straining. Getting tired._

 _Like I said earlier – I didn't even know that I could use my powers at this range, let alone fight with them._

The shield cracked, as lightning bolts began to join punches in raining down on the shield, a continuous torrent of light so bright it nearly blinded Carol even through her instinctively closed eyes and an endless wave of thunder that had her ears constantly ringing.

 _And now you're running out of gas._

 _Pretty much. That and the fact that he's a lot more powerful than the others; and by the feel of it, has picked up some counter-magic –_

 _Wait, what, magic?!_

 _Yep. A lot of vampires that get to this age pick up at least a knowledge of magic, or they get dead. The ones that were magical in life tend to be much better at actually doing something serious with it._

 _And Syrus is one of them._

 _Not really. He was probably a low enough level talent in life, but with a century of practice, and me straining at this range? He's good enough to shut me out._

 _Which is why you haven't just crushed his mind or fried him, got it. Why not just switch focus from the shield?_

 _Because then odds are good that in the time I'm changing focus, he'll close with you and knock you out, breaking the link. Which is probably why he's hammering away at the shield._

 _Crap,_ Carol said, before frowning. _All right, we need to put him down fast._

 _And find out why he wants you._

 _And who he's,_ Carol began.

 _Dracula._

 _What?_

 _He's a Grey Court Master talking about how he's taking you to his leader, after New York has spent a couple of days under a literal cloud of gloom that I can feel from here. That means Dracula._

 _Fine, I'll take your word for it. Of the two of us, you're the expert,_ Carol said, as the cracks in the shield began to spread.

Then, Syrus changed his tactics.

In the literal blink of an eye, after the last blinding flash of lightning and crack of thunder, Syrus vanished from in front of the shield, instead swinging around it and at Stevie, grabbing him by the throat and using him as a human shield.

"One move," he snarled viciously, his voice inhuman and unsettling. "One move, girl, and I kill the boy."

He looked much less human now; features elongated, claws and fangs sharp and ready to plunge into flesh, and red eyes burning with a toxic mixture of hatred, fear, and hunger.

Carol froze. _"You said you wouldn't hurt him,"_ she said.

"That was conditional on your coming quietly," Syrus retorted. "You broke the pact, destroyed my kin."

" _Sorry,"_ Carol said. _"They were in the way of me_ _ **not**_ _being Dracula's_ _**hors d'oeuvres**_ **."**

Syrus' lips parted in a rictus. "You know so little of what you are meant for," he hissed. "It is almost funny." His lips widened. "But you are right in that my Lord King wants you, and that my kin were in your way." He tightened his grip on Stevie's throat, drawing a pained gasp. "But now, so is your brother. Will you sacrifice him so easily?"

" _No. I've got a question of my own,"_ Carol retorted. _"I just fried your buddies and destroyed your van like snapping my fingers. Do you really think I couldn't do the same to you? The only reason you're still alive – or at least, not a scorch mark – is because you have information I want. Give it to me, and I let you run."_ She raised her arm and sighted down it like the barrel of a rifle. _"If you don't… I've got pretty good aim. You saw that with my shield in the subway."_

 _Can we take him?_ She asked, directing the question inward.

The answer was grim. _In one shot, in time to be sure of preventing him from killing your brother? No. This one's old enough and by the looks of things, strong enough to mean that we'd have to vaporise his head – and even then, reflex action…_

 _His hand might squeeze anyway, snapping Stevie's neck._

 _Yes._

Syrus chuckled, reading her expression. "You know as well as I do that if you could, you already would have done so. Your power, wherever it comes from, is waning."

Carol's raised fist began to burn with gold light. _"You sure about that?"_ she bluffed.

"From you, his protective older sister, a warrior maid who slaughtered my fellows in seconds, who threatened me with holy water torture if I laid a finger on him? Yes."

Carol stared at him for a long moment, and Syrus nodded slowly.

"Here is the new deal. I don't know what power you're channelling, what spirit you've invoked, but you will release it," he said. "Release it, and I will leave the boy here, alive, as we continue our journey. Refuse… and I kill him."

Carol continued to stare at him for a long moment. _"You really want me alive, don't you?"_ she said. _"Normally, a Master vamp like you would just kill someone who'd pissed you off the way I have. Or, you know, line up some kind of dungeon of horrors of torture in revenge."_

"Normally, I would," Syrus said. "But I am here at my Lord's will. And it is his will that I bring you to him, alive, and as far as possible, unharmed." His eyes narrowed. "Now. No more delays. Release the power, or the boy dies. You have ten seconds."

Carol hesitated.

 _Carol._

 _Harry, I know you've got your hero complex thing, but I can't let Stevie –_

 _I know,_ Harry said, cutting off. _Actually, I was going to say that I have a plan._

 _Care to share?_

 _No time. Just play along. Try and look miserable, like your last gamble's failed. And try not to flinch._

 _No problem,_ Carol thought. But there was no reply, and Harry's presence had vanished.

"All right, all right," she said, instantly noticing the change in her voice. "I give."

"Prove it," Syrus said flatly. "I am not going to be fooled by some basic sonomancy."

Carol opened her mouth to retort. Then, as if on cue, a cloud of golden motes of light began to flow from her. They poured from her mouth like exhaled breath, from her fingertips like raindrops, and from her eyes like tears. Carol wasn't usually given to poetic flourishes, but they felt like distilled sunlight, trailing light and warmth behind them as they left her, falling and turning to mist as they did, dispersing into nothingness.

After what felt like an eternity, but probably wasn't more than twenty seconds, the last of the golden light fell, vaporised, and vanished. Syrus regarded her with narrowed eyes for over a minute, before finally nodding his satisfaction.

"Good girl," he said, with an ugly smile.

"Whatever," Carol said. "Now let him go."

"Of course," Syrus said, before dropping Stevie, then planting a foot on his chest and drawing his MAC-10. "But you need to learn a lesson or two about keeping your word, Miss Danvers." He aimed at Stevie's right knee. "To the letter." He smirked. "After all. Alive is not unharmed."

"You son of a bitch!" Carol roared, springing forward with hands outstretched and murder in her heart.

She was twenty feet away from Syrus and Stevie. All things told, she expected to reach them in a couple of seconds, at most. She knew in her heart, and thanks to the Grey Court overview from Harry, that with the near instant reaction time of a vampire and the rate of fire of a MAC-10, it would take the vampire only a quarter of a second unload at least half a dozen rounds into Stevie's knee, leaving ample time to ready himself for her attack. She wasn't going to make it in time.

But something else did.

Even to Carol's enhanced senses it happened in a blur. Something human shaped stepped out of the shadows, grabbed Syrus by the back of neck and hurled him away from Stevie, into the burning ruins of the van with almighty roar of impact, more resembling an exploding bomb than anything else.

" _And you, vampire, are going to be neither,"_ a cold, distorted and echoing voice said, as the speaker finally stepped into clear view. It was Harry, sculpted from golden flames, eyes burning with white heat like miniature stars, and for a moment, Carol's heart stopped, thinking that she was seeing the Dark Phoenix. The lack of a pervasive smell of woodsmoke and general mass destruction, however, ruled that out.

And if there were any remaining doubt, it was dispelled when he turned and grinned at Carol.

" _Told you I had a plan."_

OoOoO

Back in the dormitory, matters weren't quite as fraught. However, they weren't entirely peaceful, either.

Bucky, his instincts telling him that something was wrong (and a small device in Harry's bed that monitored his vitals confirming it) had already got up and swiftly dressed himself. If he'd thought it was something seriously wrong, then he would have simply charged straight into the dormitory, clothing and caution be damned. However, the fact was that Harry remained in his bed, his vitals were raised but not critical, and a distinct lack of mass destruction, widespread panic, and stabbing migraines meant that he probably wasn't in too much trouble.

He met Dean at the adjoining door, the boy having been about to knock. A quick glance around the room showed that all four of the other boys were awake, up, and apprehensive.

"Mister Barnes," he said. "It's Harry, he's… floating. And glowing. Like last year."

Bucky frowned, inwardly reassessing the possibility of how much trouble Harry might be in as he strode over to inspect his charge. He'd read the reports on the Battle of the M4 took place, both from HYDRA and from the Avengers. Thor in particular had mentioned Harry's use of astral projection in that battle to warn him about Volstagg being in trouble. Additionally, Minerva had given her account of how it had turned out at Hogwarts – Harry had been glowing gold and floating, much as he was now. He had also been hot enough to the touch to badly burn Ron Weasley, which explained why the worried looking boys, who'd been conferring in whispers, were keeping their distance.

"Has anything else happened?" he asked quietly.

There was a round of dubious glances, then a series of shaken heads, and Bucky relaxed.

Until Seamus piped up.

"Well, he did smell a bit like wood smoke, the way he does when he gets really angry."

Bucky froze. "Wood smoke? Are you sure?"

"With all due respect, Mister Barnes, it's not somethin' you forget," Seamus said, and considering that Harry had nearly fried him earlier in the year, Bucky had to give him that one. "But he's stopped now."

Bucky sniffed a couple of times, frowning, before nodding. "It's gone," he said, before regarding his charge. "Hmm. She must have talked him down."

"She?" Ron asked, puzzled.

"Harry's got three major psychic connections that we know of," Bucky said. "All of them are to women – two are blood relatives and powerful psychics. For all we know, they could date back to before he was born. And the third was formed by accident."

Ron cleared his throat. "But doesn't he also…" he began, stopping as Bucky turned sharply to regard him with unblinking blue eyes.

"The only other connection we know of was broken," Bucky said, returning his gaze to Harry, pulling his sheets off him and examining him carefully. "And it's not him."

"How do you know?"

"Because if it was, Harry wouldn't have calmed down," Bucky said darkly, before his frown deepened and he examined Harry more closely.

"Mister Barnes?"

Bucky ignored the question, grabbing a stray quill and gently wiping it under Harry's nose, before examining the results.

"Mister Barnes?" Ron prompted him again. "Is something wrong?"

"Blood," Bucky said quietly. "Harry's straining himself." He looked up at Ron. "Harry likes to make out that he doesn't have limits – usually when he's feeling melodramatic. But he does have them, and by the looks of things, he's running right up against them."

"What happens if…"

"If he keeps pushing? I don't know. But I doubt it'll be anything good," Bucky said, heading back to his room. "Which means that he has to wake up."

OoOoO

Back across the Atlantic, the reason for Harry's strain was becoming quite apparent. Namely, that Syrus had bounced back with alarming speed, the Master Vampire ripping daggers of shrapnel from his flesh, driven there by force of impact, as if they were merely splinters, and ignoring the small fact that parts of him were on fire. His face looked even less human; longer, more hollow and gaunt, colder, emptier and more savage, red eyes burning with fury as he blurred forward, thrusting one of the larger pieces of shrapnel at Harry's own eyes.

Normally, Carol would have been worried for her friend. Even with his raw power, after all, his body wasn't any tougher than hers – after such a swift and vicious attack at close range, she'd have thought he'd be shopping for eyepatches in the style of Nick Fury before the day was done. But this was not normally, and Carol didn't even have time for her breath to catch before the golden energy version of Harry – which, now that she thought about it, looked a _lot_ like the amber-red energy sheath Jean had assumed during the assault on the Red Room – swayed away from the blow, letting the vampire blur past him, before lashing out just as quickly with a savage stomping kick that sent his enemy flying.

"Well, that answers the question of whether you're really here or not," she muttered.

 _Actually, I'm not,_ Harry replied, this time telepathically, as Syrus – part of whom was _still_ on fire – spun in an instant and pressed his attack, forcing Harry on the defensive. The two were now moving faster and faster, exchanging blows in a blur that even Carol could barely see, speeding up even as she watched. The vampire was having the better of it. Not only was he more skilled and experienced, while Harry moving at the speed of thought, Syrus was moving even faster than that.

 _Coulda fooled me,_ Carol said slowly, stunned, before turning away, trying to focus on her vague sense of the one thing that she knew hurt these things: her shield.

 _Well, I am, but – ow! Watch the claws – I'm not._

 _Explain. Now._

 _I'm in the middle of something, you know._

 _So make it short and sweet,_ Carol grumbled mentally.

 _Now who's Miss Angry-Pants?_

 _I've been kidnapped, with my baby brother, by vampires who shut down all New York to do it. Then my best friend joined me in my brain, before he crawled out through said brain into the real world via my eyeballs. And fingers. Forgive me for being a little grumpy._

 _Fine. My body is in Hogwarts. My mind is here. And that wasn't my way out, by the way. Just special effects. I felt I should make it look good for the benefit of the would-be Angelus over here._

 _And the golden body?_ Carol asked, suppressing a surge of triumph as her fingers brushed the edge of her shield – it was buried in the ruins of the van. _I've seen Jean do something like that…_

 _It's a bit like that, but it's more like what Jono did – made a body for himself out of psychic energy. That's what this – whoa, that was close – is. Not as stylish, but…_

There was a thunderous crack and Carol looked up in time to see Syrus carving a trench in the asphalt of the road.

" _It picks a wallop,"_ Harry finished aloud, in satisfied tones.

"A construct," Syrus hissed, through a mouth distorted by a brutal roundhouse that had literally driven a dent into his face.

The rest of his body fared little better, with half his chest caved in, the flesh of his torso and upper legs burnt and blackened beyond recognition. But as he spoke, as he stood, and as Harry and Carol watched, his torso reinflated, his face reshaping itself, and his skin repairing, the burnt flesh slowly lightened to a scalded red, then a rapidly paling pink.

"Takes a licking and keeps on ticking," Carol remarked.

" _Vampires,"_ Harry said, shrugging. _"Like midges, but even harder to swat."_

"I am fighting," Syrus continued, voice now clearer, and clearly furious. Now, Carol thought with a total lack of sincerity, wasn't that just a pity? "A _construct_."

" _More or less,"_ Harry said, and grinned. _"In this context, I'm more, and you're less."_

Syrus snarled, before pausing, and narrowing his eyes. "Not just a construct," he said slowly. "A psychic construct, projected by a male psychic, associated with Carol Danvers. You're Thor's son, Riddle's nemesis."

" _Riddle?"_ Harry asked sharply. _"What does he have to do with this?"_

"Nothing that need concern you, Asgardian," Syrus said. "Take the boy, if you must, but the girl is now the property of my lord. I will bring her to him and you will not impede me."

"Excuse me?" Carol said, incredulously, pulling her shield clear as quietly as she could. She might as well not have bothered – Syrus didn't spare her a glance. "I am no one's property."

"'No one's property'?" Syrus sneered. "I have walked this Earth for more than a century, and I have learned this: Mortals are never anything but, in their brief and feeble lives. Even ones who are a step beyond ordinary humanity, like yourself, are ultimately at the mercy of other mortals, with more power; governments, corporations, criminals, and any combination of the above, and to greater beings. The ground you walk on, the water you drink, even the air you breathe, it all belongs to someone. _You_ all belong to someone, through one obligation or another, whether it is tax, debt –"

"Oh for the love of Christ, would you shut up with your evil hipster riff?" Carol complained. "It's not cool, it's not edgy, and it's not original."

" _What she said. Twice,"_ Harry said. _"If you think that I'm going to let you take my friend to Dracula, you're very much mistaken. And if you want to try and take her, I'd stop for a moment. Stop and think. You know who I am, so you probably know what happens to people who try and hurt those I care about. If you don't, I'll give you a clue: it's not pleasant, and it's happened to things a lot bigger and badder than Dracula's delivery boy."_

Despite these words, however, he wasn't moving to attack. Nor, Carol noticed with some disquiet, was he quite as vibrantly gold as he had been only a minute or two earlier. His powers were waning, and fast. And she wasn't the only one to notice.

"Big words," Syrus said, seeming to collapse into the flickering shadows. "But with little to back them up," he continued as he emerged behind Harry, hand wrapping around his neck and pulling him close, baring his throat to wide, hungry fangs.

"… _You do realise that you can't bite me, right?"_

"I do," Syrus said, as the sky above rumbled with thunder. "And I know who you are, Harry Thorson. I have heard the stories of the enemies you have defeated. If you were here in person, I would have been destroyed already. But you are not. You are here in astral form, in a psychic construct, and you are vulnerable, at the very limits of what you can do – creating this body was a bold move, but it has restricted you to its physical reach, left you weak, and weakening even more by the second. One lightning strike, and I can disperse it and your mind to the winds, trapping your body in a limbo state between life and death. I will be gone, while your friends and family mourn a foolish boy who over-reached and paid the price." He grinned, tightening his grip as Harry struggled to break free. It wasn't pleasant. "Not bad for 'Dracula's delivery boy', eh?" He looked up at Carol. "Don't even think of throwing that shield, girl. The first move you make will be the last thing your boyfriend sees before he's reduced to a drooling vegetable."

Carol rolled her eyes with all the considerable disgust a world-weary teenage girl could muster. "For the last time: He. Is. Not. My. Boyfriend," she said. " _Best_ friend, yes. _Boy_ friend, no. Also, my god, do you never shut up? Harry, you want me to do anything?"

" _Nah, thanks. I've got this,"_ Harry said. _"You're right, by the way… whoever you are. Projecting my astral form like this, it does come with risks. You're missing two things. First, she's my best friend. She's worthy every one of them, and a million more. Second, you're right. My abilities are limited to my physical reach._ " His hands snapped up and clamped around Syrus's head like a vice. _"Which you just walked straight into. Thank you for saving me the effort, you total fucking moron."_

What happened next wasn't dramatic. There wasn't a chorus of unearthly screams of agony and terror from the vampire, nor even a dramatic flare of power from Harry's astral form. Instead, both of them froze, muscles locking them in place like statues, not even swaying slightly to regain their balance. Then, after about fifteen seconds, Syrus's eyes flared gold, for a moment, and everything about him slackened, Harry twisting around to lower the vampire to the ground. His astral form was paler now, translucent and fading.

"Is he…?" Carol began.

" _Braindead. What with how strong he was and how much I was weakening, I didn't have the time or stamina for anything subtle,"_ Harry said quietly. _"And frankly? He wasn't worth the effort._ "

"Maybe not," Carol said, hefting her shield as she stood over the immobile Syrus. "You got everything you need from him?"

" _Locations and very vague plans – Dracula didn't trust him with the details, beyond the fact that he needed you intact,"_ Harry said. _"And enough about the things he'd done that I don't feel remotely guilty about frying his brain."_

"Dare I ask?"

" _You know the threat about using your brother's bones as a toothpick? It wouldn't be the first time he'd carried it out. On someone smaller."_

"Good to know," Carol said. "Then I feel entirely justified in doing this." She raised her shield, then brought it down edge-first on Syrus' pale neck like an executioner's axe. There was a thump, a hint of white flame, and then dark blood began to dribble from the edges of the cauterised stump. "You made the wrong move, asshole," she said. "Can't say I didn't warn you."

" _That you did,"_ Harry said, before his expression softened. _"Are you all right?"_

"I'm fine," Carol said, gaze shifting over to her brother. He looked scared. Resolved, but scared. It was, she felt, probably a sensible way to look right about now.

Harry followed her gaze. _"He'll be fine,"_ he said. _"If he's half as tough as you, he'll be more than fine."_

Carol flicked him a half-smile. "Here's hoping," she said. "Is Parker going to wake up any time soon?"

" _No. He'll be down for days unless I wake him up,"_ Harry said. _"I wasn't sure how strong control his sire had on him, and I didn't want them to wake him up and stab us in the back."_ He glanced down at the rapidly withering and decaying corpse of Syrus. _"Since Syrus seems to have been his sire, that problem is no longer one, but better safe than sorry."_ He turned to Carol, expression now very serious. _"And we've got a much bigger issue: Dracula wants you, Carol. I don't know why, I don't know what for, but he wants you and he wants you badly, and he's gone to a lot of trouble to make it easier for him to get you."_

"What are you saying?"

" _I'm saying that he's going to get involved, personally, and compared to him, Syrus was nothing. I'm saying that this is going to get worse – probably a lot worse – before it's going to get better."_

Carol sighed. "Of course it is," she said wearily.

Harry laid a hand on her shoulder – it felt like a ray of summer sunshine. _"You won't be alone, though. I'll be there to back you up, I –"_

Then, he vanished mid-word.

Carol looked around, slowly, warily. "Harry?" she said.

Then, she noticed the headlights closing in from both sides, converging on her position. She wasn't exactly an expert, but something was telling her that these weren't your average highway evening drivers. Whatever had happened to Harry would have to wait.

"Yep," she said, making for her brother and the forest. " _Definitely_ going to get worse."

OoOoO

Harry's disappearance, it transpired, had been caused by an outside action.

To be exact, Bucky had gone to his room, retrieved a glass of cold water from beside his bed, then calmly emptied it on Harry's face.

This had had the desired effect of jolting him out of his trance and waking him up. This had also involved him dropping to his bed with a thump, before bouncing to his feet, body in a defensive position, eyes wild. Accordingly, Bucky had made sure that he, and Harry's fellow students, were at a safe distance.

"Easy, Harry," he said quietly. "It's all right."

Harry's gaze swept the room before, slowly, he relaxed. "Why?" he asked in a hard voice.

"You were over-taxing yourself," Bucky said bluntly. "You have limits, even if you don't like acknowledging them."

Harry opened his mouth to disagree when, suddenly, he swayed violently. Bucky caught him an instant before he cracked his head on one of the bedposts, and helped him to sit on the edge of the bed.

"Case in point," he said mildly. "And you've got a little something."

Harry frowned, before reaching up and brushing a hand under his nose, grimacing when it came around with slightly diluted blood.

"Now," Bucky said. "Report. What was happening?"

"Carol and her middle brother, Stevie, had been kidnapped by vampires," Harry said.

Bucky's gaze flicked to the book pile. "Grey Court."

"Grey Court," Harry confirmed. "Three lesser, one part-turned, and one Master, working as part of a grander scheme on Dracula's behalf."

"How much grander?" Bucky asked.

"Enough that they felt it was worth it to black out New York as a distraction," Harry said, grabbing his wand and glancing at his chest of drawers. A set of Asgardian leathers, the sword Uhtred forged him, and the gauntlet Diana gave him shot out.

"All of it?"

"By the looks of things."

"The current situation?"

"The full vampires are all destroyed, Carol and Stevie were freed and the part-vampire is with them – his sire was the Master vamp, so he should have control of himself if he wakes up. Just in case, I knocked him out for a while," Harry said, before meeting Bucky's gaze. "But Dracula's not going to give up on this one. I pulped the Master vamp's mind, and it was very clear on that. He wants Carol. I don't know why, but…" He glanced at the books. "I can make a guess."

"So can I," Bucky said. "I've also done a threat assessment on Dracula."

"I can't beat him in a fight," Harry said, stripping out of his pyjama top and grabbing his leathers. "I know. But right now, they're in the middle of a motorway in the middle of nowhere. If I can get them to Avengers Mansion –"

"Avengers Mansion is empty of actual Avengers," Bucky said. "Last I heard, they'd joined the White Council in a counter-strike against the Red Court."

"Wait, what?" Ron asked. "Mate, what's going on, where are you going?"

"Not now, Ron," Harry said briskly, shimmying into leather trousers at telekinetically enhanced speed, and grabbing both socks and boots, pocketing a sling ring as he did. "The Mansion has defences, better than more or less anywhere else."

"It also has, at the very least, Ada, if not Pepper, Jane, and perhaps other non-combatants as well," Bucky said. "And the Mansion's mystical and technical defences are good, but limited by the construction of the building – they're not as good as the Tower's were, and those were broken."

"Quinjets," Harry shot back. "Bifrost gates. If it comes to it, we won't need the defences to last for long, just long enough."

"Why not a simple evac to Asgard? It's not like they wouldn't be welcome," Bucky said.

"I'll try it, but somehow, I doubt it'll be that easy," Harry said sourly, nodding once more at the pile of books. "Going by what I got from vampire's mind, Dracula's done his research – he knows about Carol's ties to me, and therefore Asgard. Not about the psychic connection, though. And he had a massive storm going over New York for days. Somehow, I doubt that's a coincidence."

"Anti-Bifrost countermeasures," Bucky said, nodding. "Which nixes the Bifrost gate option. And calls into question how you're planning to get there."

"If Bifrost doesn't work, I'll tell Heimdall to drop me as close as he can get," Harry said, buckling on his sword. "After that, I'll fly there, what is it _now_ , Ron?"

"One of your books is glowing, mate," Ron said. He'd put on his robes with impressive alacrity, even considering that he'd just thrown them on over his pyjamas, and had a determined expression on his face. "And if you're going into trouble, again… then I'm coming to."

"Like hell you are," Harry muttered, grabbing the book – _Blood Magic for Morons_ – and examining it. Aside from the bluish glow, it wasn't doing anything unusual. "Thanks."

"You're going, then?" Dean asked.

"Yeah," Harry said, glancing up. "If anyone asks, I'll probably be back tomorrow. Or the day after."

Dean, Neville, and Seamus exchanged looks. "Well, whatever it is you're going to do," Neville said.

"Good luck," Seamus finished.

Harry met their gazes, and nodded. "Thanks," he said quietly.

"What do you plan on doing once you're there?" Bucky asked, in the same patient tone he'd been using throughout the conversation, of a teacher helping a student construct an argument.

Harry slipped on the arm-ring, then tapped the phoenix themed emblazon, and nodded his satisfaction as it expanded into a emerald green gauntlet.

"Get Carol and Stevie somewhere safe, probably the Mansion to start with. Fry any vampires that even blink the wrong way at them. Keep going either until dawn, or until the Avengers turn up, or until I can get them to Asgard and out of Dracula's way," Harry said.

"And if Dracula turns up?"

Harry drew his sword, the blade gleaming in the dim light of the dormitory as he examined it. "Keep him busy," he said.

Bucky arched an eyebrow. "Like with Maddie?" he asked sceptically.

"Bugger that. I was hoping I could keep him still enough for you to put one of your special bullets through his skull."

Bucky considered this, then nodded. "That could work," he said, reaching down and picking up a sports bag, full of what was most probably a lot of very sophisticated weaponry.

Harry raised an eyebrow of his own as he jogged down the stairs to the Common Room, and Bucky answered the unasked question.

"You were going to charge in anyway," he said. "I wanted to be sure that you actually had a plan this time."

Harry stared at him for a moment, then half-smiled. "Fair enough," he said.

"And you should have some back up," Ron said stubbornly. He'd followed them down the stairs

"I do," Harry said, nodding at Bucky.

"I meant –"

Harry turned on him, arms folded. "I know what you meant," he said bluntly. "And I appreciate it. But you're not ready for this."

Ron went red. "Says who?" he demanded.

"Says me," Harry said.

"Says who about what?"

Both of them spun around to see Hermione, who was seated in one of the armchairs with a significant pile of books beside her.

"Grey Court vampires kidnapped Carol and one of her younger brothers at the behest of Dracula, who has also blacked out New York and is likely to get involved personally," Bucky said calmly summarised. "The Avengers are unavailable. Harry telepathically intervened, and is now going to intervene in person. Ron wants to go with him. Harry thinks this is a bad idea." He transferred his gaze to Ron. "As do I. You're brave, you've got a good head for strategy when you keep your temper, and you're more powerful than most wizards. You also keep your head in a crisis, from what I've been told. But you aren't trained, you aren't experienced, and you are most definitely not ready to fight vampires. Especially not Grey Court; they're the most powerful breed individually, and if Dracula is taking this operation as seriously as he seems to be, then those present will be the strongest, smartest, and deadliest of the breed. But even if he only had fledglings with him…"

There was a blurred, complicated instant, then Ron was on his knees, and Bucky had Ron's wand in one hand, and the other wrapped around his throat.

"I'm a super soldier. A Grey Court fledgling is as fast, as strong, and even tougher than I am," Bucky said calmly, as if he had merely paused for breath. "Unless you managed to decapitate it, destroy its heart, or incinerate it, it could survive more or less anything a young wizard like you could throw at it. Added to that, it would have fangs, claws, and senses and instincts comparable or superior to any predator in the natural world, and most likely some ability to mesmerise its prey. You. It would have ripped your throat out by now."

He released Ron and reached out a hand. Ron glared at it, then him, before reluctantly taking it and letting Bucky pull him to his feet.

"And all that presumes that it wasn't sired by a vampire old enough to pass on other skills, such as the ability to transform into mist and pass through shadows, or outright magic. Or that they aren't using guns. But they're bad enough as it is, and they get more powerful with age and the more kills they make, and ever since Stoker's book came out, everyone's known how to kill them. While that doesn't affect them as much as the Black Court, because they can blend in better, it means that any vampire that's been around for more than a few years is not only strong, but smart, and that turns them from merely dangerous to downright deadly. That goes double for any hanging around Dracula: he doesn't have a high tolerance for incompetence. Which means that it would be smart enough to go straight for this." He held up Ron's wand. "And break it."

He let the words hang in the air for a moment, before handing Ron back his wand.

"I can fight vampires because I know how. I've been doing since long before I was a super soldier. With vampires, you either need to be as powerful or more so than they are, or you need to have experience, to know the kind of moves they'll make before they make them, have them trained into your reflexes," Bucky said. "Preferably both. To one extent or another, I have both. So does Harry. You've got power, but you don't have the know-how. Best case scenario, you'd slow us down, as we'd have to stop and protect you. Odds are, someone would then die while we were busy protecting you. Worst case scenario, despite our best efforts, you would be the person to die."

Throughout all of this, his voice hadn't risen, wavered, or in any way deviated from the calm, patient tone he'd begun with.

Ron opened his mouth to argue, but Harry cut him off with a slash of his hand. "We don't have time for this," he said. "You're not coming, Ron."

"Ron," Hermione said. "He might be right."

"We can fight," Ron said stubbornly.

"And you can die," Harry said flatly. "Which is why you're staying here."

"Surely there's something we can do," Hermione pressed. "Call Dumbledore, research the problem, do _something._ "

Harry and Bucky shared a look. "Telling Dumbledore would be a good idea," Bucky said. "And research could help."

"The books Strange gave me are by my bed," Harry said. "And Hermione, I've got my phone if you come up with anything. But that's as far as you go." Ron opened his mouth. "This isn't a discussion, Ron."

"Looks like it to me," Ron retorted. "You're both still here."

"Actually, I'm not," Harry said. "Neither is Bucky. We walked out of the room about five minutes ago. Right now, we're at the top of the Astronomy Tower, which, for whatever reason, is where the glowing book is leading us." He waved _Blood Magic for Morons_ for emphasis. "And even if that isn't going to do anything helpful – which, considering that Strange not only gave it to me, but wrote it, is unlikely – I can call on Heimdall from there." He paused, seemed to stare off into the distance, puzzled, then shrugged. "And now the book's glowing brighter. Portkey, maybe? Eh, either way, looks like we're off. Bye!"

"Harry, wait –" Hermione began, but before she could finish her sentence, Harry, and Bucky, had vanished. She sighed. "I hate it when he does things like that."

Ron just glowered.

OoOoO

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, matters were rather more fraught – and had Harry had any concept of how fraught, he would most likely have wound up grabbing his sword, jumping out the window, and calling on Heimdall mid-fall, in his pyjamas.

Within a minute of Harry's astral form vanishing after Bucky abruptly awakening him, the Grey Court's reinforcements had arrived, converging on the wreckage in identical vans. They emerged in two squads of a dozen each, garbed, armed, and moving with the professionalism of special forces, quickly securing the site, before spreading out in a standard grid search pattern. Any hopes that Carol had had that these reinforcements were plain humans, albeit top-class mercenaries, were crushed when she noticed two things.

First, they weren't wearing night-vision goggles, but despite that, moved through the pitch-dark old growth forest, full of tangled tree roots and inconvenient bushes, like it was a sidewalk on a clear summer's day.

Second, all around them, mist was rising up, apparently from nowhere, faster and thicker than anything natural, even by the standards of what she was pretty certain were the Catskills. Wherever they were, the mist was blanketing the forest around them in a pale shroud that flattened sounds and confused directions – likely to leave the vampire's prey uncertain, stumbling around, and generally lost. The clouds covering the stars were a mere grace note at that point.

Credit where credit was due, Carol thought sourly as she scanned her surroundings, seeing only trees, low rolling hills, rocks and dried up fallen leaves all around, it was succeeding marvellously at that. Not only was it difficult to figure out where the hell to go, it was also exceptionally difficult to move quietly.

Really, all that was needed to fulfil the horror cliché was for her companions to be picked off one by one. Then, she'd start running, panicked, stumbling and gasping as she went, before believing she'd found some safe haven – whether it be a cave, an abandoned cabin, or something like that – and then suddenly being attacked from behind by the monster. Cue the jump cut and the blood-curdling scream.

Yeah, fuck that, Carol thought to herself, adjusting her shield on her right arm, and glancing at her brother for what felt like the millionth time, making sure he was as close to her as her own shadow. She'd have been carrying him if it wasn't for the fact that she currently carrying the unconscious Peter Parker, the latter slung over her left shoulder, and needed her right arm free to wield her shield.

Plus, carrying Stevie only really worked if it was a matter of moving fast, and since Carol knew that she had no idea where she was going other than 'away' and that there was no way in hell even she was going to be able to outrun vampires on foot, even at her best speed, all that would achieve is to make a lot of noise and give the vampires something to converge on.

Stevie, bless him, had had the sense to keep silent, treading as lightly as he could, and keeping within touching distance of her at all times. While he was clearly frightened, his rapid heartbeat audible to Carol's sharper-than-normal ears, he was controlling it, rather than letting it control him.

Unfortunately, though, Carol didn't really see any options beyond either hoping that Harry would turn up in person with reinforcements sometime soon – which, since he likely didn't know how urgent things were, might not be as soon as she'd like – or hoping that the three of them stayed hidden until dawn. And, you know, that Parker didn't wake up as a ravening monster. All in all, she felt, it wasn't a very good set of options.

Then, she felt a tug on her arm and whirled, narrowly avoiding splitting Stevie's skull. Breathing a sigh of relief, she then frowned and gestured, saying 'what?' as clearly as if she'd spoken the words out loud. Stevie, eyes wide, and almost crossed from the way his sister's shield had nearly passed between them and through his frontal lobe, pointed at a tree on his right. At first glance, it looked like any other tree. After a moment, however, she spotted what Stevie was pointing at: a playing card, pinned to it with a butterfly knife.

Specifically, a Jack of Hearts.

A moment later, there was a thunderous explosion, like someone setting off a grenade, followed by a whole string of them, flashes of reddish light, almost purple in the darkness, punctuating the mist.

"What the hell is that?" Stevie asked, voice cracking.

"That the hell was me, _mon petit_ ," a voice said from behind them. Both whirled around to see the speaker. He was a tall, lean man, with the build of a long-distance runner or a swimmer and the edges of a straight razor, two things emphasised by the battered brown trench-coat he was wearing and the metallic _bo_ staff in his hand. He had dark hair, distinctive red eyes, and an even more distinctive devastating smile. More to the point, Carol recognised him, his arrival setting off a whole complicated cocktail of emotions, two of which reigned supreme: relief. And mistrust.

"Ah'm Remy," he continued. "Though as y' sister knows, most times I answer t' –"

"Gambit," Carol finished.

This, she thought, changed things. Whether that change was for better or for worse remained to be seen.

 **Well. I did say that this arc would have a few unexpected characters, and here comes one of them: Remy LeBeau, a.k.a. Gambit. Why is he involved?** _ **How**_ **is he involved? Well, there's a few reasons, one or two of which you may be able to deduce – one's fairly easy, coming down to two words: 'Doctor' and 'Strange'. Beyond that, I didn't originally plan to involve him, but from a Watsonian perspective, he was convenient (why convenient? Well, for starters, he's not alone), and from a Doylist one, there was a plot thread I left hanging with him, about just who and what he really is, and I spied an opportunity to wrap that up.**

 **Why doesn't Carol totally trust him, especially considering that she has before? Well, for one thing, since then, she's seen at first hand just how skilled a spy and manipulator he is, just what he's capable of – he played both the Red Room and Sinister for months, operating as a Mole right under their noses, and only Maddie was even partly aware of it. Gambit's downright dangerous for reasons that have nothing to do with his powers. For another, she thinks he might be a vampire or partly turned – after all, that trick's already been pulled with Peter Parker. Also, last time, in the Red Room, she just had to worry about herself (and Harry, but Harry can look after himself). This time, she's got her baby brother and an unconscious non-combatant to worry about – under the circumstances, a default setting of suspicion is pretty justifiable.**

 **And aside from that, a few things have happened, haven't they? Harry can astral project now (though not without a cost) and fight through it, Bucky has grown good at managing him, and Ron has just been given the equivalent of the 'Not Now Kid' talk, which is going to rankle, more than just a bit (though less than what I originally had planned, which had him and Hermione walking with Harry through the castle and trying to talk him into letting them come with him, playing the 'we aren't going to let you do this alone' card, until it becomes apparent that they've been following a projection, one that's walked them straight into McGonagall).**

 **And a few more are going to happen: tune in next chapter for Harry and Carol linking up in person and moving to Avengers Mansion to regroup, while Dracula loses patience and decides handle matters personally, and Harry Dresden tracking down the** _ **Word of Kemmler**_ **and trying to avert the Darkhallow while, unknown to him, he's being stalked by Voldemort.**


	31. Chapter 31: Bloody Hell IV - Skirmishes

**Well, I'm back, perhaps sooner than you expected (I am trying to get in a chapter every fortnight at least), for the fourth part of** _ **Bloody Hell**_ **– the part where the fun** _ **really**_ **starts. I stayed up to write this, the night before a fairly important deadline, but my muse started nattering away and wouldn't be quiet, and this chapter has been giving me a little trouble, so I listened. Here is the result.**

 **Frodo's Heir:** **Because I'm evil. This is well known.**

 **I'm not. Why? Well, think about it logically. Why would Harry even _want_ to become an Animagus? It presents him with no advantages, save perhaps in enhanced senses, and he's already got that covered. In fact, since one is seemingly unable to use magic in Animagus form, and likely other abilities as well, it's a significant step **_**down**_ **. It's also time consuming and likely quite irritating, even if one doesn't take into account the risk of it going wrong (which with Harry's luck, it would), which nullifies the motivation of curiosity/sentimental value due to his dad being one.**

 **Also, please in future assume that if I am so inclined, I can look such things up, and be advised that copying and pasting the wiki will not encourage me. Instead, it will irritate me immensely.**

 **Guest:** **I went with Frigga/Freyja (the spellings have often varied) as Thor's biological mother because a) that was how it was in the films, b) I felt the whole Gaea thing made it needlessly complicated. However, I believe that the original reasoning in the comics, in-universe and out, was to explain how Thor was so powerful on Earth, rather than to give him additional reason to protect it.**

 **More or less – the form of reaction is similar to Superman's on** _ **Young Justice**_ **, but with different motives. I thought hard about how Steve would react to discovering Carol and the rest of his family, and in the end, I settled on his temporarily rejecting her out of shock and self-recrimination (even though no one but Strange knew that Peggy was pregnant when Steve went into the ice). It took him a little time for him to get over himself, because Steve holds himself to an insanely high standard. Plus, in body and mind, he's not even 30. A teenage daughter would be a shock. A teenage great-granddaughter, exponentially more so.**

Carol regarded the young man across from her, keeping herself between him and Stevie, while making sure both not to stare – or drool, come to that – and not to lower her shield. For all she knew, this was just another vampire trick to get her to drop her guard; either an illusion, or a turned Gambit who, like Parker, would pass beneath suspicion. In theory, at least.

"Fancy meeting you here," she said, and smiled wryly. " _Mon cher."_

Gambit grinned. "It a pleasant surprise, _non?_ " he said.

"Definitely a surprise," Carol said. "What brings you out here? Now? An evening stroll?"

Gambit grinned, doubtless remembering when he'd used more or less those exact words to her when she'd made her escape from the Red Room a couple of months before.

"A doctor tole me that a stroll in de woods would be good for mah health," he said. "And yours."

"A doctor?" Carol asked, puzzled, before light dawned. "This doctor – what did he look like?"

"Tall, white, dark hair but white at the edges, blue eyes…"

"And a red cloak," Carol finished, a mixture of relief and irritation rising in her. "Doctor Strange."

"None other," Gambit confirmed, reaching into his pocket. "Though he didn' exactly tell me – gave me a note, as a matter o' fact." He withdrew the note, scrunched up, and lobbed it underarm to Carol, who caught and scanned it.

Unsurprisingly, it was cryptic, and in French, which she could read just fine, and gave a precise date, time, even a set of GPS coordinates that if she had to guess, were where she was standing right now. It did fit, she had to admit, both with Strange's style of operations and what she'd seen of his handwriting. Besides, she'd trusted Gambit before and been rewarded. Of course, that was before she'd discovered how he'd played an entire division of Russian spies and at least one powerful telepath like a harp).

She let out a sigh. Assuming this _wasn't_ a trick or a trap, well. It wasn't the back-up she'd been hoping for, or strictly expecting. But, if it was what it seemed – and with Gambit, it so often wasn't – then… she'd take it. Besides, it wasn't like she had many other options.

By then, however, the vampire troops seemed to have restored order among their ranks, flashes of orange energy blasts, and the accompanying humming roar of impact, lit up the night, and Carol dropped instantly, bringing Stevie and Parker behind her shield. Trying to track the shots, she inwardly observed that she was being very sharply reminded that even if this was Gambit, and even if he wasn't either partly or fully a vampire, they were most definitely not out of the woods yet. Literally, or figuratively.

"What was that?" Stevie asked in a whisper.

"Deity-class weapons," Carol said. "Based on Asgardian tech, designed to take down big bads, though they can be tuned down to stun. Of course, now they're being _used_ by the big bads, so that one didn't exactly turn out how it was meant to – big surprise." She put Parker down, glanced at Stevie and said, "Stay down, stay quiet. If I don't come back, wait until you're sure everyone's gone, then head for the highway. They want me, not you, and I'm guessing they're on a schedule, so I figure they probably won't bother looking for you."

"But –" Stevie began, before meeting his sister's hard gaze. "Fine."

"Good," Carol said, then stood up, and turned to Gambit, who was looking fairly relaxed, all things considered. "Hey, pretty boy – did the good doctor advise you to bring company on your healthy walk?"

"He may have made a suggestion or two along those lines," Gambit said casually.

Before Carol could enquire further, a bestial roar broke the night, one followed by a high vampiric screech of anger and fear, the sounds of a vicious fight, and the screech being cut off very suddenly indeed. At the same time, Carol spotted two shapes moving fast through the trees, metallic armour or weapons flickering and gleaming in the darkness, joined by other flickering figures as the probable vampires (Carol wasn't certain, but figured it was the most likely option) discarded their weapons – presumably not wanting to risk dialling them up, and then hitting her, thus inciting their master's wrath, Carol thought – and shot into the trees.

Battle was joined, and almost immediately had its casualties. Carol ducked on instinct as something large flew over her head in a flat trajectory, hitting a tree with what sounded like a crunching splat, before dropping to the ground in a limp and rubbery heap. Cursory examination revealed that it was a vampire, and despite what Carol assumed had to be a shattered… everything, it was hauling itself to its feet.

"Let me help you with that," she said, and before it could get its bearings, strode over and drove her shield through its neck as hard as she could. This both decapitated the tactical gear clad vampire and drove the shield most of a foot into the tree. With a grimace, Carol wrenched it free, before turning around, to see the wide-eyed expression of her little brother, and the mildly impressed one of Gambit. "What?" she asked, before pausing. "Oh, yeah, Stevie… I've got superpowers."

"… Really? I'd never have guessed," he managed.

Gambit snorted. "Looks like de sense of humour runs in de family," he remarked. The light tone, however, belied the fact that his eyes were scanning the forest, he was set ready to roll with a charge, and a set of faintly glowing playing cards were fanned out in both hands, his collapsible bo staff having been stowed somewhere in his battered old trenchcoat.

"Yeah, it comes with the eyes," Carol said. "So. Who've you brought to the party?"

Her answer came two-fold.

First, an enraged, exhilarated bellow.

" _HAVE AT THEE, FOUL WRAITHS! TASTE THE FURY OF ASGARD!"_

Then, a calmer and more thoughtful observation, almost incongruously so.

"Technically, they aren't wraiths. More revenants, I would say."

Carol sighed. "Never mind. I think I've guessed."

Before Gambit could reply, mist, already present on the ground, began to roll into the small clearing around them thicker and faster, going from a something thin and low, gathered around their feet, to a thick white sea that rose to their knees, and was rapidly growing higher. Remembering part of Harry's telepathic download briefing, Carol strode over to her brother and the still unconscious Parker – whatever Harry had done to him had been effective, to say the least. Gambit, being nobody's fool, joined her, going back to back.

"What they tryin'?" he asked quietly.

"They can control mist, and they can become it," Carol said tightly. "Stevie, keep a hand on my back." She glanced back to Gambit, and nodded down at the mist. "Some of this mist? It's vampire."

As if on cue, soft, malicious laughter began to swirl around them like the soughing of the wind through the trees, quiet at first, by growing like the mist, loud enough to drown out the sounds of Uhtred, Diana, and whoever else they had with them fighting the rest.

" _Enfer_ ," Gambit cursed softly. "Now what?"

"Uh," Carol said, trying to remember. "I think that you can't really do much to them in this state, but they can't really do anything to you. If they want to attack, they have to solidify. But if they do solidify, they can grab you and take you with them when they go misty again." She noticed that the mist thinned to more normal levels within a foot of her shield. "Though apparently they still don't like my shield."

"An' y' shield is holy, right?" Gambit said quietly, as the malicious laughter shifted to unintelligible, but cruel sounding whispers.

"It's made of the same stuff as Mjolnir, Odin blessed it, and vampire hate it, so I'd say it's close enough," Carol said.

"Means they've still got the same weaknesses, more o' less," Gambit murmured. "Lemme try something." He crooked both wrists, fanning the glowing cards, then focusing for a moment. In an instant, the cards began to burn like miniature purple flecked torches, and Gambit flicked both wrists with the ease of an expert, sending the cards flying in a flaming fan into the mist, which was now up to their waists. The cards punched holes in the mist, which seemed to flow away from them, landing with a faint crackle in the dry leaves and illuminating the thick mist with a dim, flickering light. In response, the whispering briefly surged, becoming angrier and distressed, before suddenly dying, replaced with an eerie silence.

"Good news," Carol said, after a moment. "They still don't like fire. Bad news, you just pissed 'em off."

Gambit opened to his mouth to reply, and as he did, part of the mist suddenly fountained up in front of him. By the time his mouth was fully open, it had formed into a dark shape, a vampire, grabbed him by the throat, then hurled him away into the forest like a rag-doll. Carol heard a distant, ominous sounding thump and crunch as she whirled, putting her shield, limned with silvery light, between her and Stevie, and the vampire.

The vampire shied away, but as it did, Carol felt two savage kicks to the back of her knees, forcing her to the ground, as a hand grabbed her shield arm, performing a swift and sharp twist, forcing her to drop it. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Stevie try to come to her aid, before a vampire backhanded him to the ground with the same motion and effort one would use to swat a fly, before drawing a pistol and lining up a shot.

She tried to surge to her feet, to stop the vampire, but as with when Syrus had been about to kneecap, she knew deep in her heart that she wouldn't get there in time – and this time, the vampire was lining up a shot to the head.

But also this time, she was being held down by vampires, and all her surge achieved was to force them to shift their vice-like grips. Then, there was a savage, cracking blow to the back of her head. There was a bright flash of light, and as everything faded to black, she heard a very final sounding gunshot.

OoOoO

As Strange's book/portkey dropped them at their destination, Harry noticed several things in a split-second.

First, it was a dark, thick forest.

Second, it was full of mist.

Third, it was full of vampires.

Fourth, Carol was lying motionless on the floor, surrounded by vampires, and a boy was being held at gunpoint.

Both he and the vampires took a moment to adjust to the situation, figuring out what was going on, who was friend, who was foe, and how to react – and in Harry's case, to try and control his instant surge of rage and instinct to reach for the Phoenix within. It wasn't a long moment, little more than the blink of an eye.

Bucky didn't.

Instead, in one lightning fast and liquid smooth instant, he raised his artificial left arm and fired three rounds from an already cocked and loaded pistol in a pulsing hammer of sound.

Almost instantaneously, the head of the vampire holding the boy – Stevie – at gunpoint exploded in a fiery mess, and the rest of the body began to burn with unnatural speed.

Before the body fell, the other vampires were on the attack, some drawing guns, others simply going in for the kill.

Harry disoriented, struggling with that surge of rage, barely raised a shield. It wasn't strong enough, and a vampire, tall and powerful, with the pallid elongated features, red eyes and long fangs of its true face, smashed through Harry's defences. On instinct, Harry kept his feet and interposed his arm between its jaws and his throat. His right arm, to be specific. Unfortunately, in this context, it was the wrong arm, and the vampire bit down hard… then immediately reared back, letting out a gurgling agonised scream and clutching at its mouth and throat, which were literally burning down to the bone with golden-white flames.

With a thought, Harry decapitated it, and glanced at his arm. Bleeding, but fine.

"Harry. Get your head in the game," Bucky snapped. All of that had taken less than five seconds, and in that time, Bucky had killed two more vampires, most of which had now taken to cover and were returning fire.

"Right," Harry muttered, raising his left arm and pouring power into Diana's emerald green gauntlet, which promptly performed as advertised, raising a transparent shield, which orange energy blasts splashed against like technicolour rain.

"Deity class," Bucky said, noticing his surprised expression. "Makes sense. They can stun. Bullets can't. Freeze them."

"Wha –" Harry began, then realised what he'd meant. Closing his eyes, he reached out, reached out with his telekinesis, and caught every moving figure in the clearing in an adamantine grip, just as if they'd been poles in one of Magneto's training exercises. When he opened them, every vampire was frozen in place. And so was Bucky, who arched an eyebrow at him. Harry, expression sheepish, released him.

"Nicely done," Bucky said quietly. "Can you hold them and check on the civilians?"

"Yeah," Harry said.

"Good," Bucky said. "Do it." He glanced up at the intermittent sounds of a fading, but still brutal fight off in the forest. "And keep your eyes open."

Harry nodded and then all but sprinted over to Carol. To his relief, she was still breathing, and he could feel her mind. Other than what felt like a nasty lump on the back of her head, she was fine, just unconscious. For a moment, he contemplated finding and incinerating the vampire responsible. However, after several explosive cracks and thumps, followed by a cessation of struggle and the smell of burning vampire, which a glance confirmed signified Bucky methodically executing the captured vampires, he decided not to bother.

With that done, he turned to Parker, gave him a cursory check – untouched, still unconscious – and Stevie, who had sensibly ducked and, had done his best to cover Parker's body. He might be scared, Harry thought, pale as death, and shivering with terror (and who could blame him), but he was brave.

"Hey," he said gently, keeping a safe distance. "Steven? I'm Harry. Your sister's friend. Remember me?

"Yeah," the younger boy whispered, staring with wide, damp eyes.

"You okay?" Harry asked, running his eyes over Stevie. There were no obvious wounds, cuts, or bruises, and aside from being justifiably terrified and on the verge of tears, there wasn't any damage from a mental attack, or as far as he could tell, a magical one. "Did they hurt you?"

Stevie gulped and shook his head. "They were going to," he said. "But Carol made them stop." He glanced at the remains of the vampire that had been about to shoot him. "And then you did."

"I'm not surprised," Harry said gently. "Carol's awesome like that. And while I wish I could take credit, that was my friend, Bucky, Bucky Barnes." He punctuated the latter by nodding at Bucky. "He does the hard work, and I sometimes blow things up."

"Harry!"

Harry looked up sharply and saw that the remaining five vampires had apparently all got the same idea at once, and transformed into mist to escape their psychic bonds, streaking for the natural mist and shadows to blend in and regroup. Remembering his lessons, Harry eyes burning gold, picked out the five vampire minds, and focused. A moment later, five balls of translucent golden psychic energy formed around five balls of vampiric mist, resulting in eerie, tinny screeches.

"Now, you see, a month ago, that would have worked," he remarked to Stevie, who was watching with wide eyes. "Those vampires would have got away clean. Unfortunately for them, I've had a few lessons since then." He looked the younger boy in the eyes. "They're monsters," he said. "They hurt people. People like you. People like your sister and me, we stop them." He turned back to the trapped, mist-form vampires. "And we make sure they don't hurt anyone ever again."

He raised his hand, slowly, clearly, so Stevie could see, and snapped his fingers with a crack like a gunshot. The screeches spiked for an instant, before dying as each ball of energy was filled by a furious burst of flame. Then, each ball of energy vanished, and all that was left were fading clouds of ash and embers, clouds that a burst of wind Harry conjured dispersed into the forest.

He turned back to Stevie. "The monsters you hear stories about? They're real," he said quietly. "You probably got that part. But you know what? So are we: the people who stop them."

Stevie stared at him, in a sort of stunned awe. Then, his expression hardened, and he nodded, gaze returning to the place where the vampires had been.

Harry looked up at Bucky, who gave him a minute approving nod, before resuming sweeping the forest around them. "How many hostiles?" he asked.

"Three," Harry said. "No, wait, two, one…"

A melon sized object soared into the clearing. It landed with a thump, bouncing twice, before rolling to a stop at Harry's feet.

It was a head. A rapidly decomposing head. It looked, if anything, rather surprised.

"… zero."

"Certain?" Bucky asked.

"Absolutely. No more hostiles."

"Up to what range?"

"Ten miles."

Bucky nodded, then reached into a pouch and pulled out a first aid kit. "Civilian injuries?"

"Carol," Stevie said, suddenly.

"She'll be fine," Harry said, answering both of them. "She just got hit on the head – and I think we all know that it'll take more than that to keep Carol down." He smiled at Stevie. "My bet? She'll wake up in a few minutes just fine; maybe a little groggy, and grumpy as hell, but it's not like that's anything new. If she woke up cheerful, though, then I'd be worried."

Stevie responded with a small smile.

"Want to come and see?" Harry asked, slowly, carefully, holding out an upturned hand. Stevie stared at it for a moment, then, slowly, reached out and took it. Harry smiled a reassuring smile, and stood up slowly, letting Stevie follow him. He glanced at Bucky, and sent, _He's fine, physically. Scared out of his mind, but pulling through. He'll be okay._ He glanced at Parker. _He's fine too. Out cold, but that's my work. I can wake him up as and when we have space and time to deal with him._

Bucky regarded him for a moment, then nodded slowly.

"What about him?" Stevie asked, nodding at Parker.

Bucky strode over and picked up Parker in a fireman's lift. "He's coming too," he said. "Allies?"

Harry focused for a second, blinked, then sighed. "Uhtred, Diana, and Logan from the Institute," he said, before pausing, frowning, and eyes narrowing. "And Gambit. He's been hit hard. I'm not sure if he's got internal bleeding, but he's semi-conscious at best."

Bucky promptly put Parker down. "Where?" he asked, clipped.

Harry pointed. "Thirty six feet that way."

"Stay here. See to Carol's head and your arm. Bring the other three in, we can plan our exit from there," Bucky said, vanishing into the forest.

Harry nodded, and cast a small ball of light, setting it to float above Carol's head.

"Is that magic?" Stevie asked softly.

"It is," Harry said. "Good magic." He examined the developing lump on Carol's head, illuminated by the soft white light of the small globe. There was some blood around it, but it was already drying, there was little enough of it. "Perfect for fixing bumps and bruises." He drew his wand with his free hand. "Normally, I don't need a wand much these days," he explained in a level tone, figuring that that would help calm Stevie down. "But as one of my teachers, Professor Zatara, likes to remind me, wands are perfect for precision work. Here's a spell I learned from her." He gently tapped the bump and murmured, " _Laeh._ "

The bump receded before their eyes, vanishing in a matter of seconds. An instant later, Carol groaned and began to stir.

"With luck," Harry said. "She won't even have a headache." He glanced at his bitten arm. The wounds weren't too deep, on either side, and it wasn't really bleeding… but if he didn't do something about it, Bucky would be displeased to put it mildly. Of course, he needed both hands. So he turned to Stevie, and said, "Steven."

The boy, who was hovering anxiously by his sister's side, though his hand was still holding Harry's tightly, looked up alertly. "Yeah?"

"Carol will be worried about you. It'll help if you're the first thing she sees," he said. "And she might need some help sitting up. I need to fix my arm, so I can't do it. Can you do it for me?"

Stevie hesitated, glanced down at his sister, then nodded sharply, shuffling around so that he was in his sister's immediate line of sight when her eyes opened.

"Thank you," Harry said quietly, before switching his wand to his left hand and focusing on the bite-mark. As he did, he remembered the reaction, the way the vampire had hurled itself away from him, the way the blood, _his_ blood, had been literally burning it like fire – or, considering how Syrus had shrugged off fire, even more than fire. After a moment of thought, he filed it away. Being unbiteable might be useful for him, but it would do bugger-all for anyone else. So instead, he focused on his wrist, tapped it, and murmured, _"Laeh."_

It wasn't as easy as it had been with Carol's head, though whether that was because of some inherent dark magic in the bite, or because he was using his off-hand, he didn't know. Either way, the wound closed up, and another tap of his wand cleaned away the blood.

As he did, he heard a groan, then a gasp of, "Stevie!"

He spun to see Carol jolting upright and looking around wildly, before focusing on her brother, and hugging him like he might suddenly vanish before her eyes if she did not. The two of them were, Harry noticed, crying, so he politely turned around again to give them their privacy, then swore under his breath as he realised he'd forgotten to call the other three in.

 _Uhtred, Diana, Mister Logan,_ he said. _This is Harry, Harry Thorson, can you hear me?_

 _Aye, my lord. I regret you arrive after the foe have been defeated,_ Uhtred replied.

 _Don't worry, Uhtred, I had a few of my own to handle,_ Harry replied wryly.

 _I can hear you as well,_ Diana said. _You are well? And Carol, and her brother?_

 _All fine,_ Harry said. _Mister Logan?_

 _Just Logan's fine, kid,_ came Logan's growl. _I'm good. Where's the Cajun?_

 _Semi-conscious. A vampire tagged him. Bucky's gone to check on him. He also asked the three of you to converge on us,_ Harry said, and focused. _There. I've given you each our bearing. If you're having trouble, follow the ball of light. See you in a minute._

A couple of minutes later, the three emerged separately from the forest, as, a moment after, did Bucky. He was supporting a somewhat pained looking, but conscious, alert, and mobile Gambit.

As they did, Carol looked up sharply, tensing up, before relaxing and wiping away the tears on her cheeks as she stood up. However, she didn't let go of her brother, who seemed fine with this state of affairs. Her gaze travelled to Harry, who coughed and looked embarrassed.

"Sorry I disappeared on you earlier," he said. "I was over-stretching myself, so Bucky dumped a glass of water on my face. And we could have got here faster, but we thought the bad guys were all dead."

"Had we only known you were in the hands of such villains, we would have arrived sooner," Uhtred said.

"Agreed," Diana said softly.

" _Certainement_ ," Gambit said, wincing, but standing up straight and testing his footing.

Logan simply grunted. "You okay, kid?" he asked.

"But for a bump on the head… which I don't seem to have any more," Carol said, frowning and feeling the back of her head, and glanced at Harry.

"Magic," Harry said.

Carol nodded. "Anyway. You're here now," she said quietly, and glanced around. "All of you are. Thank you." She coughed. "Now… how are we getting out of here?"

"We brought the X-Van," Logan said. "It's on the highway. Would be the X-Jet, but we don't have one at the moment."

"You wouldn't, what with how Erik hit me in the face with the last one," Harry remarked. "I offered to pay for a new one, but the Professor wouldn't have it. Where do we take it?"

"We'll discuss it on the way," Bucky said. "One of the vampires might have got off a distress call."

As they set out, Harry providing a telekinetic stretcher for Parker, the discussion continued.

"The Institute," Logan said.

"No," Bucky said, shaking his head. "Too many non-combatants, and the defences are good but –"

"But what?" Logan growled, hackles rising.

"But they won't stop Dracula," Bucky said flatly. "Xavier with Cerebro might take him, and the X-Men might hold off most of his inner circle, but they're diminished at the moment – Jean and Maddie are out of state – and it only takes one. Additionally, there are too many non-combatants, and with no X-Jet, there's too much chance of getting trapped."

"Wait, can't vampires not come in unless they're invited?" Carol said.

"That only applies if the house is still standing," Bucky said. "Dracula wants you, and he's already proven willing to black-out all of New York just to cover the capture. The Institute's defences are good, but the main defences are the power of its senior staff. Normally, that would be enough to make Dracula think twice, but not now. He's picked his moment very carefully, while SHIELD, the Avengers, Doctor Strange, and Wanda Maximoff are all occupied. He'll throw everything he has at this, and he's batting in Thor's weight-class."

"The two of them went toe to toe once," Harry contributed quietly. "Dad won. Barely. Then Dracula went and killed Perun, another thunder god, just to prove a point. And Dracula's the Grey King – the previous Grey King, Varnae, also went up against dad when he was younger, and dad barely got away with his life. Varnae also took on grandpa Odin, great-grandpa, and great-great grandpa, before they became Kings of Asgard. Each time, it was either a draw, or close enough that Varnae could get away more or less intact. Dracula's got that power too, and maybe more."

"More?" Carol asked, disbelieving.

"According to the White Council's file on the Grey Court, Dracula was half-human before he was turned, and his dad is some kind of demon-lord called Drakul," Bucky interjected.

Harry nodded. "I'm not sure if he got anything from his dad, but sometimes..." He glanced at Carol. "Well, powers sometimes require a push to activate. And it might explain why he was picked by Varnae to become the next Grey King."

"Short version: he's powerful," Bucky said. "Enough to match powerful Greater Gods, comfortably Omega Class in his own right."

"A mighty foe indeed," Uhtred said grimly.

"And he'll kill everyone between him and me," Carol said quietly, looking at Harry. "Won't he? I got that from your psychic download."

Harry and Bucky shared a grim look.

"He was known as Vlad the Impaler long before he was turned into a vampire," Harry said, after a moment. "So yes. He probably will."

Carol folded her arms. "Then wherever I'm going, you guys – especially Stevie – are going elsewhere," she said. "I'm not letting anyone die for me."

"Speakin' for mahself, _cherie_ ," Gambit said. "I ain't got no plans f'r dyin' any time soon. And something tells me that if Dracula wants y' so bad, it's gonna be bad f'r the rest of us if 'e gets y'."

"Syrus did suggest that it wasn't just the Bride of Dracula routine," Harry said quietly. "And the Grey Court are associated with blood magic. A lot. Not as much as the Red Court, but they are. And Doctor Strange has had me reading up on it." He smiled. "Besides: this is normally the point where if it was me saying this, you'd tell me to stop being all stupidly noble. Stupidly noble sacrifices are my shtick – stop infringing."

Carol opened her mouth to retort, when Bucky broke in.

"Dracula's on a timetable," he said quietly. "He also timed this to avoid fighting the Avengers. I don't think he's afraid of them, but he's not stupid, either - . From what Carol has shared with Harry, and what Harry extracted from the mind of one of Dracula's lieutenants, the snatch and grab was smoothly orchestrated, and professional, as was the extraction. The black-out was dramatic, as is the storm over us. However, each served a purpose. The black-out was intended to obscure matters, taking out communications, creating uncertainty, delaying the information of Carol's kidnap, and that of Steven, leaving anyone investigating with no clear trail to follow. He was clearly not informed of Harry and Carol's psychic connection, and most definitely counting on Carol alerting us, or the involvement of you four, via…"

"Doctor Strange gave Gambit a note," Carol said. "Date, time, and GPS coordinates."

Bucky nodded. "Dracula's on a timetable," he repeated, as they reached the van, and nodded upwards. "The clouds above us are, according to Harry, full of mystical energy, Dracula's power."

"It feels malign," Diana agreed, a touch uneasily. "Old. Strong. And full of hunger."

Bucky nodded. "Apparently he knows Carol is associated with the Avengers, and probably that she and Harry are close friends. At the very least, it's to obscure Heimdall's sight. Likely, it's also to prevent Carol from calling on Heimdall."

"Heimdall!" Uhtred bellowed suddenly.

Nothing happened, and everyone stared at Uhtred, who shrugged.

"Your theory is correct, Sergeant Barnes," he said.

Bucky smiled faintly, before nodding and taking the driver's seat. "Dracula wanted Carol taken, squared away, and whatever he planned to be carried out before anyone even knew she was gone, let alone began investigating. Additionally, I think that the fact that tonight is Halloween is significant, mystically speaking. He's got one shot, and he knows it," he said, as everyone else got in – Logan grumbling about taking shotgun. "Even with all the available X-Men with us, at best it would be even odds of victory – a costly, bloody, victory, with likely considerable collateral damage. He's also likely covered the escape routes out of the city, considering that half the reinforcements came from the north. So, we need fast transport, that can take Carol and Steven – we have to assume that if he can't have Carol, he'll settle for Steven, and perhaps other members of the family – out from under the cloud, and call on Heimdall for evac to Asgard."

"Jean-Paul," Uhtred said. "He is the swiftest on Midgard, perhaps in all the Nine Realms."

"He is," Bucky said, as he started the van. "Even limited by his suit, he's got a top speed of Mach 10. Harry, find him." Harry nodded and closed his eyes, scanning for Jean-Paul's mind. "In the meantime, however, we need a back-up: Avengers Mansion."

"How's that different from the Institute, bub?" Logan demanded. "It's even worse, since there're no Avengers there right now."

"It has better defences. Almost all of the non-combatant residents aren't currently resident. And it has Quinjets, armed, able to cloak, and to cruise at Mach 2. Also, hopefully, Dracula won't look there first."

Logan thought about this for a moment, then nodded grudgingly. "How d'you plan on getting into Manhattan?" he asked. "It'll be chaos."

Bucky smiled.

OoOoO

"So," Dracula said softly, with cold, deadly precision. "Let me see if I heard your report correctly. Syrus has failed me, though he at least had the decency to die in doing so. His squad, and then the escort on the exit route when they attempted to recover the situation, have been destroyed to a man. And the girl, and her brother, have escaped."

"Yes, my lord," a junior vampire, sent to give the unfortunate report and thereby take the brunt of Dracula's wrath, said.

"How?" Dracula asked. "Or rather, by whom?"

"We are examining the information from the escort team's body cameras… but it is unclear, my lord. All that can be definitively stated is that the blast that destroyed the van did not come from outside, my lord. It came from within."

Dracula turned sharply. "Within?" he said. "That implies that the girl was responsible. Some inherent ability as yet undiscovered?" He shook his head slowly. "No," he said to himself. "There is no sign of such in her bloodline, or within her. How?"

"My lord?"

Dracula looked up. "My question was a rhetorical one, child," he said coldly.

"I know, my lord," the vampire said, bowing her head. "But I have… a suggestion as to the cause."

Dracula regarded her coldly for a long moment. "Elaborate," he said, in tones that made it very clear that if he did not think the suggestion was a good one, the vampire before him would regret it.

"Master Syrus reported that the girl possessed a circular shield," the vampire said. "One that though it wasn't hot and she could handle it easily, burned even a half-turned on contact. The girl claimed that it was given to her by Odin, made at his order, and blessed by him. Syrus wasn't certain of this claim, but he brought it with him, as he felt that it was best kept in sight."

"You think that a protective enchantment within it was activated by the girl, knowingly or unknowingly, leading to an energy release," Dracula said. "Specifically, of energy that would burn vampires, but not humans." He regarded the nervous vampire thoughtfully. "It is possible. The shield does have the ability to retain and release energy, as do many artefacts of Asgardian make. And it would explain the blast pattern."

He shook his head. "But I do not think so. Your report said that the remains of Syrus' squad were little more than scorch marks, and found spread over a wide area, while Syrus himself was not burned, but decapitated. It could still be the work of the girl with the shield, but I doubt it – the escort teams were, according to your report, variously dismembered, decapitated, or burned to ashes." He regarded the young vampire. "But I think you are right in one respect, an insight I thank you for. This smells of meddling." His eyes narrowed. "Asgardian meddling."

The young vampire bowed and wisely said nothing.

"What is your name, child?" Dracula asked abruptly.

"Emma, my lord."

"Emma," Dracula repeated. "I shall remember your name, and I shall remember you. You were sent here by your elders, who knew I would be angry, as a sacrificial lamb. If this insight proves to be more than a chance inspiration, you may yet be destined for greater things."

"Thank you, my lord," Emma said, and paused. "My lord?"

"Yes?"

"I do not wish to presume, but –"

"Only three Asgardians of real power reside on Earth," Dracula said. "Two of them are entangled in protecting the shattered remnants of the White Council and fighting the beasts the Mayan scum have conjured up. This is confirmed by reports I received barely an hour ago, after the girl's successful escape. I would have felt the approach of the Thunderer, in any case, as his mastery of the weathery would have clashed with my own. The Trickster might have eluded me, travelling by secret ways, to empower and liberate the girl, but I doubt it. He would have disposed of Syrus and his squad swiftly and discreetly, then taken the girl and her brother away long before the escort arrived to investigate. No…" He trailed off, then barked a harsh laugh. "Of course, there it is."

"My lord?"

"Riddle's knife," Dracula said cryptically. "I had wondered how and when he was going to try and sink it into my back, and now I see it. Thor's child, Riddle's deathless nemesis, is both the girl's liberator and the instrument of Riddle's betrayal. It fits described pattern of destruction, even the primary method: the boy's proclivity for using fire is well known. He is equally well known for being a passionate fool, even more than most boys his age are. The faintest whisper that a friend, a friend who is a beautiful young woman, might be in danger and he would come running. Riddle seeks to set us on a collision course, have me remove the thorn in his side, and leave me to reap Asgard's vengeance. And in the unlikely event that the boy was victorious, Riddle could then finish him at his leisure."

Emma cleared her throat nervously. "Perhaps you should withdraw then, my lord? If this is a trap set by Riddle, then surely you cannot –"

She got no further. Dracula, without even looking at her, reached over with one hand and snapped her neck with a sickening crunch in one savage, effortless instant. As soon as he released her neck, she dropped like a stringless marionette.

"Insight, I welcome. Suggestions, I welcome," he said calmly to Emma, whose neck now kinked at a right angle and whose body was utterly still, save for her terrified, darting eyes. "Commands, I do not. Because we are in private, you are young, and you have shown signs of intelligence, I have shown you mercy. Use that mercy to meditate on this mistake as your head rights itself. Repeat it, and you will wish that I had ripped it off."

He strode out of his operations room. He had come too far, waited too long, prepared too carefully, for this chance, this _one_ chance, to let it slip through his fingers now. All Riddle's admittedly cunning ploy had achieved was to convince him of the value of a saying that had gained currency in recent centuries.

If you want something done properly, do it yourself.

OoOoO

I sat, bound to a railing in the Field Museum and reflected on my situation. All in all, it wasn't good.

Skim read Wanda's copy of the _Word of Kemmler_ to make sure I knew what was going on: Good.

Borrow Wanda's copy of _Die Lied der Erlking_ to summon the Erlking and stop him from being summoned and used by the Kemmlerites, Voldemort, Selene, and whoever else to raise up extra badass ghosts for the Darkhallow and their all-you-can-eat ghost buffet: Good.

Get ambushed by Cowl and his apprentice, who knock me out, releasing the Erlking from the binding circle I had him in and thereby unleashing the Wild Hunt (which is what I'd been trying to stop), then stole Bob, my spirit in a skull, which conveniently meant that they no longer had to find the Word – they had the spirit that had helped Kemmler write it: Bad. So very, very Bad.

With Butters' help, figure out where _the Word_ is – at the Field Museum, and recover it, then destroy it: Good.

Get ambushed for a second time, this time by Grevane and his aged minion, who turned out to be a guy called Quintus Cassius, with a grudge against me, leaving Grevane free to wander off with _the Word_ and Cassius free to torture me: Bad.

Why did he have a grudge against me? Short version: he used to be a Denarian, an immortal sorcerer powered by a fallen angel in a coin, who'd spent the best part of 1500 years working for a living nightmare called Nicodemus, committing every atrocity in the book. They'd tried to start a plague themed apocalypse in Chicago a couple of years back.

Cassius had had information I and some friends of mine needed, but when he gave up his fallen angel coin in a transparently fake surrender and gloated about how he'd tortured an old man and friend of ours, they turned the other cheek. They're good men. Cassius exploited that.

I'm not a good man. I turned the other baseball bat instead. I got my information, and Cassius got beaten to a pulp. And, as it would turn out, time started catching up to him, hence why he'd aged about forty years and I didn't recognise him.

I've done plenty of questionable things in my life, and I regret a lot of them. That isn't one of them.

That said, I was having a couple of doubts now that I was tied up, he was armed with a selection of tools suitable either for DIY or torture, depending on your inclination, and of course, a baseball bat. And he intended to go on a 'treasure hunt' to find the other fallen angel in a coin he believed I had hidden somewhere in my body. I didn't, and there was a long story behind that, but he believed I did.

Before he could get started, however, there was a sudden flash of green light from outside, accompanied by a flare of cold, empty power. And then nothing. Cassius looked up sharply, before shooting a suspicious look at me. I shrugged. "Don't look at meeeeee… oh crap."

I'd just figured out what had happened.

Voldemort was here, and suddenly, I was very grateful that Grevane had ambushed me first. He'd been stalking me, just as all the other necromancers seemed to have been, and he'd been planning to kill me and take the book. Grevane had beaten him to it, so he'd just punched Grevane's ticket instead.

"What?" Cassius asked, harsh and suspicious.

"Unless I miss my guess, Grevane's dead," I said. "Voldemort just killed him, and took the book."

Cassius frowned, then shrugged. "The flash did resemble a wanded Killing Curse," he said, as if simply remarking on the time of day, rather than the death of an erstwhile ally. "I think that he has little interest in either you, or I," he continued. "That is good." He smiled. It looked disturbingly grandfatherly. "It means that I can take my time."

He reached into the duffel bag again and pulled out a three-foot length of heavy chain, the kind they used to use for bicycle locks. He held it in one hand while he moved my wrists, lifting them so that I lay flat on my back, my arms outstretched over my head.

"And that is important," he continued, in a calm, reasonable tone, raising the chain. And then he brought it down. Again. And again. And again. It quickly faded into a blur of raw, red agony, until after what felt like an eternity, he stopped.

Then, he leaned down and said, picking up exactly where he'd left off, "Because when I start, Dresden, I want to be free to indulge myself. To really let go and live the moment. I'm sure you understand."

And in that moment, I had a cold, horrifying realisation form at the pit of my stomach.

 _No one is coming to save you, Harry._

But I was damned if I was going out without a fight. I rasped, "I told you."

He paused, eyebrows lifted, and rolled a hand. "Pray continue."

"Told you," I said, and it was marred with a groan. "Told you if I ever saw you again I would kill you."

He let out a low, amused little chuckle and put the chain down. He picked up the linoleum knife. Then he knelt stiffly down beside me, and calmly cut my shirt open and spread it and my duster away from my abdomen. "I remember," he said. "One should never make promises one cannot keep."

"I didn't," I told him quietly.

"Best you hurry then," he told me. "I can't imagine you have more than a few moments to make good." He prodded my belly with his finger, drawing a gasp of pain from me. "Mmmm. Nice and tender now. The better to cut through."

I watched the knife move, slow and bright and beautiful. Time seemed to slow down as it did. Then, it froze, glittering in mid-air like an icicle. Cassius frowned, jerking and wrenching at it, but it didn't move an inch. And I felt a buzz and crackle in the air that made my teeth tingle and my hair stand on end, and I began to laugh like a madman. Because I wasn't alone after all.

Then, a cold, cultured voice full of icy rage cut across my cackling.

"Sometimes, a few moments are more than enough."

Cassius released the knife and whirled, face contorted in a snarl, hands crooked in a spell-casting gesture. But as he did, his muscles rebelled against him, snapping his legs straight, his arms to his sides, and his mouth shut, before forcing him to his knees, as the chain whipped and bound his wrists behind his back and tying them to his ankles, trussing him up like a slaughtered animal. The knife soared downwards, pressed itself against the soft underside of Cassius' jaw, then thrust upwards in a single, savage motion, nailing Cassius' tongue to his soft palate.

And then, out of the darkness, a tall man emerged, with steel grey hair, black clothes, the build of man who'd kept fit in middle age, and an ominous expression. That would have created enough of an impression by itself, if it weren't for the man's eyes. Normally as grey as his hair, they were now the solid blue-white of a lightning bolt, crackling and seething with power and fury.

All of which was directed at Cassius, who was now whimpering in agony and something that the darker part of me thought looked gratifyingly like terror.

Sometimes it's nice to have one of the scariest men on the planet as back-up.

"Harry?"

And he wasn't alone, either, as emerging from his shadow like a tug-boat from the lee of a heavy cruiser, Butters scuttled over to my side, followed by my loyal woolly mammoth, Mouse. He, Butters, looked utterly terrified, pale and shaking – which is an entirely reasonable response to a world class necromancer accompanied by zombies, a fifteen hundred year old psychopathic sorcerer with a grudge, and the arrival of a man who had more than once been mistaken for a wrathful god. But he was here, and going by the way he immediately set to seeing to my injuries, and trying to remove my manacles, he was here to help.

For someone who would probably fit in one of my pockets, wouldn't have weighed more than a hundred and twenty pounds dripping wet, and had absolutely no supernatural powers or super tech weaponry, or even combat training, that was impressive as hell.

"How bad is it?" I croaked.

He exhaled. "Give me more than five seconds, would you?"

I did, then duly repeated my question.

He rolled his eyes at me, then looked serious. "It's pretty hideous, but I don't think he actually perforated the abdominal wall. Skin and tissue damage, but you did some bleeding." He swallowed and looked a little green around the gills. "That's my best guess, anyway."

"You okay?"

"Yeah. Yeah, fine. It's just... I work with corpses because I just couldn't handle... you know... actual living people."

"Heh. You can eat lunch while looking at a three-month-old corpse, but first aid on my stomach is too much to handle?"

"Yeah. I mean, you're still alive. That's just weird."

I shook my head, then winced, and sat up.

"Whoa, Harry –"

"I'm not going to die immediately?"

"Well, no, probably not, but –"

"Then I need to be up and about," I said, and managed to heave myself to my feet, doing my best to ignore the agony that suffused my torso and most of the rest of my body.

As I did, I saw Magneto coldly examining Cassius, who was revolving in mid-air at eye level in front of him. As soon as I stood up, he glanced over at me, and looked me up and down in a professional, concerned manner.

"I arrived in time to prevent any permanent damage, I hope?" he said.

"Well, a couple of minutes earlier would have been nice," I said, managing something that was more grimace than smile.

"My apologies," he said, and he did sound genuinely regretful. "I was delayed." His gaze returned to Cassius. "Now, we come to you," he said, voice icy cold. "Normally, for the offence of torturing and attempting to murder my eldest daughter's beloved, I would have killed you out of hand. However, it may be that you can be of some use to us."

Cassius simply glared at him, full of hatred, and I felt a gathering of power, a dark and deadly swell, one I recognised, because I'd once used it myself.

"Magneto," I warned him.

"I know," Magneto said calmly, and twitched a finger.

That was all he did, I swear. Just twitched a finger.

Cassius' entire body arched and he let out muffled, gurgling scream.

"We'll have no Death Curses here," he said. "Now, Master Dresden. Do you have any use or questions for him? He won't be able to speak, much, but this is a museum and I am sure that a pen and paper can be found somewhere."

I thought for a long moment, then shook my head. "He was just a hanger on," I said. "He was working with Grevane to get at me, and I'm pretty sure that Voldemort jumped Grevane just outside the museum. Anything he knows is useless."

"And do you wish to spare him?" Magneto asked dispassionately. "I doubt he will survive long, in truth. He was quite fragile to begin with."

I regarded Cassius for a long moment, as his eyes widened in sudden, horrified terror. He made a gurgling sound that probably approximated a plea for mercy. For a moment, I was tempted to spare him. Be the bigger man.

This man had spent fifteen hundred years torturing, killing, and sowing evil wherever he went, in alliance with the Fallen and in service to a man so evil the Fallen admired him, revelling in it. He had scorned any compassion shown to him, and sought nothing more than to return to his old life. What he'd done to me had been a mere taster of what he'd done to countless others, and what he would have done to countless more, given the chance.

Besides. I'd made a promise.

When the words came, they were cold and bloodless.

"I gave you a chance," I said. "I warned you what would happen if I ever saw you again." I glanced at Magneto. "Kill him."

Cassius' eyes widened as Magneto twisted his wrist sharply, before suddenly convulsing violently for several seconds. Then, there was a final shudder, and the light in his eyes died.

"It is done," Magneto said quietly. "Recover yourself. I will dispose of the body."

I nodded. "Thanks."

He returned the nod, then strode away, Cassius' corpse following him through the air, lifted by the chains.

"So… you know him?" Butters said, after a moment.

"He's Wanda's dad," I said, rolling my shoulders and testing my range of motion.

Butters blinked, then nodded. "He's where she gets the magic from."

"No," I said, wearily. "He's not. What he's got isn't magic." I grimaced and raised a hand to ward off the questions, then grimaced again as something twinged. "I don't have time to explain it. You heard of Professor Charles Xavier?"

"The geneticist," Butters said, nodding. "I read his work when I was looking into your hand."

"How me and other wizards heal better and live longer," I said.

"Right," Butters said. "Wait, you're saying that his mutation theory –"

"Is entirely accurate, young man," Magneto said, striding back into the room. The late Cassius was nowhere to be seen, and I didn't particularly want to speculate what Magneto might have done with him. "Where Master Dresden and those like him, including my daughter, are a separate branch of the human family tree, so are those like me – also including my daughter, as it happens – and a rather newer one at that. Wanda inherited her magical abilities from her mother, and some more unusual ones from me."

Butters looked fascinated, and I stepped in to cut off the impending nerdgasm and question barrage before it could get going.

"We need to get moving," I said I found my staff, picked it up, and walked to the Buffalo Bill exhibit. Butters got the candle, and then he and Mouse kept pace. I looked around for a second, then picked up a long, heavy-duty extension cord running from an outlet on the wall to power some lights on an exhibit in the center of the room. I jerked it clear at both ends and gathered it into a neat loop. Once I had it, I passed it to Butters.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Preparing," I said. "I found out about the Darkhallow."

"How?" Butters asked, surprised.

"Wanda had a copy of the _Word_ ," I said. "The only reason I was here was to take this copy off the board." I grimaced. "That didn't turn out so great."

"What does it involve?" Magneto asked.

"First off, it isn't a rite. It's a big spell," I said. "It all depends on drawing together a ton of dark spiritual energy."

"Ah," Magneto said. "Hence Halloween."

I nodded. "Right."

"Wait, what?" Butters asked.

"Halloween is when the walls between the worlds are at their thinnest," I said. "And this year, what with all that's gone on, has those walls at their thinnest in centuries, millennia even. All the spirits will be coming out to play, a lot more than normal, because they've been stirred up. And this rite relies on the necromantic energy around animated corpses and manifested shades. The predatory spirits of ancient hunters. It's also boosted by the fear that's been growing since last night. Plus, the past several years have seen some serious magical turbulence around Chicago in particular."

"What about London?" Butters said. "I mean, there was a freaking battle there."

"It's also in Britain, the home territory of the White Council," I said. "And MI13 are headquartered there – they're Britain's spooky secret service, and they've got enough firepower to make even the craziest Kemmlerites think twice. Britain's wanded Ministry of Magic is based there too, though there aren't many of them. Chicago, on the other hand, has got me, Wanda, and that's about it. And if I had to guess, they were probably hoping that the Red Court's offensive was going to draw off Wanda, maybe me too. So, less defences, and lots of turbulence that Kemmler's disciples can put to work for them."

"And the spell?" Magneto asked.

"They gather all the energy together and get it going in a big circle. It creates a kind of vortex, which then funnels down into whoever is trying to consume the energy. Poof. Insta-god," I said.

Butters frowned. "I'm not very clued in on this magic stuff, but that sounds kind of dangerous."

"It is," Magneto said dryly. "Incredibly dangerous. Yet remarkable in its simplicity…"

"Hell, yeah," I said, and crossed the room to a rack of riding equipment. "On both counts. It's not that difficult to put together, technically speaking, but it's like trying to inhale a tornado."

"Holy crap," Butters said. "But how does that help us?"

"None of these necromancers are going to want to see any of their number ascend," Magneto said. "And such a delicate spell, summoning up so much power, will be ripe for disruption."

"Exactly," I said. "But there's a problem. The vortex itself is deadly. It's going to draw off the life of every living thing around it."

Butters gulped. "It will kill everything?"

"Not at first. But when the wizard at the vortex draws down the power, it's going to create a kind of vacuum where all that power used to be. The vacuum will rip away the life energy of everything within a mile."

"Dear God. That will kill thousands of people."

"Tens of thousands, most likely, if not more," Magneto said grimly.

"Only if they finish the spell," I said. "Until then, the farther back you are from it, the less it will do. But to get near the vortex, the only way to survive it is to surround yourself with necromantic energy of your own."

"Only those with ghosts or zombies need apply?" Butters asked.

"Exactly." I lifted a saddle from the rack. Then I got a second one. I hung both over opposite ends of my staff, and picked it up like a ploughman's yoke, the saddles hanging.

"Oh my," Magneto said, a touch of amused respect in his voice. "Are you doing what I think you're doing?"

"Probably," I said. "It's not like there's many alternatives."

I started walking down the stairs. "But wait," Butters said. "What are you going to do?"

"Get to the center of the vortex," I said. "The effort it will take to work this spell is incredible. I don't care how good Cowl, Voldemort, or Selene, or whoever's doing it is. If I hit them as they try to draw down the vortex, it's going to shake their concentration. The spell will be ruined. The backlash will kill them."

"While I, Wanda, and the Wardens deal with the other necromancers," Magneto said, nodding approvingly. "Simple, yet effective."

Butters then stopped abruptly in his tracks. I felt his stare burning into my back. "But, Harry. To get there you'll have to call up the dead yourself."

"Which is against the White Council's Seven Laws," Magneto said. "But Master Dresden has a certain leeway, as apprentice to the Sorceress Supreme in Waiting."

Sorceress Supreme, actually, but I didn't bother to correct him. Instead, I strode on, if only because I thought that if I stopped for more than a moment, I might not get started again.

Magneto carried on, and I swear, I could _hear_ the smile spreading across his face. "And, if I have deduced the purpose of the saddles correctly, he intends to exploit a certain loophole in that specific Law."

"What do you mean?" Butters asked, bewildered.

"The Laws of Magic specifically refer to the abuse of magic when used against our fellow human beings. Technically it only counts if you call up human corpses," I explained.

"But you told me that everyone only calls humans," Butters persisted.

"Right. So while the Laws of Magic only address necromancy as used on human corpses, there usually isn't any need for a distinction. Nutty necromancers only call up humans, because animals don't pack much of a punch. Sane wizards don't touch necromancy at all. I don't think anyone has tried something like this."

"I'm almost surprised they haven't, really," Magneto observed. "In theory, at least, it carries all the advantages of necromancy, with none of the moral downsides."

"Here's hoping," I muttered.

"Of course, it is also completely insane," he continued. "Which is not a criticism, you understand."

"From you, that is not as reassuring as it was probably intended to be."

Magneto chuckled and said nothing.

We reached the main level of the museum, and I turned to Butters.

Who gulped, then darted a look at Magneto, then back at me. "You need a drummer," he said. "And he's going to be occupied."

"Yeah. I won't lie, Butters. It's going to be dangerous," I told him. "I think we can do it, but I can't make you any promises. We're going up against real heavyweights here. Normally, I'd say that this would be an Avengers level problem, and if I could call them in, I would. Even with Magneto's help, it's going to be fifty-fifty." I paused, and glanced at the man in question. "No offence."

"I know very well how dangerous both Selene Gallio and Voldemort are," Magneto said evenly. "And I have seen the handiwork of the Heirs of Kemmler before. Your assessment is perhaps a little pessimistic, but only a little."

"Right," I said, turning back to Butters. "Point being, I don't know if I can protect you."

Butters walked beside me for several steps, his expression serious. "You can't try it without someone's help. And if you don't stop it, the spell will kill thousands of people."

"Yes," I said. "But I can't order you to help me. I can only ask."

He licked his lips. "I can keep a beat," he said.

"Good man," Magneto said quietly.

I nodded my agreement, and reached my destination. I slipped my improvised yoke off my shoulders and dropped both saddles to the floor. My breathing was a little harsh from the effort, even though I barely noticed the pain and strain.

"You'll need a drum."

Butters nodded. "There were some tom-toms upstairs. I'll go get one."

I shook my head. "Too high-pitched. Your polka suit is still in the Beetle's trunk, right?"

"Yes." I nodded. Then I looked up. And up. And up. Another flash of lightning illuminated the pale, towering terror of Sue, the most complete Tyrannosaurus skeleton mankind has ever discovered.

"Okay, Butters." I told him. "Go get it."

OoOoO

"A secret subway line to and from the Mansion," Carol said, looking around the old station, in which rested a gleaming train carriage.

The journey to the city had been remarkably swift, considering that they'd had to cover the best part of 150 miles. Bucky had simply kept his foot flat on the accelerator, and thanks to a mixture of his knowledge of the roads around New York, his experience of high-speed potentially pursued driving, Harry's occasional use of his telepathy to keep, and the modifications made to the van by Hank McCoy, they reached the outskirts of the city within an hour.

After that, Bucky led them into a series of service tunnels, taking a route which finally emerged in Brooklyn, near the New York Transit Museum. After that, slipping quietly down several side-streets, they reached their destination, entering through what was nominally a locked and disused public toilet.

"Well, I'll give Tony this," Carol continued. "He really does think of everything when it comes to paranoia."

"This was Howard's design," Bucky corrected her. "The disused line, related to the old Track 61 under Grand Central, ran almost right under the Mansion, and Howard saw the opportunity. According to Tony, he wanted a discreet way into and out of the Mansion and, come to that, into and out of Manhattan – though Tony assumed his father built it to get mistresses in and out discreetly. Personally, I think he had other reasons. Either way, when Tony redid the Mansion, he saw the advantages, and fixed up the line. Loki also contributed."

"It's here," Logan grunted. "It works. That's all that matters."

Bucky nodded, and in short order, the carriage slipped smoothly under the bay, towards Manhattan Island. Within ten minutes, they rolled to a stop in another, similar, station.

"No security measures?" Gambit asked, eyebrows raised.

"None you can see," Bucky said. "The station in Brooklyn ran a technological and mystical biometric scan on all of us when we entered, and only let me enter once it ascertained my identity, the fact that I wasn't being compelled, and that a known enemy of the Avengers wasn't among us. If any of those criteria had not been met, among others, we would have been treated as intruders."

"And what would have followed?" Uhtred asked, curious.

"Depending on the degree of the assessed threat? Immobilisation, incarceration, or incineration," Bucky said calmly, as he led them up the stairs. "And Avengers Mansion would be locked down, while all the Avengers would all be alerted. As it is, whoever is in the Mansion is automatically informed of any new arrival, able to observe who it is, and decide whether or not they should enter. If no one is inside, JARVIS holds that power."

The door at the top, leading to a lift, opened, and swiftly took them up into the heart of the Mansion, where they were greeted by two unexpected faces.

"Professor Lupin?" Harry said, disbelieving. "What are you doing here?"

"As I keep telling you, Harry, you may call me Remus," Lupin said, his gaze roving over the group. "And I might ask you the same question."

Before Harry could launch into an explanation, however, the second unexpected face appeared: Sirius. Normally, Harry would have been delighted to see his godfather, even considering the circumstances, but was stunned to see him singing a lullaby to the infant Ada. And he was not the only one. The stunned tableau continued for a few moments until Sirius noticed his audience, and looked simultaneously somewhat embarrassed and a little peeved.

"What?" he said defensively, still bouncing on his heels, rocking gently back and forth. "It gets her to sleep, and Remus can't hold a note."

Lupin shrugged.

"Where's Pepper?" Carol asked, puzzled.

"Out," Sirius said succinctly.

"At the Stark Industries Halloween party," Lupin added, by way of explanation.

"And you two are _baby-sitting?_ " Harry said in disbelief.

"Why would one wish to sit on babies?" Uhtred asked, puzzled, though Harry was saved from having to explain by Diana, whose grasp of colloquial English was rather better, and quietly explained it to him.

"We were the only two in the house," Lupin explained. His eyes rested on Harry and he smiled faintly. "Besides… we _have_ had practise."

Harry went red.

"Wait, does this mean you have embarrassing baby stories?" Carol asked gleefully. "About Harry?"

"Plenty," Sirius said cheerfully.

"Which can wait," Bucky said firmly. "JARVIS?"

"Yes, Sergeant Barnes?"

"How many Quinjets are in the hanger?"

"Only one, Sergeant. Quinjet One was taken by Mister Stark and the other Avengers on their joint mission with the White Council. Quinjet Two remains."

Bucky nodded. "Please prepare it for flight," he said. "Set the autopilot as default – I'm not sure if those among us who are qualified pilots will be available. Please also ready the Mansion defences, and if you have any specific protocols for countering Grey Court vampires, and Omega Class beings, prepare them as well."

"Of course, Sergeant Barnes. Flight preparation will take fifteen minutes."

"Grey Court?" Sirius asked sharply.

"Omega Class?" Lupin asked, worried.

Between them, Carol, Bucky, and Harry gave the two of them a concise summary of events.

"We can't fight?" Sirius asked.

"Dracula's too strong," Bucky said. "But even if we could match him, there would still be his servants to worry about."

"Those we faced before," Uhtred began.

"Were lower ranked," Harry said quietly. "Arranged around the routes out of the city to cut off escape. You also caught them by surprise, and circumstances meant that they were unable to use their weapons at full power." He nodded to Carol. "They couldn't risk hitting and hurting Carol – for whatever reason, Dracula wants her alive. Now, Dracula will know that Carol's got back-up, powerful back-up, and so will the vampires he brings with him. And the ones he'll bring with him will be his personal guard, each one a Master, each one turned by him personally. They'll be a great deal more powerful than the ones you faced."

"A good and concise summary, Harry," Lupin said, and smiled slightly. "If I were still your Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher, you would have earned Gryffindor ten points. Though I would add that he will likely also bring cannon fodder, so he can observe and gauge your capabilities."

"Hopefully, he won't get the chance," Bucky said. "Harry, have you managed to contact Jean-Paul?"

"No," Harry said. "He's not in the city, he's not in the state, not in any of the states nearby." He glanced at Carol. "Did he mention something about going back to France on holiday?"

Carol shook her head. "No. I'd call him, but the vampires chucked my phone with my clothes," she said. "I can use the house phone?"

Bucky nodded. "Do it," he said, and Carol immediately left, calling on JARVIS as she went. As she did, Stevie followed her. "Logan, go with her. I don't think vampires could get in here without effort, but considering that Dracula's already used infiltration tactics…" His gaze shifted to the still unconscious Peter Parker. "Better safe than sorry. And you're one of the hardest people to sneak up on that I know of."

Logan regarded Bucky for a moment, then gave him a deeper nod than normal, before following Carol.

Harry made to go after them, but Bucky stopped him. "Harry, I want you to try and contact Charles Xavier," he said. "Uhtred, Diana, keep an eye on him. He's already strained himself once tonight, and Dracula's meant to have serious psychic abilities. If it looks for a moment like something's going wrong – and Diana, you're the most likely of us to know if it is – wake him up. I'd recommend throwing a glass of water on him."

Harry scowled as both Uhtred and Diana nodded seriously, but nodded, then glanced at Parker, now propped up on a sofa. "Should I wake him up? If nothing else, it's getting a bit inconvenient lugging him around everywhere."

Bucky frowned in thought, then shook his head. "Not yet," he said. "He could be useful, but right now, he's a risk. I don't know if Dracula can reach through him the way he could someone he'd sired, but he might be able to at least detect him. I'd rather not risk giving away our location, not until our escape is prepared."

Harry nodded. "And you?" he asked.

"I'm going to check on the Bifrost gates."

Harry nodded again, then left.

"Why not try them first?" Sirius asked.

"Uhtred tried calling on Heimdall earlier," Bucky said, heading towards the stairs. "The storm system above us is Dracula's work, full of his power, and blocked the attempt. The Bifrost gates are Earth-based, but from my understanding of the technology, still relay through Asgard, meaning they probably won't work. If they don't, I want to have other plans already in motion."

"Do you have anything in mind for us, Sergeant Barnes?" Lupin asked mildly.

Bucky nodded. "Sirius, Gambit," he said to them. "I'd like you two to stay with Ada – if vampires can get in, she'll be a primary target for a hostage. I'd also like you to work with JARVIS to keep watch on the surrounding area via any surveillance means still available in the black-out. Sirius, you broke out of one of the most secure prisons in the world, and Gambit, you got in and out of the Red Room's most secure facility at will, without being noticed. It's chaos outside and you're the best placed among us to spot any arrival or attempted infiltration. If and when Dracula figures out we're here and pays a visit, if you even _think_ that you see something that might be him or one of his, I want to know."

Sirius looked unhappy, both nodded, and started calling on JARVIS.

"And me?" Lupin asked.

"With me," Bucky said. "I've got a couple of magic and dark creature related questions."

Lupin nodded and hurried after him.

"You're the dark creature expert," Bucky said. "Are there any spells you can add to the already present wards to potentially slow Dracula and his senior lieutenants down, please do so. And can you apparate or use a portkey with a baby?"

Lupin blinked. "Like Ada?" he asked, then shook his head. "No. She's too young for it to be safe. Floo travel would be safer, but the Mansion isn't part of the Floo network."

Bucky nodded. "Are there any spells to detect anti-apparition wards? Or anti-portkey wards?" he asked.

"Yes," Lupin said. "Though, they aren't my field of expertise, I could manage them. But if you're hoping to detect any enchantment Dracula or his fellow vampires might have laid down to prevent such a thing, I don't think they'd work. Not only do vampires wield a rather different kind of magic to wizards like me, those detection spells work by recognising the ward, and they probably wouldn't recognise vampire wards." His brow creased in a frown. "In truth, I wasn't even aware of the possibility of vampire anti-apparition wards. You think that Dracula might have laid these down on New York? On top of, or even as part of, the anti-Bifrost wards he's laid over several hundred miles of the eastern coast of America?"

"I doubt he's done it alone," Bucky said. "Like you and Harry said, he'll have his more powerful lieutenants with him. But Dracula knows about Carol's connection to the Avengers, and I assume he's informed about the current residents of Avengers Mansion."

"Including me and Sirius," Lupin said.

Bucky nodded, as the entered the chamber containing the Bifrost gate.

"But you don't know."

"In situations like this, I tend to assume the worst," Bucky said, charging up the Bifrost gate. "I'm usually right."

"But if you're wrong?"

"While you're adding spells, I'd like you to briefly attempt to apparate. If you can, I want you and Sirius to immediately apparate Carol and then the boy with her, her younger brother, as far away as possible."

"To get out from under the cloud and be able to call on Heimdall," Remus said, nodding. "And the other children?"

"That's what the jet is for," Bucky said calmly, and input a destination. The gate flared with rainbow light, then faded and died. The display said quite clearly that it had been unable to connect. The next three attempts failed as well. Bucky stared at it for a moment, then exhaled sharply. "Sometimes, I hate being right."

Lupin patted him sympathetically on the shoulder.

As they headed up the stairs, Bucky said, "JARVIS, has Carol succeeded in contacting Jean-Paul?"

"Not yet, sir. However, Mister Thorson wished me to inform you that he has succeeded in making contact with Charles Xavier."

"How long until the Quinjet is ready?"

"Eleven minutes and thirty seven seconds, sir. However, there is a problem."

"What's that?"

"Stark Satellites have picked up an anomalous humanoid presence heading towards New York. Its energy signature does not match any I have yet encountered, though it is similar to the one that the unconscious Mister Parker is emitting."

"But stronger."

"Exponentially, sir. Comparable to either Mister Odinson."

"Dracula's coming to finish the job," Lupin said quietly.

"So it would seem, sir."

Bucky cursed viciously as they re-entered the main hall of the Mansion. Everyone had gathered there once more, and it was obvious by their expressions that they too knew what was coming.

"What's his ETA?" Bucky asked.

"Ten minutes, sir."

There was a moment of silence. Then, Harry aptly summarised the situation.

"Oh fuck."

 **Well. That was eventful. Very eventful. And it is only going to get more so – next chapter, we've got the match-up we've all been waiting for: Harry vs Dracula, the heroic last-stand where our noble underdog is defending his homestead and loved ones and when facing insurmountable odds, miraculously discovers power deep inside him and that his enemy has a glass jaw, delivers the critical blow and falls into the arms of the girl who's just realised how much she really loves him... *snerk* Nah, I'm just messing with you. Harry's screwed.**

 **Still, as a bonus, there will be scenes with Dresden riding a zombie T-Rex into battle. Oh, and yes, that's canon. Not a product of my warped imagination, not a deranged suggestion from a reader, but actual Dresden Files canon. Granted, Voldemort, Magneto, and Selene aren't in the canon version, but the T-Rex is.**


	32. Chapter 32: Bloody Hell V - Battles

**Here we are again. I know it took a while – three weeks, rather than my usual two (or thereabouts). Sorry about that. But it's also double the length of most of my chapters, so I think you're getting a decent deal. And yeah, this one is a biggie. In fact, I would go so far as to say THE biggie, both in terms of length and action. To be honest, I actually considered splitting it in half, it's that big, and if people think it works better that way, I might do so. For now, though, it's all one chapter.**

 **It's not the final chapter of this arc, but it is, probably, the one with the most action. Unfortunately, the Zombie T-Rex has had to be bumped back a chapter, because this chapter was getting long enough as it was, and the Zombie T-Rex scene features a** _ **lot**_ **of additional action, like Wanda vs Selene, Magneto vs Voldemort, etcetera.**

 **No, this one is almost entirely New York focused, building up to the grudge match we've all been waiting for: Harry vs Dracula. But it's not solely build up. See, there's a small matter of the brief, but eventful siege of Avengers Mansion, and the reveal of just who Dracula's 'Fledgling', gifted by Voldemort, is… and, well. One or two other things.**

 **So read on, dear reader, read on.**

The NYPD interrogation room was, as these things went, fairly large. It was bare, empty of everything but a two-way mirror, table, two chairs. At this precise moment, both of those chairs were occupied, one by an older man, one by a younger.

The older, a greying blond man in his early fifties, was taller and more heavily built, with the build of a man who had kept reasonably fit as he'd aged. He had heavy bags under his eyes, and looked exhausted, as if he hadn't slept in days.

The younger, dark haired with a thick streak of white in his fringe, looked tired as well, a tiredness offset by the fact that he was almost vibrating with barely restrained tension.

Another key difference between them was that the older man's problems looked like they could be solved by a good, long sleep, or at least staved off by a strong coffee. The younger man's were rather more extensive.

Bandages covered his torso, particularly the left shoulder, visible from underneath the spare t-shirt the station had rustled up, while the right arm was in a sling. Mottled, fading bruises covered a significant proportion of the rest of his visible body, including what had been a nasty red gash on his cheek, like a duelling scar, that sliced into a significant black-eye. It looked like it had been dealt weeks ago. As it happened, it was only hours old. For just as the younger man looked to be eighteen years old, he was neither as old as he looked, nor as human as he looked either.

"So," the older man said. "Harry Thorson. Or do you prefer Mister Thorson? Or perhaps your highness?"

"Mister Thorson'll do," the younger man said. "Captain Stacy."

The older man didn't obviously start, but there was a twitch. The younger man, Harry, smiled slightly. It didn't look particularly sincere.

"I know," he said. "You didn't tell me your name. But you know who I am. I'm guessing that you know something of what I'm capable of."

"Something," Stacy said, in a deceptively mild voice. "I didn't know that mind-reading was on the list, though."

"You don't know a lot of things, Captain," Harry said, without rancour.

"I know," Stacy said evenly. "I don't know who cut communications and power all across my city. I don't know how. I don't know why. What I do know, though, is that it was calculated. It was part of a plan, and I'm pretty sure that going by one or two things that have been relayed in by radio, almost the exact same thing has happened in Chicago. Now, there are riots up there, and to an extent, there are riots down here too. My city is tearing itself apart, Mister Thorson, and if I wasn't certain that it had some superhuman or supernatural twist to it, I'd have become certain after I got reports that Avengers Mansion had been relocated by force to Central Park and that there was some kind of battle royale going on, on the streets and in the skies."

"Then your people found me," Harry said.

"Yeah. Out cold, beaten to a pulp, with multiple broken ribs, gashes from what seem to be multiple weapons to the chest, symptoms matching a lightning strike, and bleeding from a stab wound to the shoulder that the EMTs say look like came from a sword."

"That's because it did. My sword, actually."

"How did that happen?"

"I was fighting someone. He took the sword off me and stabbed me with it."

"I see," Stacy said. "Additionally, you were clad in the remains of a highly sophisticated form of battle-armour, and you had hit the ground from an unspecified height hard enough to leave a crater in it. All in all, when you were found, you looked like you'd been repeatedly run over by an SUV. They had to peel the battle armour you were wearing off you, and pick several pieces of it out of your body. The gauntlet around your left hand and forearm, under the armour, refused to come off."

"Sounds about right," Harry said.

"You said someone stabbed you, your opponent. Who was he?"

"Dracula."

"I'm not in the mood to play games, Mister Thorson."

Harry smiled a half-smile. "Neither am I, Captain. I've had an absolute hell of a day," he said. "So far, the night's only been getting worse."

"I don't think mine's been all that much better," Stacy said.

Harry opened his mouth, eyes flashing, before stopping, frowning, and shrugging. "Maybe. And I'm sorry about that," he said eventually. "But let me make this very clear. I don't care if you think I'm playing games. And I don't care if you don't like what I have to say. I'm currently running about quarter speed, but that's okay - when I'm ready, I'll leave. When it comes to that, you'll have two choices: whether it's with your cooperation and blessing, or whether it's through the cloud of dust that used to be your outside wall."

Captain Stacy raised a sceptical eyebrow. "Maybe," he said. "In the meantime, though, you seem to be content to stay here. Or at least, you haven't blasted your way out yet."

"Not yet," Harry agreed.

There was a long silence, as Captain Stacy leaned back and regarded the young man opposite him.

"You know, I'm pretty sure that my daughter met you and your father," he said suddenly. "Last Christmas, in Central Park. She was with a friend of hers, Peter Parker. He'd been jumped by bullies, and hurt his ankle. You talked to the two of them, helped take Peter's mind off his ankle, while your dad had a little chat with the bullies, put the fear of god into them. Then, he came back, and with a magic wand, fixed Peter's ankle. She didn't know it was you two, as such, but I put the pieces together after she told me."

Harry frowned. "Gwen Stacy," he said, after a few moments. "Blonde, blue eyed, about yea high?" He gestured a little over five feet off the ground. "Wearing a hairband, I think."

"That's her," Stacy said. "She had a bit to say about you." He regarded Harry evenly. "The impression I got - and I think it was an accurate one, because my Gwen's a good judge of character - was that you were good people, you and your dad both, even when the cameras were nowhere to be seen. All the power and privilege in the world, powers beyond what any human could ever hope to have, and your first response when you saw what was going on was not to walk on by, to dismiss as just kids stuff, but to go over and see what was wrong." He folded his arms. "What I'm getting at is that she never said you were arrogant, difficult, and prone to making threats."

"What can I say? I've had a difficult year," Harry said flatly.

"Clearly," Stacy said dryly. He paused for a moment, then spoke again. "We found you and patched you up," he said, then raised a hand to forestall Harry's next remark. "I'm not saying this to try and guilt trip you into talking. My point is that that is what I, and my officers, are trying to do for this city – patch it up as best we can. And it would help me to do that, help me a great deal, if you told us just what was going on and why."

Harry watched him for a moment, green eyes searching his face. Then, his expression softened slightly, some of the tension going out of it.

"You want to know what's going on, Captain?" he said. "Fine. I have a little time. Someone's coming to pick me up, someone who persuaded me to sit still. Two someones, in fact. That's the only reason why I didn't walk out of here the moment I woke up and the room stopped spinning." He smirked Stacy's expression. "I'm a telepath, Captain. I might be at quarter speed at best, but my range still covers most of New York, and it's getting wider every second. Ever since I came to and figured out where I was, I've been running through my contacts list, to see who's around, and who can help me with what I need to do. Two of those were close enough, and they told me to sit tight. I respect them enough to listen. Especially since…"

He paused for a moment.

"Especially since what?" Stacy asked quietly.

"Especially since one of them has a bigger stake in this than I do," Harry said, then made a face. "And the other one's reminded me why I can't just go running off blindly. They're about…" His expression went distant. "Ten minutes away." He went back into focus. "The clock's ticking, Captain Stacy. For both of us. So, I'd suggest you ask your questions while you can."

Stacy folded his arms. "Fine. Even leaving aside all the reports I've been getting of lightning flashes and energy bursts in the sky and the fact that the so-called Avengers Mansion has somehow been relocated to Central Park, I'd say that's evidence enough you were in a big fight. Hell, let's say for the sake of argument, it was against Dracula, and that he was behind the black-out. I want to know what happened, and why."

"Captain Stacy, part of the reason I'm still here is because I don't know exactly why," Harry said. "Of course, another part is because I still can't feel my left hand, but that's another matter. Besides. It's not like I was using it all that much, anyway."

"I'll settle for what. Can you do that?"

Harry stared at him for a moment. "It won't help you," he said.

"Let me be the judge of that."

Harry sighed. "Fine. Let's make this quick."

OoOoO

There was a moment of silence, then Bucky turned on the rest, expression grim. "We've got ten minutes," he said.

"Nine minutes, forty seven seconds, sir. And counting."

Bucky bobbed his head in acknowledgement. "Let's use them," he said. "Sirius, Gambit – any sign of infiltration, or vampires in general?"

"None," Sirius said. "On the cameras, at least."

Gambit began to nod in agreement, before pausing halfway.

"Ah t'ink ah can see one," he said, in tones of detached calm, staring past the group. Everyone followed his gaze, to see what he was looking at. It took a moment to sink in, as it was not so much where something was, but where something conspicuously wasn't.

Peter Parker had vanished.

"Harry," Bucky said.

"I didn't wake him," Harry said, eyes darting around the Mansion.

"Great," Carol said, in a tone full of false cheer. "Now, not only do we have to worry about vampires _outside_ the Mansion, we have to worry one _inside_ too."

"He's a vampire?" Remus asked sharply.

"Part-turned," Harry said slowly, eyes roving around the room. "He's got at least a day to go, and his sire is dead, so unable to control him."

"His sire was a Master?" Remus asked. "What was their name?"

"Syrus," Carol said, puzzled. "Why?"

"I've heard that name before," Remus said grimly. "A moderately powerful Master vampire, one of the first turned after the disaster at Vienna in 1897 that wiped out many of the Grey Court's elders. Not one of the most martially inclined, but one of Dracula's inner circle, he is – or was – entrusted with the most sensitive tasks, if only because he presented less of a potential threat to his sire."

"Dracula," Bucky said flatly. "Could he control a vampire… his vampire grandson?"

"In theory, he can control all Grey Court vampires," Remus said. "And a great deal else besides. Though I'd heard stories that some of the eldest vampires of the Court that predated Dracula's ascension could resist, at least a little…" He saw Bucky's expression, and sighed. "Being in the same bloodline would make it easier, both to find the boy and control him. Much easier."

There was another moment of silence.

"What kind of range could Dracula control another vampire from?" Bucky asked.

"Hundreds of miles," Remus said. "At least."

Logan swore foully.

Bucky grimaced, then nodded. "Let's assume he has control of the boy," he said. "That means we've got a part-vampire with the nous of Dracula himself running around the Mansion, most likely looking to prevent our escape or let other vampires in." He focused on Harry. "Harry – did you make contact with Xavier?"

"Yes," Harry said. "He's in Bayville, but on his way back to the Institute. He estimates he'll be there in 20 minutes, at Cerebro in 25."

Bucky nodded. "Get scanning for Parker," he said. "Focus on the Mansion's vital systems and the hangar." He raised his voice. "JARVIS, same goes for you. Shut down outside air vents, then scan for movement attached to an anomalous heat signature, and neutralise it. By any means necessary."

"Authorisation of lethal defence protocols is restricted to Mr Stark, Ms Potts, and Captain Rogers, sir," JARVIS said. "However, I will deploy every other means."

"Good enough," Bucky said. "Does the lockdown protocol include the hangar?"

"Yes, sir."

"Can the Quinjet's armaments breach the hangar defences from within?"

"Yes, sir."

"Fine," Bucky said. "Hold the lockdown protocol, but be ready to activate it. And shut down the underground train station."

"At once, sir. Shall I activate the panic room?"

"No point – if it comes down to that, Dracula will be able to just rip it out of the house, and I don't want us to be trapped in a giant puzzle box which I don't know for certain will hold out," Bucky said. "Harry, link us up." Harry nodded and focused, before a telepathic connection snapped into place. He turned to Remus. "Remus, test the apparition possibility."

Remus nodded, and strode to the door.

"Logan, Gambit, secure the hangar."

"You want us t' secure de train, too?" Gambit asked, on his way out.

"I don't want to risk being trapped in a dark, confined space with vampires," Bucky called after him. "And unlike the one under Downing Street, it doesn't go far or fast enough to be worth using as an escape route." He looked up, purely as a formality, and said, "JARVIS?"

"I have detected no sign, sir."

"Are the movement sensors based on contact with a surface?" Bucky asked.

"No, sir. However, with the given database of vampiric abilities and the limitations of my configurations, it is possible that –"

"He's misted," Bucky said grimly. "Two can play at that game. JARVIS, turn up the output of every internal air vent in the Mansion to maximum – let's flush him out."

"At once, sir."

Bucky then glanced at Harry, who, without opening his eyes, replied, frustrated, "I can't get a fix on him. I know he's in the Mansion, but… it's like there's a big cloud of darkness and I can't see what's producing it. I can't get through. The best I can do is tell you that he's not nearby – instead, he's somewhere down below." Then, as Bucky was about to suggest that he stop trying and instead get ready to fight, his eyes snapped open, and his frustrated expression. "I can't get a fix telepathically…"

Suddenly, he slammed his free hand into the floor, and his eyes began to glow gold, darting from side-to-side. A moment later, a smile spread across his face. It looked disturbingly like that of Doctor Strange.

"But telekinetically is a very different story," he said.

"You've got him?" Bucky asked.

"Got him," Harry confirmed. "He's downstairs, under the Mansion – not at the Hangar or the station…" His brow creased. "Somewhere with a lot humming."

At that moment, JARVIS spoke up, a hint of worry in his tone. "Sir? I have detected the intruder. He is inside the arc reactor room."

"Harry," Bucky snapped, but Harry was already gone, passing a now awake and crying Ada off to Uhtred, before tearing his way through the floor with a horrific roar of exploding wood and scream of tearing metal, followed immediately by Diana. "JARVIS! Lockdown protocol, now!" he bellowed over the noise, only increasing as the two demigods tore through floor after floor, before after a few seconds, it morphed into the sounds of a brutal fight.

"Yes, sir."

Metal sheets began closing down over the windows and doors.

"What are you doing?!" Sirius demanded furiously. "Remus is still out there!"

"He's a powerful wizard and neither Dracula's target or an obvious candidate for a hostage," Bucky retorted. "Dracula's ETA is…"

"Two minutes, four seconds, sir."

"Too close. I'm not risking it," Bucky said. Sirius snarled and grabbed his arm.

As it would happen, though, before he could do more than that, a pale figured dived under the closing front door. Both men immediately jumped into defensive positions, but an instant of inspection revealed it to be Remus.

He was not in good shape; horribly pale and streaked in blood, clutching his left hand, he staggered to his feet. Sticking out of it at an unnatural angle were two of his fingers. As Sirius rushed over to help, it became apparent that this was because they'd become detached.

"Jesus," Carol hissed, covering her brother's eyes, as her own widened to owlish extents. "You okay?"

"Splinched," Remus replied. "As soon as I tried to apparate, just across the river to test it." He smiled wanly. "Those wards would seem to pack a punch." He shook his head. "I'll be fine."

"Anti-apparition wards only prevent apparition," Sirius said, frowning as he examined Remus' hand and its detached fingers.

"Modern ones, yes," Remus said. "Older ones, invented by dark wizards who wanted to prevent people from escaping their clutches, or arriving without their consent, are different." He sucked in a sharp breath as Sirius carefully aligned the fingers, then prodded them, and the wound. "Intended to make an example."

"Grindelwald used them," Bucky said quietly. "Either Dracula's got someone on the ground who knows them, or they're part of the cloud."

"On the ground, I think," Remus said, practically staggering. "Already cast, to prevent… prevent…"

"Prevent my escape," Carol said quietly.

"You can't apparate," Sirius said, puzzled.

"I know people who can," Carol pointed out. "Like you two."

"Either way," Bucky said, striding towards the doors to the internal staircases. "We need to move. Flight's our only way out."

Then, the lights went out.

OoOoO

Harry dived through the floor, punching through it as if through water, driving towards the dark presence of Dracula's puppet, cursing himself the whole way. His arrogance, his inattentiveness, and a thousand other things were at fault. Simply put, he'd assumed that once he'd knocked out the part-vampire, that was the end of the matter, and that the only role Parker would play was as… well, a dead weight, frankly.

How wrong had he been?

Before he could dwell on it further, he, and Diana, were into the vast generator room. It was smooth, metallic, and circular, like the reactor it contained, and easily a couple of hundred metres across.

It also contained a vampire, who was briskly operating the controls of the reactor. As soon as Harry and Diana burst in, the former unleashed a lash of flame to drive him away. In response, the vampire – or part-vampire, being controlled by a Vampire King – sprang away from the controls and onto the smooth wall, into which his claws dug and on which he perched like a thin, scrawny spider.

"Dracula," Harry said coldly.

"Asgardian," came the cool reply. If Harry had had any remaining doubts about Dracula's involvement and that it was him possessing Peter, that deep, cultured and contemptuous voice – utterly incongruous coming from a skinny teenage boy – would have erased them.

"You know what I am," Harry said.

Dracula, through Peter, snorted. "Of course I do," he said. "Everyone knows what you are, boy, and everyone knows who you are. Even before the revelation of your father's true nature, you were a curiosity, as 'the Boy Who Lived'. Since that revelation, you have performed deeds fit to shake the Earth. A demigod of your power has not been seen in an age."

Harry struck hard, fast and completely without warning, driving into Peter's mind as he had done to the Death Eaters at the World Cup, attacking Dracula as he had Voldemort. Then, they had fought, briefly, in a mindscape Voldemort had created out of the minds of his minions, before Harry had forced him to flee. It had been the psychic equivalent of a quick and savage one-two, and Harry was hoping to repeat the trick.

This time, though, those psychic blows hit the psychic equivalent of a brick wall. For a moment, Harry stared in shock.

"And yet you are still _nothing_ compared to me," Dracula finished without skipping a beat, dropping to the floor and landing in a crouch. Harry reached out to grab Parker's body and pin him, but Dracula countered swiftly, striking hard at the weakest point of Harry's will and unravelling the attack, before vanishing in a blur.

"Diana," Harry began, tone warning.

"I see him," Diana said calmly, gaze tracking that which Harry couldn't, something heading around the reactor, to the primary power conduits. Then, she darted forward in a blur of her own, looking to intercept.

Harry didn't see what happened next, and in truth, didn't expect to. Instead, he gathered his power and waited as with a thunder-clap of impact, the two blurs clashed, darting across the reactor room like flickering strobe-lights. Then, after one particularly complicated split-second, one shot out of the struggle, smashing through the glowing reactor and out the other side like a cannonball.

And Harry took his chance, hitting the possessed Parker in a flying tackle, gripping his skull like a bowling ball and pouring his will on without pause or mercy as he drove him down, through and into the floor and into the foundations, doing all he could to scramble Dracula's mind, overwhelm him, splinter the adamantine will and focus he was bringing to bear on controlling Parker. Now, on closer examination, the raw psychic power he was dealing with wasn't that much greater than his own… just exponentially better developed and deployed. Clearly Dracula had not spent the last few centuries sitting on his laurels, mentally speaking.

But they weren't all that complicated. Incredibly strong, incredibly efficient, and even relatively sophisticated, but like the vast, medieval siege wall it resembled, not particularly complicated. It was designed by the fruits of centuries of trial and error and hard experience in psychic combat, to withstand anything thrown at it, for an age or more, thus leaving Dracula plenty of opportunity to strike back at the impudent attacker. Whether that was by crushing their mind or eviscerating them with his bare hands was another matter entirely. It wasn't, however, designed to adapt. Nor was it at its best when possessing another, the psychic equivalent of weak foundations.

Harry, by contrast, was very good at adapting, and for a few instants, he got a clear look past that disciplined defence, through a chink in the armour.

What he saw did not reassure him in the slightest.

OoOoO

"Carol?" Stevie whispered nervously.

"The arc's out," Bucky said grimly. "The generator's probably intact, but the power conduits are out."

"You mentioned auxiliary power?" Uhtred said.

"It takes a few moments to activate," Bucky said. "The only reason it's even there was because Natasha, Loki, and I advised Tony to keep the existing back-up generators. The primary back-up is the connection to the city power grid, and normally the change-over takes a split second. Even then, that was only supposed to sustain the Mansion until the reactor was fixed. But with the power out all over the City…"

Sirius turned back to Remus. "All right, Moony, stay still." He tapped the fingers and, with a flash of white light, they reattached themselves. Immediately, Remus straightened up, exhaling long and slow in relief.

"Thank you, Sirius," he said.

"Apparition isn't an option, then," Bucky said.

"And shutting ourselves in is?" Sirius asked pointedly.

"It buys us time," Bucky said. "Maybe not much, but some."

"You were going to shut Remus out," Sirius accused him.

"Sirius," Remus said placatingly, but Sirius shook off the hand on his arm.

"Lockdown protocol takes forty five seconds to complete at full power," Bucky said. "Auxiliary power takes one minute and twenty seven seconds to activate. Two minutes, twelve seconds. Eight seconds after Dracula's projected arrival, eight seconds in which the Mansion would have had limited defences at best, because the auxiliary generators do _not_ possess the power required to run the full suite of the Mansion's defences. Even partially complete, lockdown protocol would have helped. And since it's partially complete, that means that when auxiliary power comes online, it'll take only…" He glanced at the windows in the corridor around them. "Maybe ten seconds to complete." He met Sirius' gaze. "I had to choose between shutting out Remus, and risking everyone else. Including the children. As it is, he's here, and we need to keep moving."

"Sirius," Remus said. "He's right."

Sirius glared at them both, then exhaled sharply through his nose. "Fine," he said shortly.

Bucky nodded and kept moving, focusing as he did. _Logan, Gambit,_ he said. _Is the hangar secure?_

 _It's secure, bub_ , Logan confirmed.

 _Locked up tight,_ Gambit added.

 _Good. Harry? Diana?_

 _Got him,_ Harry said, somewhat bitterly. _And Diana's fine – a little burnt, thanks to being thrown through the reactor, but fine._ He paused. _The connection with Dracula is broken. He's with us, conscious and very confused. I'm keeping a 'watch' on him, and I've put some defences in, so Dracula doesn't pull that again – at least, not without me noticing. But we didn't stop him in time._

 _He's off the board now,_ Bucky said.

 _Only because Dracula doesn't need him any more._

Bucky raised an eyebrow. _He doesn't need an agent inside the Mansion?_

 _He doesn't seem to think so. I touched his mind briefly. That was one of the things I learned. Another was that psychically speaking, he's at least as strong as I am._

 _You're sure?_

 _He was the one who broke that connection. Not me._

Bucky frowned, ruminating on this as the lights flickered back on and the lockdown protocol continued, auxiliary power having come online.

"Why would Dracula not want an agent within the Mansion?" Remus asked, frowning.

"It makes little sense," Uhtred said.

"It makes no sense," Sirius said grimly.

"Oh, it does," Bucky said slowly, placing his human hand against the stairwell wall and closing his eyes briefly. "If you consider one thing."

"Like what?"

"Like the possibility that the agent had already achieved all that they needed to."

OoOoO

Dracula regarded the large townhouse in front of him with cold, assessing eyes. Hardly a natural fortress – in fact, if anything, it was the opposite of a natural fortress, what with how it was surrounded by other buildings, and yet had a clear field of parkland in front of it for a foe to mass. And his researches indicated that it had only recently been converted from relatively ordinary home, long disused, into a dwelling fit for the Avengers.

But he had no doubt that it was well-defended, nevertheless, not least by those within. And, of course, there was the not inconsiderable problem of the Threshold – this place, after all, was not merely a fortress, but also a home, certainly enough of one to bar him entrance.

A lesser vampire might have agonised over this, found some clever work-around, and if Dracula had needed to, he was sure he could have done.

However, every now and then, there was something to be said for the simple solution.

Cupping his hand as if around the bowl of an invisible goblet, he tensed his upturned fingers into a rigid cage. The earth beneath his feet trembled. Then slowly, leisurely, he began to raise his hand. The earth began to groan and crunch, like a giant awakening from a long sleep, cracks like lightning bolts running through the asphalt, earth, and stone around them. The rumbling was a constant thing now, like an earthquake, but Dracula and his servants stood like statues, still and immovable.

And slowly, leisurely, Avengers Mansion began to rise, like an iceberg from the seas, and like an iceberg, far more of it was revealed as having been concealed from view than had previously been visible to the public. With a swift twist of his wrist, Dracula ensured the main mansion were separated from the sub-levels and the hangar, before smoothly lifting it forty feet in the air, across the road, and well into Central Park, lowering it to the ground with the softest of touches.

As soon as it touched down, two dozen lesser vampires that he'd brought with him swarmed the three pieces of the mansion. Eight took the main Mansion, the living quarters that were now in Central Park itself. Eight more took the lower levels, that remained intact. And the final eight took the hangar. Each group had very specific orders: to find Carol Danvers, and if possible, her younger brother as well, and to bring them to Dracula, unharmed and intact. Anyone else was fair game, but they were only to be disabled as far as was necessary. Time was of the essence, and the more living casualties the eventually returning Avengers had to deal with, the more they – or any allies they had – would be delayed. Accordingly, anyone who wasted time or laid an unnecessary finger on the girl would find themselves losing that finger and everything attached in the most excruciating fashion that he, Dracula, could come up with. It was also for this reason that the fledgling that Riddle had 'gifted' him wasn't being used – he was far stronger than the rest, vicious and useful, but primarily as a blunt instrument. He would be withheld, only used if needed. If nothing else, gifts from one such as Riddle, Dracula reflected, were prone to carrying a nasty sting – it was just a matter of working out what it was.

He sensed disquiet among the Masters behind him. They were his most trusted supporters and most elite warriors, and their disquiet was not something he took lightly.

He turned, and raised an eyebrow. "Mikael?"

The younger vampire hesitated. While he was part of Dracula's most trusted group of lieutenants, that only went so far. Particularly on a matter such as this.

"I was wondering," he began nervously.

"Why, if this is a matter of such importance to me, and to us all – which it is – that I am not entering myself," Dracula said. "Why, if I will not enter myself, I do not send any of you, my most loyal. Why I am sending in lesser vampires, some newly turned, others just young, in my stead." He raised an eyebrow. "Does that sum it up?"

Mikael mutely nodded.

"Worry not, Mikael," Dracula said. "It is a fair question." He returned his gaze to the darkened ruins of the house. "And the answer is simple: in chess, the pawns go first."

"My lord?"

"The boy is here," Dracula said. "You know this as I do, for you can smell his blood, just as I do, even if you do not know what it signifies. I do. I know that while he is but a boy, he is also a Prince of Asgard. And a Prince of Asgard is never an opponent to take lightly. Especially not this one. While his father and his uncle are known quantities, he is not." He regarded the Mansion, not batting an eye at the sudden increase in flashes of light and accompanying sounds of violent energy bursts.

"Very little is known about the boy's powers and abilities," he said, tone becoming that of a lecturer. "At first glance, they are considerable, but far from the most impressive I have faced, and about as subtle as his father's hammer. Were that all there was to him, I would crush him without exertion. But. There is more to them, and more to him, then first glance reveals. He has repeatedly survived situations and beings that by rights he should not, and emerged from such battles apparently stronger than ever before. He managed to perceive what was happening to his friend and cross the Atlantic ocean in mere moments to come to her aid, even after I had gone to considerable effort to cloud the sight of the supposedly All-Seeing Heimdall. I did not know he could perform such a feat." His eyes narrowed. "But I think that Riddle did."

"Riddle thinks he can kill you, my lord?"

"No," Dracula said. "Riddle knows very well that he cannot kill me. Does he believe the boy capable of it? Perhaps. I see no reason for him to want to further temper the boy's steel, but maybe he hopes that such a struggle to the death will leave him easy prey..." He shook his head. "He wants, at the least, both of us to be weakened in the ensuing struggle, and made vulnerable. That is the crucial point: he believes that the boy is capable of weakening me. And while Riddle is a slippery little serpent, he is a clever one, who knows the boy's strengths and weaknesses better than almost anyone else."

He turned to Mikael and his fellow lieutenants. "So, why do I not enter and handle this matter myself? In part, because I am disinclined to play the part of Riddle's puppet. In part, because if I must fight the boy, I want to observe his tactics at first hand, so I can defeat him quickly – I have neither the time, nor the inclination, for a long, drawn out fight, which he will inevitably use to try and draw me into the ruins of the house and away from whatever escape plan they have concocted for the girl. Speaking of which…" He waved a hand. "Go."

The lieutenants shot into the sky like dark arrows, vanishing into the roiling dark clouds above, spreading out into a wide circle, ready to stop any escape attempt by air.

And once they were gone, Dracula stood alone, in a still and shadowed pool of silence in a city thrown into chaos.

"And in part," he finished quietly. "Because sooner or later, she will be flushed out. And then, she will come to me."

OoOoO

Within the house, matters were, unsurprisingly, far less tranquil. This might have had something to do with said house being ripped from the earth and being separated into three pieces by the will of a Vampire King when the inhabitants were expecting a drawn out siege. Oh, and it was being invaded by two dozen strong, if somewhat stupid, vampires.

Their individual intelligence aside, however, the attack was swift, well-organised, and ruthlessly focused. Eight vampires burst into the ruined lobby, through the remains of doors, windows, and even the ceiling, the reinforced steel of which provided about as much resistance as cardboard. They searched the rooms immediately surrounding the lobby in less than a minute, pausing for only a few instants to scan each room, before spreading out and methodically searching the building, marking positions with hunting calls that were barely audible to human ears.

They didn't encounter any resistance… at first.

As soon as the house had started to move, those within had started to move as well, to rooms with fewer windows, better lines of sight, and that more generally made them less like sitting ducks. And far, far more capable of organising an ambush.

They had the home field advantage, of knowing what was where. They had the knowledge advantage, of knowing what they were facing. And they had another advantage: vampiric overconfidence.

These vampires were young, and they were powerful, having been turned by Dracula himself. And while they moved with a certain degree of professionalism at Dracula's command, they revelled in that power, believing that since the Mansion's power supply was out, and the Avengers were all far away, they could hunt at their leisure. All they had to deal with, they thought, was a fragmented group of children, non-combatants, and in one case, a strange creature with metal claws and preternatural healing abilities.

What they did not consider was this: if it was so simple, so easy, then why had their almighty lord and master gone to such trouble to divide and conquer? Why had he sent them in, on a mission of such importance, rather than sending in his strongest and most trusted? Why had he not simply done it himself?

The answer to all of these things was that while Avengers Mansion was in ruins and the Avengers themselves were all far, far away, the things and people that remained were a very long way from being helpless.

And if there was any doubt of the truth of this, it was ended by the unmistakable, agonised, and utterly inhuman scream of a vampire that has just been hit in the face with a thermite grenade modified to stick to its target. As other vampires immediately went to investigate, two were struck by well-aimed blasting curses, one removing a hand, the other a large chunk of a torso. This merely seemed to annoy the vampires in question, and would have achieved very little if the latter had not been immediately shot in the head with one of Bucky's specially modified bullets, while the other howled her fury and snatched an antique hardwood chair off the ground and hurled it like a tennis ball towards the source of one of the curses, before another bullet removed most of her head.

Three vampires had been destroyed – or rather, two, and one that could do little more than roll around and scream – in the time it took to count to thirty.

And Bucky Barnes looked around the room as he reloaded, with a mixture of cold satisfaction and wary anticipation. Then, he focused on their one casualty.

 _Lupin?_ He thought. Harry reckoned that while he couldn't necessarily break through Dracula's mental defences, he could keep their own communications concealed and, crucially, silent. This, against an enemy with terrifyingly good hearing, could be invaluable.

 _This,_ Lupin replied grimly. _Has really not been my evening._

The werewolf was propped up against the wall, resting his weight on his right side as far as possible. The chair, though it had struck only a glancing blow, had broken several of his ribs, and his left arm too. After what happened with his fingers earlier, Bucky could see where Lupin was coming from – though, equally, he felt that the wizard was fortunate that the chair had only struck him a glancing blow. Thrown at that speed, a full on blow from such a projectile could well have been lethal.

 _Can you stand?_ He asked.

 _And fight, if need be,_ Lupin said, getting to his feet with Bucky's help.

 _Good._

 _Are you going to finish off that vampire?_

Bucky glanced back at it. _No. It's too far gone to do any damage, and its screams should draw the others in._ He rolled up his left sleeve and accessed a screen on his arm. Several somethings beeped. _It might help reduce their numbers. It might make them afraid._ _And it'll definitely cover the sounds of our movements._

Lupin nodded, expression troubled, but otherwise didn't reply as he fixed his arm, which he tested with a grimace. _Healing charms aren't my area of expertise,_ he explained at Bucky's expression. _So my ribs will have to wait._

 _But your arm is functional?_

 _More or less._

 _Good,_ Bucky said curtly, as he led the wizard deeper into the ruined Mansion. A few minutes later, there was an intense, but somehow muted sounding explosion, and the screaming vampire was silenced. The trap had been sprung. A couple of minutes after that, they emerged into one of the deepest surviving rooms of the main part of the Mansion, where they were greeted with an axe so sharp it could have been used as a razor.

 _It's us, Uhtred,_ Bucky said, and only then did the young Asgardian relax. It was unclear whether the vampires were capable of shapeshifting, or putting on glamours, but Bucky felt it was best not to take the chance – and telepathic communication provided an extra layer of security against such infiltration attempts. _Any trouble?_

 _One vampire,_ Carol supplied, nodding to a rapidly decaying corpse on the floor, which her little brother was staring at with disquieting focus. Its head had been bisected vertically, before being removed entirely. _Uhtred got it._

 _Did it manage to call any others?_

There was a round of uncertain looks.

 _Then we need to move,_ Bucky said.

 _Until what?_ Sirius asked, breaking his silence. He'd been tending to his godson's goddaughter who, mercifully, seemed to somehow recognise that now was a time to stay quiet. That, or he'd put her into an enchanted sleep.

 _There are twenty four of these vampires running around various parts of the Mansion, divided into three squads of eight – one for the home, one for the lower levels, and one for the hangar,_ Bucky said calmly. _Harry, Diana, and Peter will be fine, and will likely have their squad disposed of soon. Of our squad, Remus and I took out three upstairs, Uhtred dismembered one, and a fifth was blown up by a trap I set up. That leaves three._

 _Then why shouldn't we just wait here?_ Stevie asked quietly.

 _Because even one of those vampires could kill us all if it catches us off-guard,_ Bucky said. He glanced at Uhtred. _With one possible exception._ His gaze returned to Stevie. _We've killed five of them, but four of those were killed in ambushes, and they were all over-confident. They'll be wary now. They know that we can and will fight back, so they'll be on their guard, and they won't just walk straight into a trap like before. Especially since we don't know for certain that Uhtred killed that vampire before it could get off a distress call._

 _The last time a vampire let out a distress call, you used it to draw them into a trap,_ Lupin pointed out.

 _And they'll know that. But they'll also know that they're on the clock and that their lord and master is waiting right outside and getting less patient by the minute. He has a low tolerance for failure, and these are cannon fodder. More powerful cannon fodder than those encountered previously, but still cannon fodder._

 _Meaning that they have much more to fear than just dying at our hands,_ Lupin finished heavily.

Bucky nodded. _Moving isn't a good option. It risks exposure,_ he said bluntly. _But this location is probably compromised._ He glanced around the room. _Even more than the rest of the building. But it's better than the alternatives, and the Panic Room upstairs is the next safest spot to fort up._

Everyone present reluctantly agreed, and Bucky briskly organised them into a column with Bucky himself at the head, Uhtred bringing up the rear, and Lupin and Sirius sandwiching Carol and Stevie, the latter of whom was carrying Ada.

Their silent footsteps, made that way by well-applied enchantments from Sirius and Remus, were unimpeded, as they reached the second level.

It was perhaps unfortunate, then, that they were promptly ambushed.

OoOoO

The vampires were, Harry reflected, much more durable than those he'd faced on the motorway and in the forest. Not as powerful as they might be, of course, and certainly not a patch on the senior members of the Court, but there was a difference – if the ones Harry had faced on the motorway were like armoured cars, these were like light tanks; faster, stronger, tougher, and much more dangerous. Physically, at least, they were comparable to Syrus, the irritating and deceptively dangerous Master vampire who'd kidnapped Carol and her brother in the first place.

Normally, Harry wouldn't dwell so much on the physical capabilities of his opponents. However, the fact that only his enhanced reflexes, his improved psychic senses, and a healthy dose of luck had prevented one of the vampires from using their talons to eviscerate him.

As it was, he'd escaped with only a gash through his leathers, a couple of red lines across his stomach, and a pounding heart, as his brain was swamped by adrenaline and went into overdrive, calculating and assessing the threat. His instinctive response, thankfully, was more immediately helpful, and came in the form of a fireblast that burnt the vampire's outstretched arm and face to the bone, and a roundhouse kick that sent it staggering.

Remarkably, though, it was still standing, and before Harry could permanently rectify that, he had to block a bolt of lightning from another vampire, wielding what looked like a sledgehammer with a snarl on his face. That snarl turned to bafflement as Harry made a savage ripping gesture and telekinetically tore the head of the hammer off and hurled it towards Diana's opponent at somewhere just south of Mach speed, who barely ducked it in time. Then, Harry slammed his hand downwards, pinning the vampire to the floor.

"Lightning and hammers," he said flatly. "You thought that _lightning_ and a _hammer_ would work on _me_. No, more than that, you thought you could take me in a straight fight, when I could see you coming. I'm seeing three possibilities: either you have a terrible sense of humour, the worst luck in the world, or you are really arrogant and really, _really_ stupid. I'm leaning towards the latter."

The vampire snarled. "You slew my brother," he said.

"… So?" Harry asked. "And you're going to need to be more specific than that." Then, he paused. "Wait. Your brother – smarmy, pretty powerful, smart-but-not-as-smart-as-he-thought-he-was, went by the name of Syrus?"

"Yes," the vampire hissed.

"I didn't kill him," Harry said. "I just beat him up. A friend of mine did the actual beheading." His eyes began to glow. "Hmm. I can see the resemblance – there's some real psychic power in you, to go with the physicals. Low Alpha class, at least. That's pretty good for a junior vampire; certainly stronger than most of your friends, and they'd require me to put in an actual effort to crush."

"Good enough to see you –" the vampire began.

Harry cut him off with two cold, calm words.

"Bored now."

The vampire exploded, causing everyone fighting to stop and stare. Not a drop landed on Harry who, without batting an eye or sparing a glance for the spatter marks of ex-vampire, drew his sword and quick-stepped over to Peter, who was actually holding his own surprisingly well against two vampires, each at least twice his size. And giving a running commentary, to his opponents' obvious and increasing irritation.

"So, I've got to ask, what kind of stuff should I be looking up to get an idea of what it's like to be a vampire? Anne Rice? The _Underworld_ films? _Buffy_? _Twilight_? Please, please, let it not be _Twilight_ , I don't want want to sparkle. Hey, do you think they used glitter on the actors in those films? I mean, having to cover yourself in glitter every day, can you _imagine_ …"

"Do. You. Ever. _Shut. Up?"_ one of the larger vampires, a bearded, biker looking type, roared in frustration, swinging wildly at Peter. His roar quickly turned to a scream as Harry's sword flickered out in a silvery blur and removed the arm at the elbow, a scream that was cut off as swiftly and sharply as his head.

"I don't really know him, but I'm guessing not," Harry said, then snapped his fingers, igniting the other of Peter's opponents. "Oh, and by the way, _Buffy_ is the most accurate of the ones you mentioned."

"Good to know," Parker said, somewhat wide-eyed at the rapidly withering corpse. "Do I have to wear black leather and brood? Or dye my hair?"

"I don't _knoooooooooooooooooooooow!"_

Harry's reply was not quite as coherent as it might have been, as the inflamed and thus infuriated vampire remained intact. Or at least, intact enough to grab him by the shoulder and hurl him across the room like a discus, hard enough that only some reflexive telekinesis prevented him from denting the reinforced steel wall and splattering over it like a squashed frog. Even so, it knocked the breath out of him and caused him to drop to the floor from ten feet up.

"Okay,"

"These are lesser vampires," Peter chipped in. "I know that… somehow." Then, he yelped and narrowly evaded a furious punch from another vampire, almost dancing away. "What? Don't growl at me like that! It's true!"

"If that is so," Diana managed, through gritted teeth, as she and one of the vampires struggled for supremacy. "Then… 'lesser'… is… clearly… a very… relative… TERM!"

She punctuated that last with a surprisingly deep roar of effort as she suddenly relaxed her resistance and fell back. The surprised vampire fell forward, onto her coiled legs, which snapped out and sent the vampire flying through the ceiling.

"Wow," Peter said.

"Stare later, help Harry now," Diana said crisply, as she spun to deal with two more vampires, who were treating her more warily than their fellow had.

"What?" Peter asked, then turned to see that the remaining two vampires were grabbing Harry, pinning him to the wall, and taking turns to deliver hammer-blows to his body. "Oh. Oh!"

He crossed the room in a blur, ready to protect the downed and dazed demigod who he didn't know, against people (vampires) who he didn't stand a chance against and who a creepy whispering voice deep inside was telling him he should either be fighting with, or using to weaken said downed demigod and make him easier to finish off and drain of blood, to advance either himself or his ultimate lord and master, his King, Dracula, even though it was kind of weird for him, as a proud American, to refer to anyone seriously as his King, they must have seriously screwed with his mind...

All of this passed through his mind in a split second, before he even got halfway across the room, his normally lightning fast mind having been kicked into overdrive by the life or death situation and the fact that he was now apparently part vampire – the explanation had been very brief – and wasn't that weird?

As Harry would later remark, while most people who heard Peter gabble were amazed that someone could possibly talk that much, a telepath could have told them that the real miracle was that he didn't talk even _more_.

"Hey!" Peter yelled, drawing the vampires' focus.

It only lasted for a moment, but a moment was all that was needed. Harry's eyes snapped into focus and he spat something into the nearer vampire's face, where it promptly reacted like potassium and water. That is to say, it exploded in a burst of blinding white flame, causing the other vampire to swing a punch driven by instinct and fear, one that was so swift as to be invisible to the human eye. It would have dented tank armour. What it would have done to human, or near human, flesh and bone did not bear thinking about.

Instead, however, there was a horrific, explosive shattering crunch and the vampire's arm crumpled like a car bonnet hitting a brick wall as it struck an invisible barrier. It staggered away, apparently too shocked and in too much pain to scream – a deficit which its companion was eagerly making up for as it scrabbled away at what was left of its own face, clawing at flesh and bone to try and remove the furiously burning spittle that had dissolved an entire cheek and an eyeball. It didn't get the chance to come out of shock, however, as Harry swiftly decapitated it, and turned its head to ash with a pinpoint fire-blast before it hit the ground, before putting its fellow out of its misery.

"Dracula's here," he said bluntly.

"What?" Peter asked, vaguely aware that his body was caught between asking questions and being sick.

"You were wondering why the vampires were as strong as they are," Harry said.

"Actually, I was kind of busy wondering if I was going to survive tonight, and how I ended up like this," Peter said.

That got him a fleeting smile. "That too," Harry said, before sobering and looking over at Diana.

She was, it seemed, doing just fine, despite the fact that the vampire she'd kicked up through the ceiling had rejoined the fight, and Peter said so.

"She is," Harry agreed. "Probably because she's stopped trying to match them for strength, where they can match her, and is going with skill, where they can't even come close."

"But?"

"But they're tough enough that this is going to take too long," Harry said. "And when it comes to monsters attacking my friends, I have absolutely no interest in fair fights." He cleared his throat and raised his voice. "If I can have your attention, I'd like to explain something," he said, as all four combatants turned to look at him. "I'm fast, and I'm strong. But unlike my friends, I'm not as strong, or fast, as you are – I can lift and carry a fridge, while you can lift and throw around fully loaded 4x4s. Diana, here, could probably juggle tanks. I can break city speed limits easily enough, and outrun most cars over a short distance. You can cross cities in minutes. And as for reflexes…" He smiled wryly and gestured at bleeding wound on his chest. "I think it's pretty clear that I'm not on the same level." He shrugged. "Physically, you're better than me in every way. I admit it. I accept it. Take a bow, ladies and gentlemen, you're a notch above a Prince of Asgard." He nodded at Diana. "Hell, you're on the same level as the daughter of Hercules. Hand to hand, there's no way we can win."

Two of the vampires, a man and a woman, began to smile. The third, however, the one that had been kicked by Diana, was starting to look worried. And he was right to do so, as Harry's smile vanished, and the remaining three vampires found that they couldn't move.

"But as your minds make very clear, you thought it stopped there," Harry continued. "And that's where your mistakes began. Because when it comes to psychic abilities, magic, and energy manipulation in general, it's the other way around."

His eyes began to burn gold.

"And that's where your mistakes end. Because once I knew you were there, and actually focused… you didn't stand a chance. Bye-bye."

Each of the vampires was briefly outlined in golden-white light, before each fell in six separate pieces – four limbs, one torso, and one head. All of those pieces were very dead.

Diana folded her arms and eyed Harry. "I had them," she said, a bit of an edge to her voice.

"I know," Harry said. "Sorry about that. But it would have taken too long."

Diana raised an eyebrow.

"The talking had a purpose," Harry said. "I want to get Dracula's attention and, if possible, keep it."

"You said he's here," Peter interjected, fear in his voice. "Dracula, the big bad, is here."

"A couple of hundred yards that way," Harry confirmed, waving off towards the park-land. "Considering how seriously he's taking this, it makes sense that we'd be dealing with a better class of minion. They're babies, by vampire standards - from what I can tell, none of the ones currently in the Mansion are more than a year turned. As a result, while they're stronger than the ones we saw before, they've actually got less skill and experience with their powers; hardly any of them can even turn to mist, let alone throw lightning. The only vamp I saw that could do that claimed to be the brother of Syrus, the Master vamp that Carol and I dealt with earlier. I'm not sure whether he meant that literally or not." He waved a hand vaguely. "Like it matters. He had some power, no brains, and didn't know when to shut up."

"Whereas you, of course, always do," Diana said dryly.

Harry opened his mouth indignantly, paused, then glowered, before shaking his head. "The good news is that they're younger."

"And the bad news?" Diana asked, rolling shoulders and readying herself for another fight.

"Dracula turned them personally," Harry said. "Which is why they're powerful, and as far as I can tell, he was using them as puppets."

"Like he did with me," Peter said quietly. "That part I do remember."

"Not quite," Harry said sympathetically. "He possessed you outright. Them, it was more of a loose control, getting them to go the places and do the things he wanted them to. Though he probably could have pulled the outright possession if he wanted to." He took a deep breath. "Some good news is that Dracula sent twenty four of these guys in. We've taken out eight, Logan and Gambit took out six of theirs – apparently Logan lured them into the path of the Quinjet's guns and only the two that could mist survived being vaporised. They ran, after that. And Bucky and the others have taken out another five."

"Which means we've got five left," Peter said.

Diana cracked her knuckles. "I see no problem," she said.

"More bad news," Harry said. "Dracula's here. And he's brought his ten chief lieutenants, who're about as strong as, oh… Tony in one of his armours? One of his stronger armours. With lots of additional superpowers."

"As well as, you know, Dracula himself," Peter put in.

"Who's a match for my dad," Harry said, nodding, then glanced at Diana. "And probably yours."

Diana nodded grimly.

"Who is your dad?" Peter asked, curious.

"Hercules," Diana said.

Peter stared at her, then at Harry.

"No, she isn't kidding. Yes, he's real. Yes, I've met him. Yes, he'd be really very helpful right now," Harry said. "But he isn't, so we need a plan instead."

"Have you _got_ a plan?" Peter asked.

"Yes," Harry said.

"Oh, thank god."

"If you had ever heard one of his plans, you would not be saying that," Diana said dryly, before regarding Harry seriously. "What is your plan?"

Harry paused. "Well, as far as I can tell, all his minions, covering every route out of the city? Squads like the one that kidnapped Carol, and the ones that tried to recapture her?"

"I do," Diana said grimly. "What of them?"

"I don't," Peter said, then, after Harry glanced irritably at him, blinked. "And now I do. Man, do you help with Spanish tests?"

"They're all coming," Harry said, ignoring him. "Here. Now."

"How many?" Diana asked.

Harry opened his mouth to explain. But before he could, his head suddenly whipped around, eyes aglow, face contorted in an explosion of icy fury. Then in one fluid motion he drew his sword and exploded into the air, heading straight towards an unknown destination.

"… Is that the plan?"

OoOoO

Meanwhile, Bucky had led what he privately thought of as a crocodile of civilians down to the back of house, the normal connection to hangar. Unfortunately, as he'd half expected, he found that it was separated off. He also found that the remaining three vampires of the squad sent to ambush them, and two others, were lying in wait for them. That was bad.

The fact that one of the vampires had just revealed the ability to transform into a bear – a gargantuan bear, in fact, a monster from a bygone age – was worse.

There was a moment of stunned silence, in which Bucky frantically ran through his options. There weren't many of them. Normally, a ton of carnivorous bone and muscle would have been extremely hard to stop, especially in the open, with civilians and four other vampires to worry about. It went against all his advantages and his instincts. But it would have been possible – frankly, Bucky had expected to end up in a stand-up fight well out of his weight-class at some point, and had therefore prevailed on Tony to put some very impressive weapons in his arm.

But this wasn't a natural bear, by any stretch of the imagination. It was a vampire in bear form, a creature the size of a car with the ability to think, reason, and presumably with a similarly enhanced physique, likely able to shrug off even his weapons. Fighting it head on would be like grappling with a hairy, psychotic tank, and even for the Winter Soldier, such a thing would be a losing proposition. Hell, Bucky thought, as he prepared to try anyway, it would have been a losing proposition for anyone short of Thor, the Hulk, or one of Tony's heavy-combat armours.

But, as the bear let out a deafening roar that had to have echoed across the city, before charging straight at them at speeds befitting an avalanche, and Bucky levelled his armed arm and pushed the children behind him, he realised one crucial thing.

No one, it seemed, had told Uhtred this.

The bear was thirty feet away when it started its charge. It was ten feet away when the Asgardian teenager, letting out a creditable roar of his own, met it head on, swinging his axe up into the transformed vampire's muzzle.

The impact was brutal, more akin to a high-speed car crash than anything natural, with blood, gore, and shattered fangs flying everywhere, as Jarnbjorn, the axe formerly wielded by the Mighty Thor, remained buried up to the eye in the vampire's now split jaw. The sheer momentum the creature had built up meant it kept going, bowling Uhtred over, the two barrelling back into the house like a superpowered wrecking ball as mortals and vampires alike scattered from their path.

Bucky took advantage of the opportunity to pick out the closest vampire. She was, unwisely, looking away from him, focusing on Carol and Stevie. The small part of him that was still the Soldier coldly noted the error in focusing on an objective to the exclusion of accounting for all extent threats.

The rest of him was just interested in dealing with the threat to Steve's great-grandchildren, which he did in short order, putting three neatly grouped rounds in her head, ensuring that there was nothing solid left above her lower jaw.

Carol, to her credit, didn't bat an eye at the carnage, instead raising her shield close to ward off another vampire. She also pulled her brother, who did bat an eye and, in fact, looked as if he was about to be sick, but to his credit, was clutching the now awake baby Ada to his chest, close to her. He had, impressively, managed to calm the fretful baby.

"I've got to say," she said, in a forced conversational tone. "I didn't see the bear coming."

"Neither did I," Bucky admitted.

"I'm guessing they didn't see Uhtred coming, though," Carol remarked. "I mean, I know he's Asgardian, and that he's growing into a serious badass even by Asgardian standards – Sif doesn't train just anyone, after all – but…" She twitched as from within the Mansion, a mangled bear's roar was punctuated by what was either an Asgardian battle-cry or some very inventive Asgardian swearing, and then the earth shaking and a string of violent sounds of the sort more usually associated with major demolition. "I wasn't expecting that," she finished, before shrugging. "I guess hanging around Harry and Diana would put anyone in the shade, though."

"Probably," Bucky agreed, noting that her casual tone and topic struck a sharp contrast to her tense body and constantly moving eyes, which were trying to watch all three of the remaining visible vampires at once. "Most of the vampires dispatched to find you seem to have had little more than the standard speed, strength, and durability, though greater than normal. They're young, very young by vampire standards."

"Meaning cannon fodder?" Carol asked.

"Yes," Bucky said grimly. "Expendable and relatively easy to control, but stronger than most lesser vampires, they were sent in to test our resistance, and…"

"And?" Carol asked apprehensively.

"And flush you out," Bucky finished. "But Dracula isn't the only one with minions." He glanced at his arm and nodded his satisfaction. "JARVIS should have succeeded in booting them up by now."

"Booting up what?" Carol asked.

Her answer came less than five seconds later, as what looked like seven fireworks shot straight up from the ruins of the lower levels of the Mansion. When they got a thousand feet up, however, instead of exploding, they rocketed down towards the three open vampires, pairing up against each, while the seventh, dark and sleek, came in to land by Carol and Bucky.

"Some of Tony's new armour designs," Bucky said, nodding at the one in front of them, which was opening up like an oyster shell. "They're not all complete, but they are all flight capable. This one's your route out."

"I'm not leaving –" Carol began, then wheezed as Bucky delivered a lightning fast blow to her stomach, ripped her shield away from her while she was doubled over, and shoved her into the armour, which started forming up around her.

"Yes, you are," Bucky said. "We can't get to the hangar without exposing ourselves to Dracula, and the armour's at least twice as fast as the Quinjet, anyway. It's definitely faster than Dracula." He jabbed her in chest. "Dracula is here for _you._ He doesn't give a flying fuck about the rest of us. The longer you're here, the more he's going to keep attacking the rest of us, and make no mistake, the next attack won't be a test, it'll be for real, and we won't stand a chance. If you're gone, with no means to contact you, there won't be any reason for him to stay and we won't serve any value as hostages."

"And how do I know that he won't just kill you all anyway?" Carol demanded, struggling against the armour.

"You don't," Bucky said. "And he might. But since he wanted you taken quickly and quietly, without being identified as being behind it, I figure he won't. He doesn't want a war with Asgard or the Avengers." And as he spoke, a small, torpedo shape drifted up beside him and opened up, much as the armour had. "And," he said, taking Ada from Stevie's arms and placing her in the cot, soothing her as he did, before closing it and activating it. "The matter of the baby is already taken care of, thanks to Tony's paranoia," he said, as the cot took off, then shot into the skies. "It's programmed to go to the Institute, and at the speeds it can go at, it'll be there in around ten minutes, at most. Plus, it's armed." He waved a hand. "Dracula doesn't give a damn about her, she'll be safe there."

"Then if you think I'm going to leave Stevie –"

Bucky punched her right between the eyes before she could even blink. "I don't," he said quietly, carefully closing the armour up behind her. "You've got too much of your great-grandparents in you for that." He cleared his throat. "JARVIS, take her out of here. Fast as you can, get her to the nearest Bifrost gate outside the cloud, and take her to Asgard."

"Yes, sir."

Bucky watched as the armour took off, then vanished into the dark and stormy night, before he swept his gaze across the battlefield, and noted to his satisfaction that while the other six armours were destroyed, between them and the two wizards, the visible three vampires were destroyed. Unfortunately, one of said wizards – Sirius – was down, and looked to be in not the best of shape after having what looked like a significant claw-mark on his chest, and what might have been a stake stabbed into his shoulder by a vampire with a sense of irony. Additionally, the battle royale between Uhtred and the bear-form vampire, meanwhile, seemed to be continuing apace.

However, since Lupin was tending to Sirius, who seemed to be stable, and realistically, there was nothing Bucky could really do to assist in either scenario, he opted not to intervene, and instead turned to Stevie, who was regarding him steadily.

"Anything to say?" he asked.

"You really think Dracula will leave us alone?" the boy asked. "I mean, Carol's got powers. I think I've figured out where they came from. And if they did… maybe I've got them too."

"You've got the potential," Bucky said, opting for blunt honesty. "But Dracula doesn't have the time or know-how to wake that up. And like I told your sister, killing all of us would just start a war with the Avengers at best, Asgard at worst. He's not stupid, he knows that he can't beat Asgard."

"And the Avengers?"

"If it was a straight up war, maybe. But he knows that they'd come for him, personally," Bucky said. "And even he's not likely to survive that."

"Is that gonna be enough to convince him?"

"Maybe," Bucky said. "Maybe not. I've got something else to offer him, though."

Before Stevie could ask what that was, a vast ball of blood, bone, and rage erupted from the ruined Mansion, tearing a van sized hole in what remained of one of the walls. It was impossible to tell which limb belonged to which combatant, at first glance. Then, Uhtred's still shining axe rose and fell several times in hacking blows, before with a very final thump, the bear's head rolled away, and both it and the body began to shrink back into the rapidly withering form of the vampire it had been, albeit covered in the slimy and swiftly evaporating ectoplasm that had provided the extra mass. With that, Uhtred emerged, bloodied and savage looking, appearing to be something every bit as primordial as the demonic beast that he had just slain.

"The battle is won," he said, with an unmistakable tone of exhausted satisfaction.

Unfortunately, he was very wrong about that.

OoOoO

Dracula watched Carol's evacuation by armour with what might be called an astonishing lack of concern, especially considering that it might well be capable of outrunning him in straight flight. Indeed, the only expression that crossed his face seemed to be one of mild surprise.

"So, she flees," he murmured. "The most sensible course available, but not the one I would have expected her to take." He shrugged. If anything, he mused, it suited his purposes. He turned and regarded the fledgling, who had been held in place only by well-justified fear of Dracula himself, imposing his will on the lesser vampire. "Indulge yourself, but destroy the Quinjet first, then focus on the Asgardian Prince and the Olympian Princess. They are flight capable, and they are the ones I want neutralised. Understood?"

"Understood, my lord," the giant junior vampire rumbled.

Dracula nodded, then took off. The monster was dispatched, the potential problems would be distracted, and the girl, the final piece in his puzzle, who thought to escape through skies he controlled… she would soon be his. While he could not say that all had gone as planned, for it had demonstrably not, all was turning out well enough.

OoOoO

Harry soared out of the ruined lower levels of the Mansion to see scenes of devastation. The shattered ruins of the Mansion itself lay sprawled across the nearer parts of Central Park, like a vast and decaying beached whale. That didn't draw his eye, though. What drew his eye was the ruined Quinjet, which had clearly been used as a kind of crude projectile, and the battle being waged in front of it.

A huge, bulky figure, the pale of something that had crawled out from under a rock, was chasing a group of smaller figures, moving with frightening speed and deceptive agility for something so large. That's what Harry noticed on his first glance. His second glance, though, confirmed the fears that had drawn him to this part of the battlefield at such speed. The huge figure, the huge vampire, was particularly targeting the smallest figure, the one the others were trying to protect – Stevie. However, going by the body on the ground that Harry spotted with a jolt, he wasn't too choosy about his victims.

The third glance, though, was what settled it. It wasn't so much a glance as a good, long, up-close look. Because the figure looked up, revealing a blood-soaked mouth, and gave a cruel smile, and even through the blood and twisted vampire 'game face', Harry recognised him.

It was Dudley Dursley a.k.a. 'the Beast'. His cousin. Former local bully, turned mutant menace and Red Room psychopath, who Harry had last seen running for the hills. And now, it seemed, he was back.

"Hey, freak!" he bellowed. "Heard I missed your birthday!" He reached down and grabbed the limp body. "Here's your present!"

Then, easily as tossing a crumpled up ball of newspaper, he hurled the body at Harry at an appreciable fraction of the speed of sound – certainly fast enough that Harry barely caught it, and that only with his telekinesis. The body slammed into him, limp and terribly cold, and blood spattered all over his body and face. For a heart-stopping moment, Harry thought that he was holding a corpse. But no, there was something in there, a very faint spark.

And then, Harry got a good look at the body's face. It was a little hard to recognise at first, what with the talon marks marring his face, destroying one eye entirely, and the gaping hole in the chest.

"I had a go at him first," Dudley said, sounding cruel and thoroughly pleased with himself. "See, he had a go at me, stuck his little axe right here." He tapped his left leg. His clothes were ripped, but aside from an angry red mark, his leg looked healed. "So I had a drink." He let out a deep laugh. "Man, you Asgardian freaks taste really good. So I decided to have something to eat too."

Harry only vaguely registered this, staring as he was at the lifeless Uhtred, and slowly drifting to the ground, legs crumpling beneath him. He heard a rush of air behind him and hurried footsteps, recognising Diana and Peter's mental presences, with Bucky's close behind.

"Harry? Harry, what is… oh," Diana said. "Oh no."

"Oh man," Peter said. "Oh man, is he…"

"Still alive?" Harry said, in a cold, dead voice, like ashes given words. "Just about."

"He'll live," Bucky said, after swiftly examining Uhtred. He paused, then at Harry's expression, quietly said, "Probably."

Harry closed his eyes and bowed his head. "This is my fault."

"Aw, is the baby freak going to start crying?" Dudley taunted.

A smell of wood-smoke began to fill the air. From the ashes a fire was being woken.

"Harry," Diana said, voice quiet and urgent. "This is _not_ your fault. You, Peter, and Bucky should tend to Uhtred, take him to healers." She looked up at Dudley, gaze hard. "I will handle this one."

Harry shook his head silently.

"Harry," Bucky said softly, placing a hand on his shoulder. "Come on. We can get the others out of here, get Uhtred seen to. He'll be fine. Just focus, and breathe. You're angry, and god knows you have the right to be, but that's not the mission – saving Uhtred, keeping Stevie safe? They are."

Harry didn't reply, but the scent of wood-smoke seemed to die down somewhat, and some of the tension. But as Diana made to stand up, he caught her arm in a vice-like grip, eyes snapping open, and burning an incandescent gold. _"No,"_ he said, voice echoing with power and murderous intent. _"You get Uhtred to hospital. You get them to safety. He's mine."_ He stood up, expression cold and merciless.

"So, you've got some fight in you after _arghk!_ "

Dudley was cut off mid-sentence as Harry reached out, clenched a fist, and ripped savagely. Something dark and reddish burst out of his pale throat in an explosion of gore, and he immediately staggered, eyes wide with shock and pain as he clutched at his throat. The piece of flesh hovered in front of Harry, who examined it for a moment, before incinerating it with a snap of his fingers.

" _I have had enough,"_ he said. _"Of my friends being hurt, by monsters who think their power gives them the right to do what they want. Of being dragged into one mess after another."_ He whipped his sword through the air with a hiss, loosening his wrist. _"But most of all, right now… I have had enough of you, Dudley."_

He strode forward, slowly, calmly, each movement measured and perfectly precise.

" _My friends, watching me now, they're afraid,"_ he said, tone almost conversational. _"Because you've hurt someone I care about, a very good friend of mine. You've made me angry. So angry, that, really, I'm a little bit scared of myself. You see, the last time I was this angry, I tapped into a power that made me strong enough to break worlds and burns stars, just by lashing out, strong enough to crush Dracula, your master, with a stray thought. And the more I tapped into it, the angrier I got, and the angrier I got, the stronger I got, so strong that all sorts of bad things could happen. They're scared that I might become that being."_

Dudley suddenly turned to mist, pouring forward in a vast wave. Harry, however, swept his left hand down and spoke a word that made reality squirm, bringing a vast, brief gale that pounded the cloud of mist to the earth like a waterfall of wind, pinning it there in defiance of all the laws of logic and nature for ten seconds, before Harry cut it off with another deliberate wave of his hand. Then, though he didn't gesture, speak, or even change expression, there was a sudden flare of psychic power, and the misty cloud congealed into humanoid form, slowly, reluctantly, as if being forced. Once that was done, Dudley, desperate and clearly both afraid and furious, lunged towards Harry. He moved in a blur, barely visible to the human eye.

Harry was faster.

One moment, Dudley was lunging, fangs agape, taloned hands outstretched, and Harry was standing stock still in front of him, sword held loosely at his side. The next, Dudley was collapsing in a huddled, crumpled mass, howling a wordless scream of agony as he rolled in the dirt, clutching the stump that had been his right forearm. And Harry, not even having changed his expression, was calmly flicking the blood off his sword.

" _I was scared I might become that being,"_ he continued, as if he'd merely paused for breath. _"But I've been learning a few things over the last couple of months, from some good teachers. They've had anger issues too. And maybe something stuck, or maybe you've just managed to make me a whole new kind of angry. Because a couple of minutes ago, I found that I feel… different. Normally, if I was this angry, I'd lash out, I'd burn everything in reach, maybe even tap into my inner demon to do it. And if I had, you'd be ash by now."_

Dudley staggered to his feet, and, his face a mask of agonised rage, swung a fast, powerful, but clumsily telegraphed blow with his remaining arm. Once again, Harry moved in a flicker of dark clothing and silvery steel, and once again, Dudley's arm – the left, this time – fell to the floor, neatly severed.

" _Maybe it's because I have another inner demon these days, one that's a lot more rational, in its own way,"_ Harry said softly. _"But either way… everything's gone cold."_ His eyes flared, and an irresistible force drove Dudley to his knees, and pinned him there, like the hand of a giant, as Harry circled around in front of the vampire that had once been his cousin. _"And I want you to know that,"_ he said calmly. _"I want you to know, before I finally put you out of the world's misery, that that's how it's being done: cold. Not for fun, not even for revenge. Just… cold. Goodbye."_

The sword blurred for a third time. There was a hiss, and a thump, as a third piece of undead flesh hit the earth, followed by its rapidly decaying trunk. And then, it was done.

Harry stared at the corpse for a long moment, then turned around to see Sirius and Bucky. Lupin had clearly been nominated to take Uhtred to hospital with Diana and Peter and not just, Harry thought, because he was one of the most responsible and respectable looking options – particularly necessary when the other two escorting adults, present to fend off any hopeful vampires, were a blood-spattered Logan, and Gambit, neither of whom was particularly respectable. And as Harry well knew, both Bucky and Sirius knew a little something about inner darkness.

"Harry?" Sirius asked, one word carrying a wealth of questions.

"I'm all right," Harry said quietly, examining his sword, then sweeping a hand along it, removing the blood. He smiled thinly. "Don't have much choice in that, do I?" Then, he frowned and looked around. "Carol?"

"Evac'd in an armour," Bucky said.

"If those things move even half as fast as I think they do, she'll be fine," Sirius added.

Harry nodded, then froze and met Bucky's suddenly horrified gaze as he put it together. "Dracula needs Carol," he said. "And he, or his minions, are willing to take hostages to get to her. So if she's gone…"

"… where is he?" Bucky finished, before glancing down at Dudley's corpse. "And why would he send a powerful, but vicious and stupid vampire to handle a hostage taking mission?"

"Unless," Sirius said slowly. "It was a distraction."

"To keep me busy," Harry said. "He regards me as a threat to what he's trying to do."

"He regards you as a potential obstacle," Bucky corrected quietly. "Not the same thing."

"I know," Harry said, with the methodical calm achieved only by the extremely angry. His gaze swept the former battlefield, and he began to draw pieces of broken armour towards him. "I don't need to beat him."

"Because you can't."

"I can't," Harry agreed, wincing as the backplate of one of the suits slammed into place, jarring broken ribs. "The same way that I reckon he knew Dudley wouldn't beat us. Especially not me. So I'm turning his own trick back on him." He shot Bucky a knowing look. "With a twist."

"You've contacted Xavier?"

Harry nodded. "He's warming up Cerebro," he said. "And contacted Jean-Paul; he was in Kansas, for some reason, and is on his way now." He paused, eyes going distant. "Oh, and he's taken delivery of Ada, who is fine, if grumpy."

Bucky nodded, then ran his eyes over Harry's cobbled together armour. It was full of gaps. "Dracula has centuries of combat experience," he said. "If he has even one blade, he'll go through the gaps between the pieces of that armour like it isn't there."

"Let me," Sirius said, and briskly tapped the shoulder plate twice with his wand. The entire ensemble rippled, then shivered and ran together like it was made of liquid, before fracturing into a sheet of pentagonal jigsaw like pieces. The pieces shifted and rotated, before, before merging into smooth, silvery-white battle armour, as close-fitting as a tailored suit. "That should do it," he said, looking satisfied.

And well he should. In the space of five seconds, it had gone from something that looked like it had been cobbled together in a junkyard, to something… well. Something befitting a Prince of Asgard.

"Thanks," Harry said, startled.

Sirius shot him a quick, tight grin. "Call it making up for lost time on the birthday present front," he said. He grimaced. "Though I can't say how long it'll last. I was always good at transfiguration, but fighting Dracula…"

"I can make it last," Harry said, raising his left wrist up to eye level and focusing. "Probably."

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, a silvery-green ripple ran through the armour. It stopped briefly on the torso, as if undecided. Then, instead of taking the expected form of a glowing, simplified bird insignia, a phoenix, it instead shaped itself into a series of smooth, simple lines, describing a golden tree with seven golden stars in a semicircle above it, while a silver and white winged Corinthian helmet enclosed his face. With a final gesture, he beckoned, and Carol's shield leapt out of the shadows, settling itself on his arm, as his sword gleamed with the white light of a star.

"Diana's gauntlet?" Bucky asked.

"Yeah," Harry said, voice modulated by the helmet as he briefly examined the armour. "It's supposed to just make a gauntlet, which I can project a shield through... but it looks like it does a bit more than that."

"Doesn't it just," Bucky murmured, before meeting Harry's gaze. "Bring him into the open. If he's out of the city, keep him that way, and bring him into the bay. If he's still in the city, bring him down in the park. Hold him still as long as possible, but don't get in a contest of strength. Above all, keep him distracted."

Harry stepped into the air, hefting sword and shield. "That, I can do," he said steadily. Then, in a softer, quieter voice that even Bucky's enhanced hearing would have strained to catch, he added, "I hope."

OoOoO

Captain Stacy coughed, and Harry stopped, raising an eyebrow.

"Yes?"

"You killed someone," Stacy said, tone carefully neutral.

"A vampire," Harry corrected. "He was already dead, and had been for weeks, maybe months. There's a lot of breeds of vampire, Captain Stacy, but this type, Grey Court, are classic _Dracula_ and _Buffy_ type vampires – except they don't turn to ash unless you set them on fire, and there aren't any good ones with souls. The closest you've got are people who haven't fully turned yet, like Peter, because it takes three days. And two people, who wound up as sort of half-vampires – one, a bloke called Blade, because his mother was bitten while she was pregnant with him, the other, Jackie Falsworth, because she got a blood transfusion from Blade after she'd been bitten."

"So what about Peter?" Stacy asked. "He's a friend of my daughter's."

"I know, he was the kid my dad and I met in the park last Christmas, with your daughter," Harry said, nodding.

"So what are you going to do with him, if there's no cure, and his time is running out?" Stacy asked, doing his best to keep his voice even. "Is there some kind of cure in Asgard, or something?"

"No," Harry said. "Once you're a Grey Court vampire, you're already dead. Peter, though…" He paused. "Well. He hasn't fully turned yet. And I've got two ideas. Both are ridiculous, insane, and only one has technically been tested… on me… by someone who's much, much, _much_ better at what they do than I am, and is also on the other side of the country." He paused. "Though, considering my track record on plans, the more ridiculous they are, the better chance they have of working, so who knows?"

"A boy might be under a death sentence, of turning into a monster, and you're making _jokes?_ " Stacy asked in disgusted disbelief.

Harry's face went blank and rigid. When he spoke again, it was soft and dangerous, like a silk wrapped stiletto blade.

"I know, Captain," he said. "Right now, my best friend, someone I care for very much, someone that I think I might actually love, might be being drained of her blood as part of a ritual to turn an already horrifically powerful monster into an almost unstoppable one, while she's awake, and alive, and while I can't do a single thing about it." His eyes flared gold and he bared his teeth in what was technically a smile. "So yes. I'm making jokes. It's a coping mechanism, and believe me, it's probably the one thing between me sitting here and talking to you, and me going on a rampage with end results that would make a nuclear explosion look like a small firework."

Stacy stared at him in silence for a long moment, then inclined his head in acknowledgement.

"So," he said. "You wouldn't have killed him if he hadn't been…"

"Turned. The word is turned."

"If he hadn't been turned."

"If he was human, and I'd ended up fighting him, you mean?" Harry said, then shook his head. "No. Because, frankly, I wouldn't have needed to. I'd have beaten him up, telepathically knocked him out, then dumped him on SHIELD's doorstep later on."

"And if he was human, and he did what he did, what his vampire self did?" Stacy asked quietly. "What would you have done then?"

Harry met his gaze for a long moment, before cocking his head. "You know, Captain Stacy… I honestly don't know," he said mildly. There was another long, tense, moment, before he shrugged and added, "I'd probably have spared him. Minus a limb or two."

"You don't seem that bothered talking about the death of someone who, from what you said earlier, was your cousin, who you grew up with," Stacy said. "Or the fact that you had to destroy the vampire that used to be him."

"I never liked Dudley very much," Harry said. "I wouldn't say I hated him, but at the same time, I was happy to have seen the last of him when dad came back. If that had been the last I'd seen of him before he turned up again as a vampire, then yeah, I'd feel sad. I'd pity him. I'd feel sorry for him. And when I destroyed him, it would have been out of mercy." He met Stacy's gaze, eyes cold and hard. "But I had met him since. And believe me, all that being turned into a vampire really changed was his teeth and his diet."

"You're saying –"

"I'm saying take it from the telepath," Harry said flatly. "Dudley was a bully and a thug in the making when I stopped sharing a house with him. By the time I met him again, he had powers. And he'd chosen – I repeat, chosen – to use them to become a rapist, a murderer, and an all round monster. He wasn't brainwashed into it, he knew exactly what he was doing, and loved every minute of it. How he ended up that way is another story. Point is, when we met again, he tried to beat me to death, and since most of my powers were sort of turned off at the time, he came fairly close to succeeding. I put him down, then tried to help him. He refused, and tried to kill me. So I beat him to a pulp, then spared him. After that…" He smiled thinly. "Well. I was a little busy, after that. But I hoped, against all the evidence, that maybe being shown mercy would encourage him to be a better person. It didn't. All it led to was him graduating from killing people, to eating them." He sat back. "So no, Captain Stacy, I can't say that I'm bothered I decapitated him, because anything worth saving had died a long time ago. The only courtesy I owed him was to make it quick. Which I did."

He checked his watch. "A couple of minutes. Should be just long enough to round things off," he said. "Mainly, to explain how I went from ready for battle, the man with a plan, to the man with a sling and a stab wound from his own sword, among other things."

OoOoO

Carol, it was safe to say, had not been having a good night. In fact, what with being kidnapped by creepy vampires who threatened to eat her baby brother, then hunted by more vampires, then holed up in Avengers Mansion, which was ripped apart by the big bad, Dracula himself, who was after her for some undisclosed reason that probably involved her blood. What he wanted it for, she wasn't particularly clear on, but she doubted it was for just a quick snack.

Either way, his minions had attacked in force, and Bucky, best friend of her great-grandfather and, since he used to be the Winter Soldier, also _the_ ruthless super-assassin, had decided to do something equally dickish and pragmatic. To whit, he'd punched her in the face, stuffed her in a spare suit of Tony's armour, then sent her unconscious self off to who knew where under control of the auto-pilot.

The logical part of Carol grudgingly conceded – after she woke up and freaked out – that as plans went, this was actually a fairly good one under the thoroughly shitty circumstances. The more emotional part of her was absolutely furious, for obvious reasons. None of her, however, was remotely surprised. And following her awakening (somewhere over Boston, according to JARVIS' helpful inflight commentary), the plan relied on one crucial thing: that the armour she was in was going to be able to evade, or out-run, Dracula and his most elite minions.

Despite the fact that the armour she was in, incomplete though it was, was moving at Mach 2, she wasn't doing that. Astonishingly, going by the HUD's identification of ten separate hostiles, they were keeping pace. That, or they had some wicked shortcuts to use.

"Hey, JARVIS, what kind of weapons does this thing have?" she asked. "Because I'm getting the feeling that I'm going to need them."

"Repulsors, flares, and a unibeam, Miss Danvers," JARVIS replied.

"That's it?!"

"The armour _is_ incomplete, ma'am," JARVIS reminded her somewhat reproachfully. "And Sergeant Barnes requested this one for your evacuation, as of the available armours, it is the fastest."

"I thought that Tony had about a million of these things," Carol said to herself, frowning.

JARVIS answered anyway. "The vast majority of Mister Stark's armours were destroyed in combat with the artificial intelligence known as Arnim Zola, who took control of many of them, during HYDRA's attack on Avengers Tower," he said. "Mister Stark has since been replenishing his supply; however, installing additional safeguards to prevent a repeat of such an incident, and other delays have meant that only a limited number of suits are available – and most of those are currently being used by Mister Stark, on the Avengers' missions assisting the White Council."

"Fine," Carol said. "So, my chances if I turned and fought are…"

"Of survival? Quite high, considering that prior evidence indicates they wish to capture you alive, ma'am."

"Of victory?"

"Negligible, ma'am."

"Yeah, I thought so too," Carol grumbled, then paused as she noticed three new contacts on the HUD. "JARVIS… what are those?"

"F-22A Raptor aircraft, Miss Danvers."

"And I can outfly those, right? If I have to?"

"Indeed, Miss Danvers. However, I have transmitted the relevant authorisation codes."

"And they can take out the vampires?" Carol asked, hope rising in her as the F-22s shot past her, and flipped awkwardly to get a good look behind her as the F-22s engaged the vampires, a sentence she'd never have imagined thinking, much less saying, a year ago, and let out an ear-splitting whoop as one of the dark blurs, one of Dracula's lieutenants, vanished in a ball of flame after being hit by a missile.

Her joy, however, was short-lived.

"Oh _shit_."

The reaction was apt. Powerful vampires, it seemed, took poorly to being hit by air to air missiles, and the targeted vampire emerged from the ball of flame, and pounced on the nose of the jet that had shot her. While she looked like she'd been scorched, it seemed like nothing more than that, as she moved freely and her eyes were both focused and even from a distance, clearly full of furious hatred as she tore at the jet like it was made of wet cardboard. The pilot attempted, sensibly, to eject, but the vampire managed to snatch them out of the air before they could get clear.

"Oh hell no," Carol muttered, managing to turn the suit, and in doing so, gaining a new respect for Tony. These things were not easy to handle – if anything, they were too responsive. "HEY, BRIDE OF DRACULA!" she yelled as she closed on the vampire.

"Ma'am, if you pass this close to a human pilot at this speed, you will kill them!" JARVIS interjected urgently, and cursing, Carol barrel-rolled away from the grappling pilot and vampire, gaining enough distance that all the shockwave did was send vampire and seated pilot alike spinning through the air like dandelion seeds.

"Okay, so that didn't go as planned," Carol said.

"That was planned, ma'am?"

"And of course Tony's AI would be a smartass," Carol grumbled. "Still, on the upside, the vampire's following me now."

"Yes, ma'am. As are the other nine, though I would not describe that as an upside."

Carol snorted, focusing on the pilot, who was spiralling towards the ground. "Plot an intercept course, JARVIS," she said. "I'm –"

"Going to reach the ejected seat and manually activate the parachute," JARVIS said. "Mister Stark has previously performed a similar manoeuvre. Your course has been plotted, ma'am."

"Great," Carol said, doing her best to collide with the spiralling seat with the minimum of necessary force. The pilot, clearly terrified, met her gaze, and Carol attempted to reassure him. "You're going to be all right!"

"I believe it is unlikely that he can hear you, ma'am."

"Yeah, you're probably right," Carol said, looking for the relevant button. The HUD, fortunately, picked out the right thing to rip out of its housing, which Carol did with some relish. The parachute exploded out behind the seat and, finally, the pilot's descent was slowed to something survivable, if not precisely safe. The vampire responsible for his downing made to go after him for a moment, an idea Carol nixed with a well-aimed repulsor blast. "Over here, crisp and toasty!" she yelled, waving madly – and nearly falling out of the sky as a result – before turning and activating the armour's equivalent of afterburners, blasting off at top speed.

"Ma'am, surely the logical alternative would be to have escaped while Dracula's lieutenants were occupied," JARVIS said.

"Yeah, but first, considering how one of them was doing against one jet, I doubt it would have distracted all of them," Carol said. "And second," she said, doing a clumsy barrel-roll to avoid a pounce from above. "I'm not letting people die for my sake."

"A noble sentiment, ma'am, but perhaps not a very practical one."

Carol opened her mouth to reply, but never got the chance, as she was hit in the chest by a blow like a missile strike, sending her spinning off at an unidentifiable angle which, frankly, was making her feel sick. Before her internal gyroscope could reset itself, one of the vampires pounced on her from above, as another two tore the suit's repulsor gauntlets and boot-jets off like old plasters, driving her forcefully into the ground at painful, but not damaging, speeds.

Then, despite the fact that in the armour she probably weighed several hundred pounds, she was casually flipped onto her back like a tortoise, to the predatory amusement of the ten vampires around her. They hardly even looked out of breath, Carol noticed with some irritation as one of the male vampires reached down and lazily ripped the armour's mask off. They'd been chasing her for several hundred miles at Mach speeds, you think they'd be at least a little blown – or whatever the equivalent was for undead monsters that didn't actually have to breathe. But they weren't. In fact, aside from their scorched colleague, they didn't look like they'd done anything more taxing than a light morning run on a windy day. And even the scorched vampire was looking better by the second, and licking something red off her fingers like a cat. Carol thought, with a sinking feeling and a surge of anger, that she had a good idea of what it might be.

"Good evening, Miss Danvers," the leading vampire said, before smiling a toothy smile. "I am Mikael. And your advisor is right – you should have run. It would, at least, have prolonged matters." His smile widened. "And given us more of a work-out."

"Go fuck yourself," Carol said flatly.

"Charming," Mikael said dryly. "In any case, you have an appointment with our lord Dracula. And despite your spirited attempts to evade it, it is an appointment you will meet."

"Tonight's not good for me," Carol said. "How about tomorrow? At noon?"

"I think that I will have to decline," a deep, coolly amused baritone voice said. It was a voice that reverberated with power, something Carol would have noticed even if the other vampires hadn't immediately dropped to one knee and bowed their heads. And what with their reactions, Carol knew who the speaker was even as she craned her neck to get a better look.

He was tall, lean, and dressed in neat, black and red clothing, fringed with gold – elaborate, but practical, with the stylistic flourishes being mere decorations to clothes designed for combat. He was built like a swordsman or a straight-razor, with sharp, pale features, paler greying hair, and the distinguished face of a man in his late middle years who has aged gracefully. That face was regarding her with a mixture of irritation – as at a stone that has repeatedly got caught up the workings of an engine, mild amusement – as at a dog that has learned to do a new trick, and just a hint of respect.

"Good evening, Miss Danvers," he said. "You have led I and my followers on quite the merry dance. But that dance now comes to an end. Allow me to introduce myself. I am –"

"Dracula," she said quietly.

He inclined his head. "It is nice to be recognised," he said. He glanced at one of the vampires, the scorched one, who was now mostly healed. "Go, Elisha. Make sure that all is prepared." He ran his gaze over her. "And find someone to eat; I would prefer you at full strength, and you have done well." He turned to all of his lieutenants. "You have all done well. And you will be rewarded."

"I'd just like to request that if you're going to go into a vampire motivational management speech, you just kill me now and put me out of my misery," Carol said.

"Insolence," Dracula murmured. "From the likes of Riddle, it is irritating. From something like you? It is almost amusing." He twitched a finger, and Carol, who'd been preparing another salvo of snark, found her mouth jammed shut. Dracula regarded her for a moment, then, satisfied, nodded to Elisha, who took off.

She got seventy feet. At most.

Carol wasn't clear on exactly what happened, largely piecing it together from fragments of memories later on.

There was a blinding flash of light, like a thousand fireworks exploding at once. An explosion of sound that was less noise, more a huge wave of force that drove Carol into the ground like a boot into mud. And a roar of impact that shook the earth like a meteor strike.

Then, Carol saw the cause of it, through a haze of flickering lights. Even though she wasn't so much 'seeing stars' as seeing an entire fucking galaxy, she knew who was striding out of the huge impact crater, burning with the cold fury of the stars above and brighter by far than any of the lights dancing in front of her eyes. She knew him from the first moment, and would have even if she'd been struck blind; even if his armour, like something from an ancient myth, had stayed on entirely, and part of his silvery-white winged helmet had not retracted to reveal his hard face and blazing emerald eyes, she'd have recognised him. And when he spoke, even though her ears were ringing like an entire city's worth of church bells, she could feel his words reverberating in her bones.

" _Dracula, King of Corpses, Lord of Leeches,"_ he said, in a voice like thunder, and levelled his sword at the vampire. _"I, Harry Thorson, Prince of Asgard, would have words."_ His visor slammed shut. _"Words, vampire, with_ _ **thee**_ _."_

OoOoO

All nine of Dracula's remaining lieutenants immediately moved to attack, the skies above crackling with lightning, but then, they stopped. Because Dracula had raised a hand and an eyebrow.

"So," he said. "You are the one who Riddle, and half the supernatural world, is so afraid of. Asgard's youngest, newest, Prince. I have fought your people before, and I have no interest in war with them. So, despite your killing…" He glanced past Harry at the large, smoking crater. "Obliteration, even, of one of my chief vassals, interference in my affairs, and insults against me, I shall give you this one chance: walk away."

There was a moment of silence, then, to Carol's horrified disbelief, Harry bowed his head and sheathed his sword.

" _I'm sorry, Carol,"_ he said heavily, in that echoing voice. Then, before Carol could do more than gape, there came a telepathic coda. _This is probably going to hurt._

And before Carol could even blink, he moved in a blur, yanking savagely with his left hand, pulling Carol towards him as he thrust his right hand out and spat something in an ancient language, firing a bolt of orange light that splashed onto the air in front of him. Then, grabbing Carol as she collided with his armour with a thump – and it did hurt, she thought vaguely – he dived through the tear in reality, into what looked a vast, snowy, primeval forest, with trees the size of giant redwoods.

Carol, landing face first in the snow, scrambled to her feet as Harry spun, staggered, and raised his hands to zip the tear in reality shut.

He wasn't fast enough.

Dracula stepped through the rip in reality like it was a screen-door, delivering a brutal kick to Harry that sent him flying through several dozen trees – literally, straight through them, flying through them like an ember through ricepaper, vanishing into the distance like a rogue firework. Then, in voice as cold and harsh as frozen iron, he spoke.

"Your words, boy," he said. "Were irritating. But _this?_ Thinking that I would be fooled by some acting and magical sleight of hand? Now _that_ is truly insulting."

He grabbed Carol and hurled her back through the portal, into the arms of one of his subordinates, and said, "Take her, prepare her. I will deal with this… _irritant_." And then, with a curt gesture, he sealed the portal, leaving Carol alone with lieutenants.

OoOoO

Harry was, frankly, somewhat surprised to still be conscious, his progress through the forest – and the trees it was composed of – only having been stopped by what seemed like a small mountain. Closer inspection revealed that it was a large one, and, going by the thinness of the air, large enough to make Everest feel threatened, if not outright inadequate. Clearly, he thought muzzily, Sirius did good work on the armour. Plus, the power of Diana's gauntlet.

Then, his eyes widened as a dark figure landed in front of him, and everything snapped back into place.

" _Oh_ _**shit.**_ **"**

"Indeed," Dracula said coolly.

" _Where is she?"_ Harry demanded without preamble.

"Back in the mortal world," Dracula said, drawing his own blade. "The precise location is none of your concern."

" _I beg to differ."_

"You do, do you?"

" _She's my best friend. So yes, I do,"_ Harry said, before stepping forward in a movement only identifiable by the gleam of light on his sword, perfoming a swift cut at Dracula. It was parried with nonchalant ease. Then, Dracula went on the attack.

"Considering the psychic connection you share, I think you are rather more than that," Dracula said, advancing steadily on Harry, who was now desperately trying to fend off Dracula's blade, which was moving in a dark, flickering blur. "It does not matter, however. It also does not matter who, or what, you are. Your power and your name cause the likes of Riddle to skulk in the shadows, and they inspire fear in creatures and groups throughout the supernatural world. I respect that, the fear you have managed to inspire. But understand this: _I do not share it_."

Harry struck out with Carol's shield, hoping to use its unique properties to cause Dracula to shy away and gain him some room. Without missing a beat, Dracula seemed to flow away from the blow, grabbing Harry's left arm and yanking hard, helping it on into the ground, dragging him off balance. And as Harry stumbled forward, Dracula, now behind him, grabbed the back of his head with one hand and slammed him face first into the frozen ground hard enough to shake loose avalanches on the mountains off in the distance.

"Understand this, as well. I am not like those enemies you have faced," Dracula continued, expression shading into a cold snarl, eyes red with fury. "I am _not_ a hubristic, parasitic shade of a mortal wizard, scuttling from shadow to shadow and spinning webs of trickery and deceit to try and achieve some semblance of power, attempting to manipulate others into defeating my enemies for me. I am _not_ a necromancer so detached from sanity as to be willing to give myself to the Darkhold. I am _not_ as they are, a pale shadow of a greater power, hankering for days long since gone."

He grabbed the limp Harry by the back of the neck again and brought him up to eye height.

"I am Dracula. I defied empires, causing the fields of Europe to steam with the blood of my enemies long before I began drinking it as well. When I destroyed their armies, I made a screaming forest of their survivors, _earning_ the name of Lord Impaler. I am the Lord of the Vampires, I have slain gods and demons alike, and I, little Prince, am going to teach you a lesson that you should long since have learned."

With an effort of will and a sharp cut of his blade, he sliced open a hole into the mortal world, in the skies far above New York, looking down on the clouds below.

"Why not to meddle in the affairs of your betters."

Then, without ceremony, he hurled Harry through into the open air, before stepping through himself.

OoOoO

Bucky had made his way to the top of the Empire State Building, reasoning that it was the nearest reasonably accessible tall building, and provided the best sight-lines of Manhattan – particularly Central Park and New York Bay, which he'd directed Harry to try and direct the fight towards. It wasn't perfect, of course, but with a city as large and densely built-up as New York, with no certainty of where his target was going to turn up, nothing would have been. It was, he felt, the best he was going to do under the circumstances.

So he had set up his sniper's nest, and checked on the situation with the others. Uhtred had been stabilised at Lenox Hill Hospital, and looked like he would pull through, and Stevie was being assiduously guarded. Aside from an incident when an enterprising vampire had attempted to infiltrate the hospital and exploit the overwhelming number of casualties, harried staff, and limited generator provided power, all had been fine.

Bucky had unsurprisingly enquired about the latter, having seen the carnage a hungry vampire could cause in a hospital back in his Winter Soldier days. Not so this time. The vampire, he had been assured, had been found in short order, then discreetly frog-marched down a quiet corridor by Diana, decapitated by Logan, before Gambit had charged both pieces of very dead vampire, but only sufficiently that they were effectively cremated, rather than turned into explosives. Nothing, apparently, had been left besides some clothes and a small pile of ash. The clothes, full of vampire ash, had then been thrown down the hospital laundry chute, also by Gambit. As corpse disposal methods went, Bucky had to admit, it was a novel one.

Bucky's gaze swept the skyline, and saw, once again, nothing. He'd shot down a couple of vampires had been old and powerful enough to fly, but stupid enough to do so without being sure of air superiority, and they'd spiralled down, burning like magnesium flares. Since then, however, nothing. The other vampires still present in the city – and there were at least a couple of hundred present, since Dracula had called in all those guarding the routes out of the city – and Bucky strongly suspected that they'd be responsible for their share of deaths before the night was over. Still, there was nothing he could do about it, aside from what he already had.

While Harry had been reading up on vampire lore, and blood magic, at the behest of Doctor Strange, Bucky had examined the material his charge was given, had a look at the calendar, then considered how Doctor Strange thought, figuring that whatever was going to happen, it was probably going to happen in New York – or, if not there, London. Once he'd done that, he'd mentioned it to both Fury and Wisdom. They had drawn similar conclusions, but in matters such as this, the opinion of the Winter Soldier carried weight. If nothing else, SHIELD would be out on the streets, probably in plain clothes, and so would a few independent vampire hunters that he'd heard Fury might be drafting in.

He had done something, he knew, and that was a comfort. But, again – he knew the kind of horrors that hungry monsters could wreak on a powerless city at night, and any comfort was a cold comfort indeed.

Before he could get too drawn into his grim musings, however, something gleaming in the sky caught his eye. Looking up sharply, focusing his sights, and sighed grimly.

Harry.

Of course it would be Harry, shining like a falling star, plummeting as if out of control, and followed by the loose, serpentine shape of a huge dragon made of lightning filled darkness. And at its heart, a pale figure, wielding a sword.

Dracula.

Bucky watched them for a moment, willing Harry to pull up, to at least make a controlled landing, before shaking himself out of it. His part of this fight wasn't to help Harry directly, or will him on, even if he had been able to. So he levelled his rifle and aimed down the sights, picking out the vampire's torso, before adjusting for windspeed and target speed. He took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, and fired.

The shot struck Dracula's shoulder, but where it would have blown a lesser vampire's shoulder off, and set their body alight, it seemed to merely lodge in his flesh and burn the Vampire King.

But, Bucky noted with some satisfaction as he aimed once more, it achieved one thing. It made Dracula pull up, to reach up and remove the bullet, dropping it like it was red-hot – and to him, it probably was – before glaring directly at Bucky. And as he did, Bucky felt what was happening before it did, his left arm humming with static electricity. He was about to be struck by lightning, and there was nothing he could do about that. The sensible choice would have been to run inside, try and put as much of the building as possible between him and a lightning strike that would most probably avoid petty, mundane things like lightning rods.

He made the other one instead. Careless of his own safety, Bucky Barnes, arguably the deadliest sniper in the Nine Realms, aimed his rifle and fired.

The gun cracked. Lightning flashed. Thunder rolled. Smoke rose from blasted ruins of the observation deck of the Empire State Building. And of Bucky Barnes there was nothing to be seen.

OoOoO

Dracula regarded the enchanted bullet he had caught between finger and thumb, careless of how it was burning his fingers, then the smoking ruins of the sniper's nest, before snorting his disgust and tossing the bullet away.

"Idiot," he said, testing his wounded shoulder. It hurt, but it was still functional. "What did you hope to achieve?"

Three feet of enchanted Asgardian steel erupted from the middle of his chest, drawing a startled and furious howl of pain.

" _What did he hope to achieve?"_ Harry snarled from behind Dracula's left ear. _"How about this, a piece of your own medicine?_ _ **BURN!**_ _"_

The blade ignited with golden-white flames, as intense as the fire of an Elder Wyrm, causing a horrible smell of burning flesh as Harry twisted his sword and ripped it free. And now, it was Harry on the attack, taking advantage of the dazed Dracula, hacking at the centuries old Vampire King with blows that would have levelled skyscrapers or caused earthquakes, the dance between Shadow and Flame in the skies above the city becoming ever faster and more frantic. It seemed inevitable that it would soon come to a conclusion.

But even dazed, Dracula was more than capable of defending himself, and met Harry's attacks blow for blow with his own enchanted blade, causing furious explosions with flashes akin to lightning bolts and roars like crashing thunder, burning the clouds away around them. And the tide of battle would soon have turned back in Dracula's favour, if Harry hadn't then spied his chance and played his ace card.

Dropping his sword, he bull-rushed Dracula, using Carol's shield to bat the vampire's own blade aside, grabbing Dracula's face in a vice grip with his free hand.

" _All right,"_ he hissed. _"Sword's not working so well. Let's try something I'm better at."_

And with that, he unleashed a vicious psychic blast, one of his best, one that staggered everyone with even a hint of magical or psychic talent in the city, straight into Dracula's mind.

Dracula, though, just smiled a bloody mouthed smile, sharp and mirthless. "Child," he said. "Do you really think that I haven't faced psychics before? We've gone mind to mind already, and all you gained was a few scraps of knowledge. Do you really think that you could do better now?"

" _Me? No,"_ Harry said, with, though Dracula couldn't see it, a nasty smile of his own. _"That wasn't really an attack, Dracula. That was a distraction. And a signal."_

Dracula's brow creased in a frown, before suddenly, he howled in agony, dropping his own sword and clutching at his skull, brushing Harry off in the process. And Harry, not feeling remotely inclined to fight fair, switched Carol's shield to his right hand, and channelling every bit of telekinetic and magical power he could muster through body and armour, brought the shield down on the vampire like a hammer.

The blow was immense, shattering the glass on every window within half a mile, and it sent Dracula shooting into the ground so fast that it seemed like he had teleported, so hard that it shook the entire island of Manhattan, down to the very bones of the earth.

Harry flew down, slowly, carefully, feeling like if he made any sudden moves, he might just keel over. As he did, the storm clouds above city broke, and rain poured down like a waterfall. Harry barely registered it as he landed in the crater Dracula had left as he landed. It was, he noticed, about the right size for a large duck-pond. Going by the amount of rain pouring down at the moment, he thought, it might well end up becoming one.

He shook his head, dismissing thoughts of duck ponds, and hefted Carol's shield, clambering down into the crater, armour clanking in a somewhat unwieldy fashion as he went. In short order, he spotted Dracula, half naked, half buried in the increasingly muddy earth, body rigid with tension as his mind came under attack from one of the most accomplished telepaths the world had ever seen, powered by a machine designed to enhance and focus his psychic might. Charles Xavier had joined the battle.

Harry stared at the vampire for a moment, before shuffling around and hefting the shield. Then, he took a deep breath, and summoning up what power he had left, made to end it, bringing the shield down edge first like an axe.

It would have cut through tempered steel. It would have cut through a sheet of industrial titanium, and a thick sheet at that. But it did not, however, cut through Dracula's neck.

Instead, the vampire king's eyes snapped open as the blow fell, and his right hand shot up, stopping the blow with a miniature thunder-clap. Harry, astonished, tried to wrench the shield back, but even though smoke emerged from between Dracula's fingers, and white flames licked at them, his grip remained vice-like.

Then, he spoke.

"Not bad," he said, in soft, venomous tones. "But not good enough."

Harry made another attempt to wrench the shield back, and found himself not only unable to pry it from Dracula's grasp, but unable to move from where he stood. Dracula's will bound him to the spot like it was a law of nature, and no matter how much defiance and power he threw against it, that did not change – he might as well have been spitting into a hurricane.

"Another lesson required, I see," Dracula said. "Allow me to demonstrate."

And then, faster than the human eye could follow, he exploded to his feet, ripping the shield from Harry's grip, sliding it onto his arm, and delivering an upper-cut blow that smashed straight into Harry. Pinned in place by Dracula's will would have snapped him, even sliced him, in two as easily as snapping a twig, had not the armour taken the brunt of the blow, shattering like spun glass.

As it was, the blow also broke the binding that held him in place, sending him flying across the park, across the city, through building after building, before finally coming to a stop in a derelict tower block, surrounded by rubble and dust disturbed by his violent arrival. He coughed, and when he did, blood spattered onto his chest, blood not from a cut in his mouth or to his lips, but from deep in his chest. He tried to breathe, gasping, and could only suck in faint sips of air. He tried to move his right arm, and found it in agony, like it was on fire, misshapen and rapidly purpling from internal bleeding. He closed his eyes, using what power he had to force it back into shape as he had before, and let out a choked scream at the pain.

And that was not the only source of pain, though with the amount of pain he was in, it was difficult to distinguish individual sources. Just by looking down at his body, though, craning his neck to do so because his body was barely able to struggle into a sitting position – and that felt like running a marathon – he could see jagged edges of his armour slicing into his body, parts of it buried in his flesh like knives. It was, he noticed, now reverting to its cobbled together natural appearance before Sirius had enchanted it and Diana's gauntlet had reinforced it. The enchantment, though, had been broken, and the gauntlet had reverted to its dormant bracelet appearance.

Before Harry could continue his self-assessment, a figure appeared in the hole his body had smashed through the walls of the building. Unlike Harry himself, the figure seemed to be moving with perfect ease, everything functioning as it should. At worst, he seemed like someone working out a mild pulled muscle.

Dracula, in short, did not look like someone who'd just been in a brutal fight with a psychic, sword wielding demigod, which had involved his being impaled and semi-incinerated. He'd also been shot with at least two enchanted bullets and hit with a psychic sucker punch from a Cerebro wielding Charles Xavier. The former barely seemed to have left more than an angry red mark on his shoulder, one that didn't really impede his movement, and the latter, after a short mental struggle, he seemed to have shrugged off entirely. If anything, he looked more like someone who'd played a particularly spirited rugby game, excepting only the stab wound. Now _that_ had left a mark, a large, nasty red and black burn wound running through his torso, like a burnt kebab. It was also, Harry felt, somewhat ironic that Dracula was now holding the blade that had done it.

Following his gaze, Dracula smiled thinly. It had no mirth in it, and no mercy, either. "Yes, you've made your mark, haven't you?" he said. "It seems that I underestimated you, young Prince. As you underestimated me." His eyes narrowed, and the cold fury that the smile had only thinly concealed surged to the fore.

"Did you really think that I would be undone by a mere _human_ with magic bullets? Or that I would wilt under the assault of Askani Adept, even one vastly enhanced? Did you _really_ believe that I had never faced such enemies before, never learned how to catch bullets or turn the Askani's techniques back upon them? That you were the first to think of distracting me while an ally delivered the fatal blow?" He surged over to Harry in the blink of an eye, pulling him up to eye level by his jaw, seething rage in every word, in every line of his face. "Tell me, _boy_ ," he hissed. "Were you _really_ so arrogant as to think that such _achingly_ predictable old strategies and _pathetic_ parlour tricks would work on _me?!_ "

Harry just glared at him, and Dracula examined him for a moment, then snorted contemptuously.

"I should kill you for that insult alone," he said. "I should hang you up by your ankles and wrists and drain you dry, as I will the girl. But Asgard could not ignore such an act, and I have neither the time for, nor the interest in, a war with your people. So rejoice, little Prince – your heritage protects you." He snorted. "That and I am disinclined to do Tom Riddle's work for him." He held Harry's sword up and examined it. "Of course, I cannot ignore such insults either. As Riddle will have an object lesson made of him, for his insults and deceptions, so must you, one that is rather apt. And right here, in this very finely balanced blade, I think I have the perfect instrument for it." He glanced up, and Harry got the feeling that he was looking up, not at the decaying ceiling, but towards the clouds above. "Two, even. And I think I shall rather enjoy it." His gaze returned to Harry, and a cold smile spread across his features. "It has, after all, been sometime since I last reminded the world how I earned my name."

Harry muttered something, and Dracula raised an eyebrow.

"What was that?" he asked.

Harry looked up and smiled a mocking smile, before clearing his throat. "I said, 'whatever. Go ahead. It can't possibly be more painful than listening to you talk'," he said.

Dracula snarled and, blind with rage, snatched Harry up by his hair, exposing the teenager's throat as he bared his fangs. Then, suddenly, he stopped. And frowned. And sniffed, twice, before leaning down to get a better look at the spattering of blood on his chest.

"Your blood," he murmured. "There is something in it, something strange." He sniffed again. "Smoke. And not just burning wood, no, it's like there's somehow a spark in your blood," he said, frowning. "I've smelled it before, but it's not Asgardian, not even allowing for the differences of the royal bloodline…"

Then, he froze, and his eyes widened. An instant later, he'd pinned Harry to the wall, fangs exposed to their fullest, eyes red as blood, and the true face of the vampire within exposed, exposed and contorted into an expression of mingled terror and rage.

" _What. Are. You?"_

Harry grinned at him through bloody teeth. "Tell you what," he said. "I'll make you a deal: when I figure it out, I'll let you know." He raised a finger in mock solemnity. "But only if you ask nicely."

Dracula snarled, and grabbed Harry by the jaw, dragging him out towards the hole in the building. "Enough jokes," he said, before jumping out from twenty stories up and landing as if he'd just hopped off a fence. Then, he hurled Harry to the ground and drew back the sword. "I assure you, you are going to survive this," he said. "Much though I would prefer otherwise."

Harry opened his mouth to retort, before all the breath went out of him as Dracula ran him through, pinning him to the asphalt of the road by his shoulder – the same shoulder that Dracula had been shot in. All he could muster was a strangled, whispery scream.

But that was not it, as more clouds rolled in, stronger and thicker than ever before, more and more swiftly by the moment, adding to the rain that roared down. That part of Harry that was not occupied with either the pain, the irony of being skewered with his own weapon, worry about Carol, Bucky, and Uhtred, impotent rage about being unable to help them, or resisting the temptation to just unleash the Phoenix within and destroy Dracula, and indeed anyone else who _dared_ threaten those he loved, was already planning his next move.

It was not especially optimistic. Within five minutes of Harry running him through, Dracula had been fighting with full focus and at near his full strength. Harry doubted he would be so quick to recover.

As if reading his mind, Dracula smiled thinly. "No, my boy. Your part in this is over," he said.

"We'll see about that," Harry managed.

Dracula regarded him for a moment, then shrugged. "I suppose we shall," he said.

Lightning gathered in the skies above, pouring in from across the vast sea of clouds, as if they were ships coming to a harbour, gathering in a vast, roiling ball of energy. Then, in one vast, savage instant, they lashed downwards in a single bolt. And struck the hilt of Harry's sword.

Everything went white.

And then there was silence.

OoOoO

"And then," Harry finished. "I was found by your officers."

"No," Stacy said, frowning.

"No?"

"You were found outside the station, nowhere near the place you've described. And there was no sword to be seen."

Harry frowned. "Weird," he said quietly, before shrugging and standing.

"Whoa, where do you think you're going?"

"My visitors have arrived," Harry replied, before his expression hardened. "I said I was leaving when they got here, Captain. And believe me, I'm going, whether it's with your blessing, or through the rubble of what used to be the walls of your station."

Stacy folded his arms. "Son, right now, I wouldn't be so sure of your ability to walk in a straight line, let alone blast your way out of this station," he said.

"And you say that... but we're having this conversation right now. Going by my reflection," he said, nodding at the two way mirror. "While I'm hardly at my best, I don't look like death warmed over any more either. And my powers are more or less up and running again." He cocked his head and regarded Stacy. "You think that I might be telling the truth, that maybe I actually could walk out of here the way you'd push open a door. You'd be right about that." He folded his arms. "Now. I've got things to do. A friend to save."

"Like what? Like where? And from what?" Stacy demanded.

"You don't need to know," Harry said.

"The hell I don't," Stacy snapped. "I'm -"

"A copper," Harry said. "This is not your business, Captain, or your job. Your job is to keep the peace. Me wasting time telling you won't help you do that, and there's nothing you can do to help me. The only reason I've told you all I have is because I was told to stay here, and it was a way to both pass the time and help me get everything sorted in my head, figure out if there's anything I missed." He looked up, as if listening, then stood up. "The people who're going to pick me up are here. So go and do your job. I'm going to go and do mine."

"Your job?" Stacy asked.

"Dracula's got my best friend," Harry said, standing up. "I'm not entirely sure why he's gone to such trouble to get her, but he did, and he's not planning anything good. And whatever he's up to, whatever he's doing? I'm going to stop it."

"By throwing yourself into a fight with someone who nearly killed you a couple of hours ago?" Stacy demanded, rising with him and blocking his path to the door. "Listen to me. I don't care how powerful you think you are, that's suicide. You like definitions, try this one: insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

"So I'll try something different this time," Harry said with a shrug. "As for suicide? I've died. It didn't stick. I'll take my chances."

"You're just a kid," Stacy said. "This might not be my job, but it's sure as hell not yours."

"Maybe not, but when it comes to rescuing girls from undead life-drinking monsters, I do have prior experience," Harry said glibly. "Call it a hobby. Or maybe a vocation."

"Damn it!" Stacy snapped, slamming a hand against the table. "This is not a game! You're a teenager, my daughter's age - if anything, you're younger. There's no way you're ready for this."

"Maybe," Harry said, after a moment. All the humour had drained out of his expression, replaced by exhaustion. Exhaustion, and resolve. "Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm not ready for this." He met Stacy's gaze. "But that doesn't matter. Because, 'this', this thing? It's here. It's like how Hide and Seek always starts: 'Ready or not... here I come'. So I don't have a choice. And I don't have time to play nice, either. Bye-bye, Captain Stacy."

And then, he vanished.

Stacy blinked, staring at the empty seat in front of him, before scrambling out the door, looking up and down the corridor, then collaring the officer waiting outside the room.

"Davies," he said.

"Captain?"

"The Thorson boy – teenager my height, white, green eyes, black hair with a white streak, beaten to hell but mobile – have you seen him?" Stacy snapped.

"No, sir," Officer Davies said, looking puzzled. "I thought he was in the interrogation room with you."

"Dammit," Stacy growled. "Are the cameras still out?"

"Yes, sir. Do you want me to start asking around?"

"No," Stacy said, shaking his head. "Dammit, dammit, _dammit!_ He straight up told me he could leave any time he liked. He told me, and I didn't believe him."

"Sir? Should I –"

"No, there's no point," Stacy said, glancing at his watch and repressing the urge to swear as he saw what he'd half expected: he was missing fifteen minutes. "He'll be long gone by now, wherever it is he's going." He sighed. "At least he didn't follow through on his threat to blast his way out."

He turned, then stopped as he spotted a piece of white paper on the table of the interrogation room. Frowning, he stepped inside and went over to pick it up. It was, he noticed, a piece of paper from his own notebook, and his own pen was lying next to it. On it was a short note in scrawled hand-writing of someone writing quickly, but with a certain degree of care because their fingers were still not quite fully functional. It was the sort of hand-writing that Stacy, as a cop, was unfortunately very familiar with.

' _Captain Stacy,_

 _You should get this note about fifteen minutes after the end of our conversation. I froze you for that long – and stopped everyone else in the station from seeing me. It seemed like the quickest and least painful way to get out. By the time you read this, I'll be long gone._

 _Still. I'm sorry I had to do it. I'd rather I hadn't had to. You seem like a good man, one who wants to do the right thing. But you don't understand what you're dealing with (or to be more accurate, what I'm dealing with). And what you don't know would slow me down, and get you killed. So do your job, Captain Stacy. And let me do mine._

 _Harry Thorson_

 _P.S. You haven't been in contact with your wife and daughter since before your shift started, and you're worried about them – I could feel it. So, I spared a moment to check: both got home before the black-out. They're both worrying about you, but are otherwise fine.'_

Stacy sighed again. "Good luck, kid," he said. "I get the feeling you're going to need it."

 **Well, I hope that lived up to expectations. And that, you know, you had time to stop and breathe. ;) Anyway, a few questions are left open, such as 'what happened to Bucky?', 'Who de-kebabed Harry and left him in sight of the police station?', and of course, 'How on earth are they going to get out of this one?'**

 **Find out next time.**


	33. Chapter 33: Bloody Hell VI - Endings

**Yes, I'm back – it took a little longer than usual, but I've had an exam, some Kafkaesque interactions with my uni bureaucracy, and other stuff. Still, I'm in a good mood, even if this took most of the night to write, because my football (soccer) team has done well. And the end result is a finishing chapter to this arc, which is even longer than the previous one. Unlike that one, there might be an organic place to break it, and I might if I feel the need, but this one feels right as it is.**

 **And in it, we have: Impromptu Dragon Slaying! Epic Battles! Epic Tricks! And Unexpected Introductions! We've got it all, folks, all you could want, even a little bit, right at the end, of… Rooooooooooooomance!**

 **So read on, dear reader, read on.**

 _ **Shall-iin:**_ _ **Those vampires were only capable of going up against fighter jets because they're the Lords Lieutenant; Dracula's right hands, his post-Vienna elite, the strongest and most loyal – the fact that Harry managed to blast one of them into scraps in one shot, even after she'd taken an AIM-120 to the face speaks volumes of how powerful he is. They're over a century old, all Master Vampires, all turned by him personally, like Syrus, but considerably more combat orientated. In other words, if an ordinary vampire had taken that missile to the face, there would have naught but burning chunks of vampire raining down over the countryside. These ones are rather different.**_

 _ **Capecodmercury:**_ _ **I felt I should jack them up a little. And there will be cavalry, oh yes, but not of the conventional kind. Jean, Maddie, and Harry, have the potential to become something glorious and/or horrific, when put together. Especially since they fit the 'Maiden (Harry), Mother (Jean), Crone (Maddie)' dynamic very neatly.**_

 _ **I am an unabashed Tolkien geek, and am currently rereading all the books. That said, the white tree and seven stars is more a reference to Frey's armour (see chapter 19), and a hint of things to come – though, to be fair, that armour is itself a Tolkien reference, so it's a roundabout Tolkien reference. The helmet, though, was definitely meant to evoke Numenor. And, you know, Thor's preferred headgear.**_

Wanda was hard-pressed. Duelling someone who had a fair claim to be the most ancient Dark Lord or Lady of all time, and was certainly one of the most knowledgeable and powerful, while also trying to make sure her allies weren't being massacred by any one of a collective of powerful dark practitioners, and prevent a building Ascension Rite from being carried out, would be quite enough to have that effect on even the most calm and collected practitioner.

Dealing with all that, while _also_ wondering where the hell her father was and if she hadn't judged him wrong and he had betrayed her, what had happened to her boyfriend/apprentice and worrying that he might well be dead (since the Wild Hunt had been unleashed on the city, something he'd been doing his best to stop), _and_ dealing with the fact that she'd just had the mantle of Sorceress Supreme thrust upon her, something which in turn meant that Doctor Strange was almost certainly dead, something he'd darkly warned of for some time, with the attendant grief for the man who for all his flaws had cared for her, raised and protected her, and had been the nearest thing she'd had to a father for much of her life… really, Wanda felt, it was a miracle she hadn't snapped.

It also helped that her allies were actually doing better than she'd hoped, in both the practical sense, and, frankly, the moral sense. They had stopped to protect a group of children, on the way to a Halloween party by the looks of them, and had formed an impenetrable grey wall that mowed through spectres and zombies alike. Wanda applauded both the move and the skill on display – the three younger Wardens might, as Dresden had put it, 'green as grass', but they could handle themselves. Ramirez in particular was wielding what she thought had to be some kind of green entropic blasts, a variation on water magic perhaps. Whatever they were, they dissolved holes through whatever they touched, and despite their passing resemblance to the Killing Curse, she was glad to see them.

But the simple fact was that while she was keeping Selene occupied, that left the battlefield occupied by Corpsetaker and her spectres and her ghoul, who had an effectively free run at the ritual. And far more worryingly, there were several other players who Wanda could not see.

Grevane, Kemmler's first acolyte, who favoured zombies, and his drummer. But while he was dangerous, he wasn't big on subtlety and was big on frothing insanity, so she felt it more likely that he'd either fallen to inter-necromancer squabbling, or been otherwise delayed. Alternatively, he was preparing an army of zombies to overwhelm everyone else once they were all tired out, so best to be cautious. The robe clad necromancers Dresden had referred to as Cowl and Kumori were also nowhere to be seen, which was rather more worrying. Partly because one of whom was apparently more or less as powerful as she was, and the other of whom was no pushover, and partly because both seemed from all reports to be entirely sane – or at least, of a cold, measured insanity that was a more than dangerous substitute – and hiding their identities. That suggested at least a passing familiarity with stealth, which meant they could be anywhere.

And then… there was Voldemort. He was the one she was most worried about. Once, when he appeared on the battlefield, he'd have declared himself, implicitly challenging anyone present to step up and face him. But now, now he was slipping around through the shadows – he was there, she could sense that much, but where exactly, she didn't know. And if nothing else, she wasn't overly keen on getting hit with a Killing Curse in the back.

Plus, the power of the spell was building. The Darkhallow was almost upon them. Though, on the plus side, this meant that Selene was getting more desperate.

Of course, Wanda thought, as she diverted a storm of shadowy daggers around her, at the same time being sure to step forward to avoid the humanoid figures that stepped out of the shadows to try and trap her in their grip, and then stepping into the reach of Selene herself… this was a mixed blessing.

And indeed it was, as Selene surged forward, grasping Wanda in a crushing grip. Normally, the immortal would-be Greater Goddess was impeccably turned out, coolly confident, and contemptuous of all other lifeforms. Now, though, after a brutal battle with Wanda, and being faced with the prospect of losing a chance at the ascension to the status that she deemed to be rightfully hers, frustration and desperation had stripped away much of the Queenly façade and revealed something of the monster within.

"Speck! Worm! Pretender to Power!" she snarled, in tones of ringing fury, illuminated by the sparks of silver and white as Selene's life-draining abilities clashed with the protective enchantments of the Eye of Agamotto and the Cloak (now Coat) of Levitation. "Like all the Heirs of Agamotto, you interfere where you shouldn't! You meddle in things that you do not understand!"

"It wouldn't be the first time I've been told that," Wanda managed. While the wards protected her from being drained and reduced to a lifeless husk, or at least severely inconvenienced, they didn't do quite as much to impede Selen's significant superhuman strength. "Usually by my father. And you know what? I say to you what I said to him: fuck off!"

She snapped her fingers, which flared with scarlet light, and vanished, reappearing thirty feet away, leaving Selene behind. Or most of her, Wanda internally amended, as Selene's hands had come with her. For a moment, they continued their crushing grip, before dropping to the floor and scuttling back towards the rest of Selene like large, pale spiders. It spoke volumes of Wanda's tolerance for, and experience of, strange things that she didn't even blink.

Instead, as the Atlantean sorceress let out a scream of pain and fury that shattered every intact window within view, she took advantage. Reaching down to her belt, she pulled a small stake of wood, from a white ash tree, and threw it. As it flew, magically guided to land between Selene's feet, she gestured sharply. For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, a spear of living wood, as thick as Wanda's arm and rapidly thickening, shot up from deep in the earth, impaling Selene in the back through the abdomen. For a moment, one of the most feared Dark Ladies of all time had the fate of impalement, one that she had visited or ordered visited on so many others through the ages, visited upon her. Wanda would have felt some measure of grim pleasure at the irony, had her adrenalin charged brain thought that instead, Selene now resembled nothing more than a cheap kebab.

But it was only a small part of her thinking this, as her hands and fingers spun and danced as she murmured complex spells. The spear, now the trunk of a sapling, began to grow even faster. It has long been wondered whether a tree, falling in a forest, makes a sound if there is no-one to hear it. This tree was growing rather than falling, had plenty of witnesses, and left none in doubt that it made a sound, trailing a creaking, groaning roar, like every forest in a windy storm sounding at once. It shot upwards towards the cloudy night, as if hoping to reach the moon and the stars above, and grew outwards as well as upwards, with branches, branches that tore through empowered flesh as easily and swiftly as they did through the air, branches that sprouted rich green leaves and bunches of flowers that shaded from pale greenish-yellow bases to dark violet tips into a broad crown. In less than a minute, it had gone from a sapling to a fully grown tree, in full bloom.

"Now that," Wanda said somewhat smugly. "Is what I call gardening."

However, she remained on her guard, for her smugness was a smugness tempered by the knowledge that it wouldn't keep Selene down for long. But what it did do was give Wanda both a breather, and a chance to survey the battlefield.

The Corpsetaker was still waging an endless attack on the Council's Wardens, one that rather puzzled Wanda. While it made sense that the body-jumping necromancer would want to eliminate a serious potential threat before laying claim to the Darkhallow, all she was currently doing was holding off the Wardens and allowing one of her competitors to claim it. There had to be some other plan at work – necromancers and dark practitioners in general were usually insane, but rarely stupid, as stupid Warlocks had a very short life expectancy.

While the supposed definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, Wanda knew from personal experience that at the very least, they could vary their tactics. The Corpsetaker had to be planning more than just holding off/hammering away at the Wardens and hoping they got tired. What it was, though, Wanda couldn't say.

Speaking of rivals, the sole remaining Kemmlerite, the one called Cowl, was calmly beginning the spell of the Darkhallow, while his apprentice, called Kumori, stood in close attendance. Grevane hadn't come forth yet, and she hadn't sensed any particular zombie themed build-up of power, so felt it was increasingly likely that he was dead. Voldemort, meanwhile, was also still nowhere to be seen – he certainly hadn't emerged to aid his nominal mistress, which, to Wanda's mind, was not a surprise. It also meant that he was likely hoping for her to attack Cowl, as she would have to, then sucker punch both of them. She grimaced. It was both a likely trap, and a good one. If nothing else, she thought as she girded herself for battle, summoning her power, she was going to have to walk straight into it.

"Cowl!" she called in a purposefully amplified voice.

The hooded figure looked up, and tensed, flicking his wrists, freeing his hands. For those practitioners who didn't need a focus, it was the equivalent loosening your pistol in its holster, or sword in its hilt. When he spoke, however, with a faint burr to render it unrecognisable, he seemed calm enough.

"Sorceress Maximoff," he said, inclining his head politely. "I presume that you have come to stop me."

"Kill her," a cold, emotionless voice said from by Cowl's feet, and Wanda's gaze was drawn to a sight that made her heart stop.

A skull, a polished white skull, with cold blue flames for eyes, was regarding her with what could only be called a cool disinterest.

She recognised him. This was Bob, an extraordinarily powerful spirit of intellect bound to a skull by, according to Bob himself, a French mage called Etienne the Enchanter some centuries ago. Since then, he had served as a lab assistant for witches and wizards down the centuries, mostly recently Harry Dresden, who had dug him out of the burnt ruins of the laboratory belonging to his evil mentor, Justin Du Morne.

Normally, Bob was fairly harmless, being a cocky, snarky, and spectacularly perverted lab assistant and advisor, who took wages in the form of romance novels. And despite a fairly affable version of the amorality typical of spirits from the Nevernever, she could normally count on his assistance.

Unfortunately, there were two very significant problems with that.

First, Bob's personality was dictated by the person who owned his skull, a reflection of it. His personality in Dresden's care had been influenced by Dresden as he had been when he was 16 years old and had first claimed the Skull.

Second, Bob had served as a lab assistant to many practitioners down the centuries, both good and bad, and one of them had been none other than Heinrich Kemmler. And when Dresden had unlocked that aspect of Bob's nature, he'd nearly been killed in less than a minute. While this probably wasn't the same version of Bob, it was certainly cut from the same cloth.

It also meant something else: Harry Dresden, her Apprentice and boyfriend, the remarkable, ridiculous man that she had steadily fallen in love with, was dead. Inherent stubbornness aside, he would never give up Bob willingly. Not only did he know how dangerous the spirit was, having nearly died at the hands of, for want of a better word, Evil Bob, only a couple of days before, but Wanda knew that he regarded – or rather, she thought with a catch in her throat, had regarded – the irreverent spirit as a friend. And while Dresden was – or had been – many things, he was not so cold-blooded as to give up Bob to the likes of Cowl for strategic purposes, much less so cowardly as to give him up for fear of his own life.

Harry Dresden was dead. And his presumed murderer stood in front of her, clear as day, and bold as brass.

Wanda took a deep breath, and leashed the tide of grief and rage that rose within her, strangling the howl that sought to tear itself free of her body. Wait, she told it. Wait for the right moment. And then… then, Cowl would not think that she was her father's daughter. Instead, she vowed, he would _wish_ that he was dealing with her father.

"Kill her," the spirit repeated. "She is strong, and her powers are chaotic by nature. If she lives, her mere presence may disrupt the working."

"Be silent, spirit," Cowl said dismissively, without looking away from Wanda.

"He's right, you know," Wanda said, voice cold and distant, as ice covering a roiling sea. "And if your apprentice doesn't keep trying to sneak up behind me, her spirit will be one of the first your Darkhallow summons up. If, that is, I leave enough of it to salvage."

Cowl calmly raised a hand, and Kumori, who had frozen in place, dropped her veil, stepping back.

"'Your Darkhallow'," he repeated. "I take it that you do not seek to claim it yourself."

"Of course not," Wanda said coldly. "While it is very clear that you do – and have apparently convinced yourself that it is a lesser and necessary evil."

"As I told your apprentice," Cowl said. "It is only logical. Someone is going to claim the power, and who are the alternatives?" He gestured over at the army of spectres. "The Corpsetaker?" He gestured at Wanda's tree. "Selene? If, that is, you have left enough of her to compete for it – nice work, by the way." His head swept slowly around. "Or Voldemort?" His gaze returned to Wanda. "The Corpsetaker would devour the minds and souls of half a continent or more, if she claimed the power. Selene would do far worse. Her limitations removed, she would enslave the world, and have all of humanity bowed in supplication before her. Voldemort, who is here even if he has not shown himself yet, would have the means to enforce his ridiculous creed of 'Pureblood' superiority, and to make himself truly immortal. Grevane would have the whole world as zombies, I do not doubt, though I suspect that he has already been disposed of."

"And you?" Wanda asked coldly.

"She is stalling you," Evil Bob interjected impatiently.

"Silence," Cowl repeated, before regarding Wanda once more. "What would I do with the power? Use it. Use it to achieve the true end of all necromancy: end death."

Wanda stared at him for a moment, then let out a harsh laugh. "You idiot," she said. "The universe would not stand for it, and even with the power of a Greater God at your beck and call, you'd still only be a speck before the powers that would seek to redress the balance. And that is if your attempts to rewrite the laws of nature did not unleash something far worse. Didn't you see the skies turn red? Didn't you feel the Master of the Darkhold emerge? His emergence left reality weaker, the walls of the universe thinner, than they have been in millennia."

"Of course I did," Cowl said calmly. "Which is why I believe that I will succeed. Reality is, as you say, far weaker, more febrile, and more malleable than it has been in eons, perhaps since the fall of Atlantis. Part of that is thanks to the scheming and emergence of the God of Chaos, and part of it is thanks to the darkness that you have not named, the one close to your heart." Wanda could not see his face, but she got the impression of a smile. "You castigate me for wanting to upend the so-called Laws of Nature, when one close to you almost began burning them down around us. I sensed the Darkhold's manipulations, and I sensed the rise of the Dark Phoenix too. I know the flames that both have kindled, flames that creep through the cracks that both of have widened. I even know of what is coming, of the one who seeks the means to end not death, but life, and I know that he is gaining the means to do it. I even suspect that your teacher, the great Doctor Strange…" He paused, regarding Wanda, noting her coat and its buckle, formerly the Cloak of Levitation and Eye of Agamotto. "The _late_ Doctor Strange, I see." He regarded her with the calm certainty of the truly mad. "I suspect that he saw what was coming and tried to avert it. But death has claimed him and his mission, whatever form it took, has failed. I wish to rewrite the Laws of Nature and to end death. Above all, Wanda Maximoff, Sorceress Supreme, I wish to save the world."

There was a moment of silence, the end of the speech coinciding with a lull in the battle. Wanda broke it.

"You're insane," she said.

"Your apprentice said much the same thing," Cowl remarked, apparently not offended. "As I remarked to him, I do not believe I am insane… but if I was, would I know?" He shrugged. "It hardly matters."

"And why is that?" Wanda asked, preparing a strike, a cold, quick piece of probability manipulation that would induce a fatal aneurysm.

Cowl simply nodded past her, and as he did, Wanda spotted something out of the corner of her eye – a red sports car driven by the Corpsetaker's ghoul. It was speeding, speeding and sliding through the sheeting rain, towards the Wardens, set to take out them and about half the children. Wanda whipped around, forming new spells to stop the car, or at least to shout a warning. And then realised that she'd been had.

As soon as she had turned, Cowl took the golden opportunity, and hit her with a blast of cold, corpse-white power, one that proved that Dresden had most definitely not been exaggerating in his estimation of the necromancer's power. Even attenuated by her present defences and an instinctive ward she conjured up, it hit her like a bolt of lightning made of shards of ice, striking right through her body and down into her spirit, sending her spinning a good couple of dozen feet through the air towards the muddy ground.

Thrusting her hands in front of her, she just about managed to mouth the words to a spell to transfigure the earth into something softer and more yielding, spreading the force of impact across a hundred feet all around. It worked, in that she survived intact, and it made the ground shiver. And as she struggled to her feet, cursing herself for a fool in every language she knew for letting her emotions blind her into falling for one of the oldest tricks in the book, everything seemed to happen in slow motion. But even with time obligingly slowing for her, she'd been left too dazed to do anything more than watch as the car swept towards the Wardens and the children like a sweeping broom, or the grim reaper's own scythe.

Then, where before it had shivered, the ground shook. Not once, not twice, but with the regularity of a drumbeat, more and more, louder and louder, closer and closer, vibrating up into her very bones. And then as part of Wanda vaguely wondered what the hell it was, for just one long instant, it stopped,

Her question was answered a split second later, as hang time ended, and something dark and absolutely colossal landed feet first on the red convertible.

The ghoul, face pale, scrambled out of the car, his human disguise failing in his fear of whatever the hell this was.

He tried to flee.

He got about five feet.

The vast creature – and it was definitely a creature – dipped its head down and, with remarkable grace for something that probably outweighed a bull elephant, snapped up the ghoul like an olive from a cocktail stick. After that, the vast creature, which Wanda's scrambled brain was beginning to think it recognised, threw back its head and let out an ear-splitting roar that hadn't been heard by mortal ears in sixty five million years.

"This is it," Wanda said to herself, in numb, stunned tones. "It's finally happened. I've finally gone _completely_ mad."

"No more than the rest of us, Wanda, I assure you," a smooth, amused male voice said, attached to an offered hand up.

Wanda recognised the hand and the voice, but took them anyway, getting to her feet. "You got my message, then, father," she said.

"I did," Magneto said. "I am sorry for my tardiness, but I was delayed."

"So… you brought a tyrannosaurus to compensate?" Wanda asked, brains still a little fuddled.

"No," Magneto said, lips twitching into a smile. "That was someone else's idea." He nodded up at the dinosaur, and Wanda, squinting through the rain, saw a huge saddle, visible against dark, pebbled, impossible flesh. She also saw two figures on its back, one moving its legs up and down, as if marching in place, and as she strained her ears, she heard the strains of a steady drumbeat emerging from up top. She also recognised the sort of energy that the dinosaur was radiating – necromantic energy. At that point, everything fell into place, and Wanda's jaw fell loose. Slowly, she reached up and pinched herself. It wasn't a dream.

"Your young man is really quite creative, isn't he?" Magneto said.

Wanda just nodded numbly, as the combination of astonishment, disbelieving joy, and pure relief surged forward in an unstoppable wave, nearly swamping her dazed mind. But only briefly, as she shook herself and reminded herself of the task at hand.

"He is," she said, running towards the T-Rex, which had since moved to cover the Wardens' retreat, with the children, into the buildiing. "And he has perfect timing."

As she arrived, her father following, she found Dresden, with his friend and drummer, doctor Butters – who was, of all absurd things, wearing a one-man polka suit – briefing Luccio and Morgan. Squashing her immediate impulse to grab her boyfriend and kiss the life out of him (or into him, as the case might be) she strode over.

OoOoO

I stopped halfway through explaining my plan – wait until the spell was nearly complete, use Sue the T-Rex to bulldoze a path through several hundred rotting corpses, and sucker punch whichever necromancer was trying to pull off the Darkhallow while they were occupied – when I saw Wanda stride in. I turned to her and as our gazes met, a whole encyclopaedia's worth of emotions flitted across her tired face: joy, relief, determination, and resolve.

"When I suggested you upgrade your car," she said. "This wasn't quite what I had in mind."

"Well, it wasn't what I was planning, but it was second hand, just lying around," I said, affecting casualness and shrugging. "And it was a bargain. I couldn't turn it down."

Wanda's eyes sparkled briefly with amusement. "So I see," she said, amused, before her expression became all business. "You found the book?"

I grimaced and nodded. "Grevane and his drummer jumped me and took it at the Museum," I said, before nodding past her at the arriving Magneto, a nod he returned. His presence caused both Luccio and Morgan to visibly tense. Knowing what the man was capable of, and having seen him neutralise and kill a dangerous sorcerer with all the effort I would use to squash a fly, I couldn't exactly blame them. "But I'm pretty sure that Grevane got jumped in turn, outside the Museum, by Voldemort."

Magneto and Wanda's eyes both narrowed, almost identically, while Luccio and Morgan looked grim.

"You're sure?" Luccio asked.

"I can't be certain, but I saw a bright green flash through the window while Grevane's drummer was having some fun," I said. "And I felt something, like… not a flare of power, but something empty. Cold. Evil."

"A Killing Curse," Wanda said quietly, with Luccio and, surprisingly, Morgan nodding their agreement. "That tallies with Selene's behaviour when I fought her earlier."

"She's here, then?" I asked.

"Alive," Wanda said. "But in several pieces, and probably not in any state to do immediate harm." She smiled a brief, thin smile. "You may have seen the ash tree in the middle of the battlefield."

I winced.

"She gave off the impression that I was all that stood between her and performance of the ritual. I would therefore assume that Voldemort delivered the book to her," Wanda continued. "He's around – if nothing else, a lot of the corpses around ground zero aren't normal zombies, but Inferi."

"Inferi?" Magneto asked, eyebrow raised.

"A form of zombie created by wanded magic," Wanda said briefly. "Simply corpses, reanimated by magic. It significantly limits their power – unlike a wandless zombie, the age of the corpse and thus the spirit means nothing – but it means that they can be 'programmed' and left to their own devices. They're mostly used as a terror tactic, or in large numbers, as cannon fodder." She shook her head. "He's up to something. The inferi, they're a token gesture, to confirm to Selene that he's not just given her the book and then vanished, and to cover his real plans."

"Do you have any idea what those might be?" Luccio asked.

"He won't want any of the others to ascend, out of sheer spite if nothing else," Wanda said. "He might help Selene, if she hasn't already taught him what he needs to know, but –" Suddenly, there was a flare of that same cold, empty power as I'd sensed and seen at the Museum, from close by. Everyone bar Butters and Magneto looked up suddenly – and even Magneto's brow creased in a wary frown.

"A Killing Curse," Morgan snarled, as he and Luccio shared a look and broke into a run, sprinting towards where the younger three Wardens had fortified. It was only ten seconds of running away, but going by the expressions on their faces, even Morgan's, it must have felt like ten years.

Warden Kowalski was lying flat on the ground, his haunted eyes now blank and empty, his face twisted in harsh fear. Yoshimo, pale with agony and terror, was on her feet despite her broken leg and shoulder to shoulder with a wild-eyed looking Ramirez. Both were facing a tall, slender man in dark robes that flowed and flickered around them as if they were free of the constraints of gravity and had wills of their own. He had sharp, high cheekbones, aristocratic good looks, and dark hair, looking like the slimmer variety of male actor or model. But that was not it. His skin was not just white, but the bleached and almost translucent white of something that lived in caves that never saw sunlight, while his eyes were cruel and red, like burning coals, and a sadistic, malevolent amusement adorned his features. He didn't look like someone enjoying a fight, caught up in bloodlust. No, he looked more like one of those children who never learned that it was wrong to burn ants with a magnifying glass or pull a cat's tail to hear it scream, all grown up and delighting in new toys to play with.

Just as we arrived, Ramirez levelled his sidearm, a monstrous Desert Eagle and opened fire, while Yoshimo thrust out a wand and cried a spell in a language I didn't recognise, unleashing a savage gale. But their opponent wasn't remotely fazed. Instead, the bullets passed through a translucent barrier in five feet ahead of him as nothing more than dust, and he disrupted the gale with the flick of his wand, while three thick, dark tentacles of robe shot out. One ripped the pistol from Ramirez's hand, a second wrapped around his throat with crushing force and yanked him viciously to his knees as he gasped for breath, while a third wrapped around Yoshimo's broken leg, and twisted savagely, dropping her to the floor with a strangled cry of pain.

Before he could do more, though, a crimson bolt of energy slammed into him, turning his own moving robes from weapon into a cocoon that trapped him and freed both junior Wardens.

"Voldemort!" Magneto roared suddenly. Up until now, tonight and every other time I'd seen him, he'd always been calm. Furious, perhaps, but it was a cold fury; controlled, channelled, and mastered. Now, he didn't look or sound calm. Instead, he now he had the demeanour of an angry god, and believe me, I know whereof I speak.

His face was twisted with fury, expression consumed with hatred and a desire for blood and vengeance. His voice was full of rage, rage and hatred and power, and as he spoke, the building, the earth, and the very air around us resonated in sympathy.

" _You. Are. Mine!"_

And as he strode forward like the leading edge of a hurricane, power crackling around him in a storm akin to the one above, his right hand was thrust out towards Voldemort, and his signature grey helmet was forming around him from iron particles pulled from the air around us.

Then I realised that I was wrong, and Wanda had been wrong too. Because Magneto didn't want to rip Voldemort in half. And his helmet wasn't forming from iron particles in the air, not completely. And as it solidified, I noticed that even in the dim half-light, it wasn't grey either.

Voldemort was wracked with pain, arched like a drawn bow string, as a steady mist of dark greyish-red particles flowed through the air towards Magneto, giving his helmet a burgundy hue.

Normally, I wouldn't have shed a tear at Magneto getting horrifically violent revenge on Voldemort, who, by all accounts, deserved every bit of it and much worse. But while right or wrong, in this context, could be debated, there was one thing that couldn't. This was wasting time.

So I drew my revolver and put three rounds into Voldemort's head from point blank range. While I can't say that it exploded, or anything so dramatic, there certainly wasn't much left of it, and Voldemort's body suddenly slackened.

I didn't have much time to appreciate this, though, as my body was lifted up as if by the blood in my veins and pinned to the wall with a strength that I could no more resist than I could sprout wings and fly. My head was yanked back as if by an invisible hand, and I met the murderous gaze of Magneto. I had denied him his revenge, and now the wrath that had consumed him, that he had unleashed on Voldemort, turned on me. And for the second time that night, I had the crystal clear realisation that I was almost certainly about to die. At the hand of my saviour from the first time, no less.

"Father, no!" Wanda snapped, not as a plea, but as a furious command, and before Magneto and I could do more than meet eyes, there was a flash of crimson light, and I dropped to the floor, legs crumpling beneath me. Magneto whirled on his daughter, sending the drawn swords of Luccio and Morgan flying to lodge point first in the wall as he did. At this point one might expect a mighty duel of some sort, a tragic clash of powers as evil triumphed and rejoiced in the background.

Instead, she slapped him.

This was no dainty slap, either. It was an open-handed blow from her, delivered with strength, knowledge, and with decades of anger and frustration behind it, was more than enough to send her father's head snapping to one side.

And as it did, Wanda stepped forward. Until now, she'd worn the mantle of Sorceress Supreme, acquired only a couple of hours before, uncomfortably, like an itchy shirt that didn't quite fit. Now, though, it seemed as if she had grown in stature, the mantle settling across her shoulders as if perfectly fitted. Her eyes were flashing with controlled anger and her expression was not one of anger, frustration, or even fear (for me). It was one of cold command, as beautiful and unyielding as the marble statue of a goddess.

"Listen to me, father," she said, in a voice resonant with authority as he regained his balance. "We are dealing with at least three necromancers, four if Selene has recovered, one of whom is every bit a match for me. They are fighting over an ascension rite which will, if it succeeds, kills tens of thousands of people, maybe even more – and that doesn't even account for what the newly ascended Greater God might do. We are trying to stop it. That is why I requested your help, _not_ to satisfy your hunger for revenge for mother's death. He might deserve torture, but now is _not_ the time. That is why Harry put him down."

She glanced at the spot where Voldemort had fallen, then froze, and narrowed her eyes. Voldemort's body was gone. Apparently, head shots weren't enough to put a bona fide Dark Lord down for good. Or at least, not that one. It surprised the hell out of me. Wanda, though, hardly skipped a beat.

"And don't worry – you may get another chance," she said, and returned her gaze to her father. "But I want to make _this_ very clear, father: you are here, at _my_ request, to help, to prevent this ascension attempt, and _not_ to have one of your trademark tantrums. I am the Sorceress Supreme, and I swear on my mother's soul, I swear that if you _ever_ try and pull something like that again, I will see you spend the next decade in the bottom of somewhere that makes the Raft look like a holiday camp. Do. You. Understand?"

Magneto met her gaze for a moment, then closed his eyes and nodded. "I understand," he said quietly. "My apologies, Wanda." As he spoke, Luccio and Morgan's swords dropped out of where they had lodged in the wall. He turned to me, and I had to fight down a desire to drop everything and run like hell. But now, his eyes were not filled with rage, so much as a tired, bitter regret. "My apologies, Master Dresden. My emotions got the better of me."

"Could be worse," I managed. "You didn't burn down a building."

He chuckled grimly. "Quite," he said, then turned to Wanda, head slightly bowed. "What would you have me do?"

"Subdue Cowl's apprentice," Wanda said. "Once that is done, watch my back. Voldemort still lives, as does Selene." She turned to the Wardens. "Captain Luccio. The Corpsetaker was here."

It wasn't a question, and both Ramirez and Yoshimo nodded.

"She took Kowalski," Yoshimo said quietly.

"And Voldemort killed them both," Wanda said. "I am sorry for his passing, and for the fact that it was probably not hers. I don't sense her presence, but she is more spirit than flesh nowadays, and her spectres are still active. However, she won't have gone far, and in spirit form will be vulnerable to the Darkhallow. She will either return to her old body or seek a new one, then act. And I'd rather not have her knife in my back."

"We will find her," Luccio said.

Wanda nodded her thanks, before turning to me. "Harry, you and Doctor Butters are with me," she said. "I'm going to need your dinosaur." Her eyes gleamed dangerously. "It is time that Cowl and I had a _proper_ chat."

OoOoO

The other Harry, meanwhile, was currently seated in the back of a car, with Bucky, who was alternately checking his various bandages and wounds and grumbling about his charge's lack of caution/common sense. This wasn't, in itself, a particularly odd scene, except for a couple of things. First, Dracula had recently done his best to incinerate Bucky with a very large lightning bolt, something that even the legendary Winter Soldier couldn't shrug off. Second, the car was flying.

These two things were explainable, however.

Bucky's arm had been installed with extraordinarily powerful grounding technology and circuit breakers, of the sort that Tony had in his own suit, which he'd insisted on if he was going to spend any length of time in Thor's company. It was not, he said, anything personal, just a reasonable concern for anyone who was likely to spend a lot of time in high places, around someone who summoned lightning storms, and had a metal arm full of conductive materials. Additionally, he felt that as Harry's bodyguard, he would likely encounter a lot of strange and unstable collections of energy, so having his arm not merely hardened against such things, but able to contain and discharge them would be helpful.

This he had explained to Harry, who had then very reasonably pointed out that Dracula's lightning bolt had been large enough to blast off a significant proportion of the top of the Empire State Building. Even Tony's tech, he argued, had its limits.

"The building took the brunt of it," Bucky had replied, shrugging, and had said no more.

However, he hadn't got away entirely unscathed, as demonstrated by the fact that he was no longer wearing his new arm, designed by Tony, which had apparently seized up. In its place, salvaged from the ruins of the Mansion, was the gleaming silver of his old arm. The arm of the Winter Soldier.

It was therefore ironic, or perhaps appropriate, that the flying car was owned and being driven by Alison Carter, former and current Deputy Director of SHIELD – now holding the position jointly with Maria Hill. She was the one who Harry claimed to Captain Stacy had a bigger stake in affairs (which, since Carol was her granddaughter, was entirely true), whereas Bucky had been the one who had reminded him about what happened when he went charging straight in against a superior opponent.

Harry, meanwhile, was in a mood where he'd have been pacing if only he had been physically able.

"Is Professor Xavier all right?" he asked.

"Fine," Alison said. "With a headache, but fine."

Harry blinked. This was pleasant, but unexpected news. "Dracula –"

"Some months ago, the feedback from an incident with the Darkhold, just before the Battle of the M4, put him in a coma precisely because he was using Cerebro," Alison said. "Since then, Charles has been making some improvements to Cerebro. Among others, he's included circuit breakers of a kind, so if there is another surge of psychic power as there was before, Cerebro would take the brunt of it. Dracula turned his attack back on him, but only succeeded in frying Cerebro and giving Charles a headache."

Harry nodded slowly.

"That still leaves the question of how to get Carol back," Bucky said quietly. "And what Dracula's planning to do with her."

It was testament to Alison's iron control of her emotions that she barely tensed.

"Blood," Harry said.

"Excuse me?"

"It's about blood," Harry said. "This, all of this, has been about blood. Blood and power. Dracula wants Carol's blood. Not just for a snack, but because there's something about it, and only it, that he can use for some purpose, to get him more power."

"I've heard of vampires getting more power based on how powerful their victim is," Alison said, frowning. "But…"

"But if he'd wanted that, he'd just have ambushed Carol and drained her in an alleyway," Bucky finished bluntly, Harry nodding his support. "Simply drinking the blood gives a temporary boost. This is different, he's gone to a lot of trouble to get her alive and more or less unscathed." He glanced at Harry. "A ritual?"

Harry nodded. "It has to be," he said, thinking. "There's something in one of the books I read, something about how Grey Vampires started out just faster, stronger, tougher, and with some hypnotic powers. The other powers, the mist, the weather control, the shapeshifting, the shadows, maybe even the claws… they came later."

"Developed as the vampires got older?" Bucky asked.

"No," Harry said, shaking his head. "The psychic stuff, maybe, and any magic, that varies from vampire to vampire. But the basic powers… they do develop as the vampire gets older, but they didn't develop as the originals got older. The book suggested that they were gained." He frowned. "Sorry I'm only just bringing this up now, I only thought of it after we started talking about vampires and gaining power."

"What would Dracula hope to gain from Carol's –" Bucky began. He only began, however, as Harry swore very suddenly and very loudly. It went on for a solid forty five seconds, getting increasingly inventive, before petering out.

Alison arched an eyebrow. "Harry?"

"It's been right in front of me all along," Harry said. "'A Lord of Blood, seeking to break the Seal of the Dawn'."

Both Bucky and Alison sucked in sharp breaths. "Trelawney's prophecy," Alison said. "Of course. The Lord of Blood is Dracula. And the Seal of the Dawn…"

"Is daylight," Harry said. "He's not trying to become physically stronger or anything like that – he thinks he can use Carol's blood to become immune to daylight."

"And he can pass on that power to any vampire he sires," Bucky said grimly. "Maybe even any that he's already sired."

"And suddenly, the Grey Court goes from being a shadow of its former self to being more powerful and more dangerous than ever," Alison continued slowly. "There might not be any Masters who're both loyal to Dracula and more than a few years past their first century, there haven't been since 1897. But that won't matter, not when their oldest weakness is gone. They'll be in pole position to take advantage of the chaos the Red Room left behind."

Harry's eyes widened like tennis balls. "You mean…"

Alison nodded grimly. " _That's_ why Dracula's been throwing everything he's got at this, blacking out cities, attacking Avengers Mansion, bringing in all of the Lords Lieutenant," she said. "He's not just patching a weakness, trying to make his Court better able to survive in a changing world – he's building an empire."

There was a moment of silence, before Bucky turned to Harry. "Did the book you were reading say anything specific about the ritual?"

"Did it say how long it takes to set up?" Alison asked.

"One or two things," Harry said. "And it'll take a while – a few hours, at least." He looked out the window, expression hardening. "Even if he does pull it off, though, I've got two plans for that."

Two sets of blue eyes, one via the rear-view mirrow, locked onto him.

"And what would that be, Harry?" Bucky asked carefully.

"And how would my granddaughter fit into it?" Alison asked quietly.

Harry was silent for a long moment. "If Dracula succeeds, he won't leave Carol alive," he said. "He won't take any chances about how much blood this ritual needs. He'll –" He stopped and took a steadying breath, hands clenching into fists. "He'll drain her dry. He said it himself." He looked up, and his face was as pale, hard, and unyielding as if it had been carved from marble. "So I'd summon up the Council Elite, all the most senior gods on Earth. And I'd give them a choice. Either they save Carol… or I do it. By _any_ means necessary."

The scent of wood-smoke twisted briefly through the car, but even if it hadn't, the meaning of Harry's words would have been unmistakeable.

"Even with the potential consequences?" Bucky asked quietly.

"The Council Elite, with a very few exceptions, hate and fear me anyway. The only reason they haven't done anything is because they're more scared of Doctor Strange," Harry said, and smiled sardonically. "What are they going to do? Try and kill me? It'd be nice to go back to the old favourites." His expression darkened. "And if they tried to go after those around me… then they'd create the monster they're all afraid of." He waved a hand and just like that, the darkness vanished. "But they won't do that. Some of them have brains."

Bucky met his charge's gaze. "That's all well and good," he said. "And the consequences to the rest of the world? _All_ of them?"

Harry, who knew very well that he was referring not just to the risk of a Dark Phoenix rampage, but of Surtur breaking free, a risk which Bucky had been made aware of, met Bucky's gaze. Eventually, however, he looked down at his clenched fists.

"It'd be a last resort," he said, in a softer voice. "And I'd get Heimdall to Bifrost me and Carol to the other side of the universe, first. But…" He looked up again. "If it came to it? She's my best friend. So yes. Yes, I would."

There was a long moment of silence.

"Thank you," Alison said quietly. "For being willing to do something like that. Not just saying it, but meaning it. But I'd prefer if it didn't come to that."

"As would I," Bucky said. "However, for that to be the case, we need to get Carol back before Dracula succeeds in his ritual." He paused. "Which will involve distracting Dracula."

"And dealing with an army of vampires," Alison added grimly. "Just vampires, and only loyal and controllable ones, I think – if Dracula's making himself vulnerable, those will be the only ones he'll want around him. But even still."

"I'll keep Dracula distracted," Harry said, then smiled a wicked smile. "Oh, believe me, he'll be _very_ distracted."

Bucky raised an eyebrow. Harry had a number of smiles, including dazzlingly charming, warm and adorable, and coldly homicidal. This one was one of the more ominous ones and best described as Doctor-Strange-Junior. It generally portended a particularly insane plan, even by Harry's standards.

Unlike Doctor Strange, however, Harry had spent the last few months learning two important lessons the hard way. First, the virtues of sharing his plans with his allies before he put them into action. Second, the consequences of not doing so.

"That still leaves an army of Grey Court vampires, the nine remaining Lords Lieutenant, and perhaps a selection of other Master Vampires," Alison pointed out. "More than a few of whom will be mystically capable if they're pulling off a serious ritual." She caught Harry's eye. "Which will be a problem, considering that the White Council have been crippled, their remaining combat capable members are leading counter-strikes, covering their retreat, or responding to an emergency in Chicago – which has drawn in Ms Maximoff, Mister Dresden, and Magneto. Your father and uncle are out with the White Council, and while I've sent messages to them and the rest of the Avengers, the likelihood of them arriving in time to help is low. And Doctor Strange has not been seen since he vanished fighting demons, Outsiders, specially summoned by the Red Court."

"And he said that he wouldn't be getting involved in this one," Bucky remarked.

"I'll ring Professor Dumbledore," Harry said. "He can probably apparate across the Atlantic." He rubbed his jaw. "And even if he can't, I need to ask him about something."

"That would help," Alison said. "And I've got as many SHIELD teams as I have reasonably available, but what with the fact that SHIELD is still rebuilding, and how few of those remaining are prepared to take on vampires, our odds are not looking good."

"This isn't about outfighting Dracula," Harry said. "I've tried that, and it didn't work."

"Yet you seem to be planning it again," Alison said pointedly.

Harry smiled again, this time thinly. "If all goes to plan, I'll have a bit more power," he said. "But that's not the important part. Because this time, I'm out-thinking him. This time, it's just part of the trick."

"And that trick would be?"

Harry told them.

Bucky met Alison's gaze, and nodded slightly at her raised eyebrow. "That could work," he said, before eyeing Harry. "But not for long."

"I've contacted Jean-Paul," Harry said. "It won't _need_ to be for long."

"The Lords Lieutenant ran down an Iron Man suit in full flight, which had a headstart," Bucky reminded him. "And by your account, they didn't look tired, so I doubt it's their limit. Jean-Paul's limited to Mach 10 in his suit, without a burden."

Harry tipped his head in acknowledgement. "I've also asked him to stop at the hospital and bring Logan, Gambit, Diana, and Peter Parker," he said.

"Why Parker?"

"Two reasons," Harry said. "First, I have a way of hurting Dracula. And if I'm right, it might cure Peter."

Both adults stared at him, stunned, and he grinned, and wave his bitten arm around.

"Like I said," he said. "It all comes back to blood. That's what Strange has been telling me, in a round about sort of way. Blood gives Dracula and other vampires power. Carol's blood is special, and so is mine. Wanda mentioned that my blood might have powers, and she was right. A vampire tried to bite me in the woods and its face and jaw caught fire. Another one, in the Mansion, I had blood in my mouth and when I spat in its face, its face caught fire and melted. My blood's like Holy Water to them."

"And you think it will burn out the vampire in Peter before he fully turns," Alison said thoughtfully. "You know, that might actually work."

Harry nodded. "And I can find Carol from our connection, but I want to make sure that Dracula's not messing with it," he said. "I know he can misdirect and confuse my psychic probes, he did it when he was possessing Peter in the Mansion. If I check where he is from Peter's connection, and from Carol's connection, I can… sort of triangulate them. Make sure we're going in the right direction, anyway."

"So, we find out where Carol and Dracula are, you distract Dracula, Jean-Paul whisks her away, while the limited forces of SHIELD, Alison, Gambit, Logan, myself, and perhaps Professor Dumbledore, take on Dracula's massed forces," Bucky said. "This still doesn't seem like a winning proposition. Particularly not once Dracula realises you've swiped Carol from him." He glanced at Alison. "Especially if he realises that a potential replacement for Carol is right in front of him."

"Which is why I'll be playing command and control," Alison replied. "Once Carol is out of there, I'll use a more modern form of countermeasure."

"And that would be?"

"Assuming that it's in an uninhabited area, which I think is quite likely, a bomb. Specifically, a modified GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast," Alison said briskly. "Otherwise known as the 'Mother of All Bombs', and the most powerful bomb this side of a nuke even prior to modification." She glanced in the rear-view mirror. "It might not kill Dracula, but it will definitely kill more or less all his merry men and women. And if it is in an inhabited area, then I've ordered a Nexus Bomb be brought in – weaponised teleportation, essentially. It encompasses the target in an energy field, then implodes and scatters anything inside it across a couple of thousand kilometres, and several dimensions, in bite-sized pieces."

There was a moment of awed silence, before Harry looked at Bucky.

"That… should probably do the job."

"Good," Alison said. "Now, where, precisely, have you told Mister Beaubier and company to meet us?"

As it turned out, it wasn't that far away, and after another five minutes flight, in which time Harry rang Professor Dumbledore and filled him in, they came in to land. However, instead of the four people who were expected, there were five. And as soon as they got a good look at him, both Bucky and Alison tensed up, hands drifting towards weapons. Harry, taking his cue from them, and from the fact that the man's psychic defences were – from even a brief glance – smooth and solid enough not to give anything away and that he was radiating raw magical power in Wanda's league, tensed up as well. And there was something else about him, something… off. It was almost, Harry thought, like the feeling that ghosts gave off.

All that would have been more than enough to put him on his guard, even on an ordinary day. However, additional to all of the above, something in his Red Son memories was jumping up and down and screaming of danger.

"Mister Beaubier," Alison said crisply, though she kept her eyes on the unexpected addition. "I see you have all arrived in one piece. With a tag-along, it would seem."

"One who hasn't introduced himself, _Madame_ Carter," Jean-Paul agreed. His group were not quite so tense, though they were regarding the newcomer with wary suspicion. "He has, however, provided credentials." He held out a note, which the three perused. It was brief, and signed by Doctor Strange. It was entirely genuine, as it contained references specific to each of the three that only Strange would know.

"Strange sent you to us," Harry said, speaking to the man. He didn't, at first, seem like much.

He was of a little more than average height, physically fit, and appeared to be in his mid thirties. He had dark hair, calculating dark eyes, and long features, and was wearing a fine three piece suit with a green tie and green cufflinks. On appearance alone, he'd pass comfortably as a successful businessman of some kind in more or less any city in the world. Yet appearances weren't everything. Even though his credibility rested solely on a single note, and the fact that he was surrounded by a number of extremely dangerous individuals, he seemed to be entirely at ease. And it was not the ease of ignorance, either.

"I'd say more that he persuaded me that it would be in my interest to assist you in defeating Dracula," the man replied, speaking perfect, almost accentless English, but with just a hint of an accent that intensified the sense of warning Harry was getting from his Red Son memories, locked away though they were. "And rescuing your fair granddaughter, of course," he added to Alison, with a graceful inclination of his head, one that did not disguise to Harry the sense that to him, Carol's safety was an afterthought.

"As for my name, Harry Thorson," he continued, returning to Harry. "My full name is not one I hand out lightly, for reasons a fellow practitioner of magic would well understand. It is also one that does not translate to English very well. Usually, though, I am known as Victor von Doom. Doctor Victor von Doom."

OoOoO

I may not have mentioned this before, and if I have, it bears repeating: Tyrannosaurs can _really_ haul ass. Even when it comes to dealing with an army of spectres, zombies, and inferi, they just keep going, with Sue powering through the sea of lesser undead like a boat cresting a wave.

Ramirez, who was seated behind me, certainly thought so, going by the gleeful whoop he let out.

"Enjoying the ride, Ramirez?" I asked.

"Sure," came the cheerful reply of someone drunk on adrenalin. "Man, they should make these things standard issue!"

A brief mental image of the Wardens riding into battle on zombie dinosaurs danced across my mind's eye for a moment, before I dismissed it.

"Not likely," I said. "Sue here is one of a kind."

Sue, as if she'd heard me, threw back her head and roared a sky-splitting challenge to the clouds above.

"Pity. And I told you – anyone who lets me ride their zombie dinosaur gets to call me Carlos," he continued.

"Right, I'll bear that in mind," I said, before nearly losing my grip on Sue's back. Our progress was being delayed now, as we got deeper into the army of undead, with sheer numbers slowing our momentum and the fact that the strongest undead were at the back reducing our speed from 'charge' to 'slog'. And as we slowed, undead creatures began hurling weapons into Sue's enchanted flesh, or simply reaching in and ripping out vast chunks of it in a frenzy, doing their best to rip her apart piece by piece.

Any mortal creature would have gone into a thrashing panic at such wounds, brought to its knees, near death.

But Sue was not mortal. And she didn't get afraid. She got _angry._

The tyrannosaurus flared with silvery ghost-light, and let out a roar even more powerful than those that had preceded it, before proceeding to go to town on the undead army with a frenzied savagery and a bloodlust that defied belief. Though she was one, and they were an army, it was no contest – Sue was less a zombie, more a force of nature.

Unfortunately, that was when everything started to go wrong. This awe inspiring display led to Sue turning away from the fight we were trying to get to, the one over the Darkhallow itself, and she resisted my attempts to force her to turn back towards it.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw Luccio emerge from the building that she and Morgan had entered whilst hunting for the Corpsetaker. My relief that she seemed to be all right was tempered by a sense of unease. I couldn't pin down what it was, but it was there. Something wasn't right.

Just as I noticed that, a tall, dark robed figure emerged from the shadows behind her. Voldemort. Luccio whirled, raising her blade, but a flick of Voldemort's wand disarmed her, and when she raised a hand in a sharp, pulling gesture, my flicker of unease increased. It, and the power that accompanied it, a cold, empty power that I could feel from the other side of the battlefield, was familiar. Familiar and _wrong_.

Whatever it was, though, it wasn't enough, as Voldemort himself seemed to chuckle coldly, and flare with power of his own, harsh power that broke Luccio's spell in a savage instant and sent her reeling, dazed. Then, before Ramirez and I could do anything, he raised his wand, and in a high, cold, voice that for a single moment silenced the battlefield, spoke two words.

" _AVADA KEDAVRA!"_

There was a flash of cold green light, a flare of empty power, and the sound of rushing wings. And then, like a puppet whose strings had been cut, Luccio dropped into the mud.

Ramirez let out a strangled cry of rage, and vaulted down off Sue's back with more enthusiasm than grace. From that height, by all rights he should at least have sprained an ankle, but if he did, he showed no sign of it. A mere split second after landing, he scrambled to his feet with another scream of rage, a sweep of his humming enchanted blade and a storm of the green blasts he favoured, before charging off towards Voldemort, sword raised high. Voldemort, meanwhile, didn't disapparate this time. Instead, he spotted Ramirez' approach, let out a laugh that was lost in the renewed roar of battle, and made an unmistakeable beckoning gesture. It said, clear as day, 'bring it on'.

I cursed, glanced at Wanda, decided that she was doing fine – her duel with Cowl had evolved into a ball of impenetrable crimson and deathly white energy, the two warring for dominance, and pounding the ground beneath them to dust – and so attempted once more to wrench Sue around.

Ramirez was, from what little I'd seen, a very talented combat wizard and more than capable of doing serious damage to any monster that crossed his path. I'd fancy him against more than a couple of the dark wizards I'd faced. Voldemort, however, was something else entirely. For one thing, he seemed none the worse for wear, despite Magneto's attempts to rip out most of his blood and turn it into a hat, and my putting three .44 calibre bullets into his head. In short, he wouldn't fight Ramirez. He would kill him.

As I was on the point of just jumping down from Sue and chasing after Ramirez, though, the shit really hit the fan.

I felt power being drawn in, the magical equivalent of the sea rushing away just before a tidal wave came. Then, from the tree in the middle of the battlefield, the White Ash that Wanda had somehow created and had implied Selene was trapped inside of somehow, came a crack like a massively magnified gunshot. Lines suddenly appeared, running through the tree like rivers, rivers of dark, oily red flame, the thick smoke of which I could see, and the heat of which I could feel.

Then, with a thunderous boom, the tree exploded like a bomb, sending burning splinters the size of knives flying out across the battlefield in a lethal storm. And as burning leaves and flowers rained down on us all, something came into view over the jagged, cracked, and splintered ruin of the tree stump. It was a vast cloud of twisting, coiling darkness, blacker than the night, blacker than the deepest, darkest shadow I'd ever seen. Where those were an absence of light, that was a darkness that swallowed light, and wouldn't settle until it had swallowed it all.

It hung there, twisting and roiling for an instant, before suddenly collapsing in on itself, like an egg the size of my car. But what emerged was not the form of Selene that Wanda had described. Instead, something huge and serpentine erupted form the egg of darkness, growing longer and broader with every instant, reaching up towards the uneasy sky like the tree it had emerged from, with the speed of a freight train.

In a matter of mere instants, it had coalesced. Raised on two huge back legs that ended in clawed feet the size of 4x4's, with a body as wide as two subway carriages placed side-by-side and covered in scales like black iron, and a tail the length of a telephone pole, it towered over a battle that had stopped in stunned silence. It then settled down onto all four feet, shaking the ground around us. Huge, slitted yellow eyes seated high on a reptilian head opened and glared malevolently down at all below. A vast maw opened, revealing fangs like swords, and dark red flames kindled deep in the creature's throat.

Then, the primordial dragon that had been Selene Gallio let out a roar fit to drown out the thunder itself, before focusing on the one thing between her and the Darkhallow she so desired: me. Little old T-Rex riding me.

I swallowed and said the first words that came to mind.

"I'm gonna need a bigger dinosaur."

OoOoO

"Victor von Doom," Alison said. Though her tone was cool and calm, her gun was in hand, and aimed at Doom's head, as was Bucky's. "Extraordinarily powerful sorcerer, brilliant scientist, and undisputed ruler of Latveria. The man with so many groups, agencies, and entities wanting to have a little _word_ with him that an orderly queue would reach all the way back to New York City. What could possibly bring you back to the United States?"

"As I said," Doom said, seemingly ignoring the fact that two of the most dangerous people on the continent were holding him at gunpoint, and a powerful demigod was giving serious consideration to frying him where he stood. "Doctor Strange persuaded me that it would be in my interest."

"Like it is to send robots to periodically attack the US, and other nations?" Alison asked. "We can't prove it, but we know it's you."

"Everything I do has its reasons," Doom said, and shrugged. "I won't pretend that I am involved out of altruism. While I have no desire to see a child, or anyone, die at the hands of such disgusting abominations of nature as vampires, my main interest is in ensuring that Dracula does not become more powerful."

"You think that the ritual empowers him," Bucky said. "In what way?"

"My theory was that it would make him immune to sunlight," Harry said. "Carol doesn't offer more raw power, or any explicit supernatural ability. So it has to be a weakness he's patching. Her blood can't make him immune to faith, and the threshold rule is a fundamental of magic. Sunlight's the logical answer."

Doom's eyes flicked over to him and regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, as if reassessing him, before nodding. "I had come to that conclusion as well," he said. His gaze swept along both groups. "We do not have time to debate this further. My reasons are purely pragmatic: while I have no interest in Dracula becoming immune to sunlight and conferring that ability to the entire Grey Court, or at the very least, to those he sires from now on, there is more to it. The Grey Court are spread across the world, but their power base, Dracula's power base, remains in Eastern Europe, near Latveria. While I have so far managed to ensure that Latveria weathers the Red Room's abortive empire building…" His gaze lingered on Harry. "And the chaos that has followed their fall, the lands that surround it have not been so fortunate. They are in upheaval."

"You think that Dracula could take control of Eastern Europe," Alison said. She didn't seem much more trusting, but her gun had lowered slightly. "Or at least spread his influence throughout the region. And once, or as, he does so, he'll come for his main supernatural rival in the region: you."

Doom nodded.

"And the robots?" Bucky asked quietly.

"A few of them came after me, this time last year," Harry remarked mildly. "Dad wasn't particularly happy about that. Nor was the Hulk, as it happens."

Doom regarded them. "Hypothetically, were I responsible for dispatching advanced combat robots to attack, or incite combat with, the Avengers, then I would have my reasons. Those reasons would be little different from those for my presence here and now. The Avengers are, as a collective, possess phenomenal raw power. Gods, demons, and mortals alike fall before them, while the armies of the stars and the depths of hell themselves are left in devastated ruins. They can achieve victory on the battlefield and off it, waging war in the open and in the shadows, their enemies falling before them like wheat before a scythe. Their agenda is their own, their limits are those they choose." He met Alison's gaze. "And they have deposed rulers that they do not like before."

Alison's eyes narrowed briefly, but she did not disagree.

Doom's gaze swept along the line once more. "I do not seek a war with the Avengers," he said. "I have no reason to, as for the most part, their actions suit my interests. But there is every chance that one day, they may seek a war with me. Just as Dracula will, if he gains the power." His eyes stopped on Harry. "So. If, hypothetically, I dispatched my technology to draw the attention of the Avengers and draw them into a fight, then it would not simply be for amusement, or petty destruction – which you might, hypothetically, note from how the actual damage has been limited to property damage, and little more than cuts and scrapes. Enough to provoke a response, rather than an enraged declaration of war."

"Then what would it be for?" Harry asked.

"It would be for one purpose," Doom said. "So I could, as any sensible ruler would, assess those who might make war on me. Their strengths, and their limitations."

"And if, hypothetically, the Avengers were involved in a series of grand scale battles over a relatively short period, then you wouldn't need to send out your robots," Bucky said shrewdly. "Just observe."

Doom smiled as coldly and briefly as the flickering tongue of a snake. "Hypothetically," he said. Then, the smile vanishing, he raised an eyebrow. "So. Will you trust me to assist you, or must we work at cross-purposes?"

There were a series of shared looks, before Alison holstered her pistol. "Coldblooded logic has its uses," she remarked. "But I'd like to make one thing clear, Von Doom – if your brand of logic makes you for even one moment consider harming one hair on my granddaughter's head, then I will kill you."

"And if she doesn't, I will," said two identically cold voices in perfect stereo, with identical uncompromising expressions on the speakers' faces.

Doom's gaze rested on the speakers, Harry and Bucky, without batting an eye. "As all men become their fathers, so all students become their teachers," he murmured, before nodding. "I understand." His gaze flicked over to Jean-Paul. "As I did when the threat was first delivered to me."

At that point, a previously, and uncharacteristically, silent member of the party awkwardly coughed for attention – then hacked and spluttered for a few moments as something got caught in his throat. And the regard of the whole party turned to Peter Parker.

"Uh," Peter said, quailing a little under the collected attention. "I've got a question: what am I doing here? I mean, it's not that I don't want to help – I do. It's just…" He paused. "I'm not sure how much help I can be. I mean, I'm part vampire now, but I'm not that powerful, and Dracula's possessed me once tonight already. What if he does it again?" His voice wavered and he swallowed. "What if…?"

"What if what?" Harry asked.

"What if you turn in full," Alison said softly, going to his side and slipping a grandmotherly arm around his thin shoulders. "Mister Lupin told you, didn't he?"

Peter nodded. "He asked when I was bitten, then told me. He thought I should know," he said. "So I could… so I could say my goodbyes."

"We don't want you to fight," Harry said.

"Hey, wait, I can and will fight!" Peter said indignantly, glaring defiantly through watering eyes, before deflating somewhat. "But, um… I don't think I'm going to be very good at it."

"Not what I meant, Peter," Harry said. "I can get a fix on Carol. We've got a mental connection, you see." He eyed Doom. "And Doctor von Doom might be able to zero in on the building ritual, because something this big is going to be drawing in some real power." Doom inclined his head in acknowledgement, and Harry's gaze returned to Peter. "You've got a connection to Dracula."

"You're going to try and read his mind?" Peter asked, startled. "Through me?"

"No," Harry said. "I'd rather he didn't know we're coming, least of all me."

"You want to triangulate his location," Doom said shrewdly. "One beacon can be obscured, two as well, but three…"

Harry nodded. "As soon as we've got that, we can move," he said.

"And your plan to overpower Dracula's armies is…?" Doom asked, earning a cold look from Bucky.

"Ah was wonderin' that mahself, to tell y' the truth," Gambit said.

"You've pulled a few tricks in your time, Mister LeBeau," Alison said. "You should be familiar with the Kansas City Shuffle."

Gambit's eyes shot up, as, perhaps unsurprisingly, did Logan's. Then, the Cajun mutant nodded slowly.

"Y'know," he said after a moment. "That might jus' work."

"Dracula is not such a fool as to be tricked by a simple bait and switch," Doom said. "He will be watchful. And wary. Particularly on a night like this."

And Harry smiled. "Trust me," he said. "He will." The smile widened into a sharp grin. "This is Halloween, and there's two things I've learned about this time of year. One, nothing is quite what it seems. Two… it's when the impossible happens. When everything changes."

He cracked his knuckles and smiled a manic smile.

"So, let me put it like this," he said. "This Halloween, I, we, are going to rescue Carol, give Dracula the most miserable of his undead existence, and cure Peter here. And I am going to make all of those things happen, even if I have to bully and blackmail every single god in the heavens to do it." He clapped his hands and rubbed them together, before he turned to Peter, drew his sword, and said, "So. Let's get on with it, shall we? Who's got a mug I can bleed into?"

OoOoO

"So… to not be a vampire, I have to drink blood," Peter said slowly, staring down at Alison's travel mug. Usually, it was full of tea, or coffee. Right now, it was half full of Harry's blood. "Which, aside from being disgusting, is kind of twisted logic."

"The evidence says that Harry's blood is inimical to vampires," Alison said. "The idea is that it burns the vampire out of you before you turn fully, and there is nothing but vampire left."

"It fits with the basic principles of blood magic and vampirism," Doom remarked. "Vampires feed to sustain themselves, absorb energy, and different kinds of blood affect them in different ways. Blood magic works in a similar fashion, which is unsurprising, since this breed of vampire is, so far as I can tell, the product of a mixture of necromancy and blood magic." All except Jean-Paul were now in the back of Alison's car, magically enlarged by Doom for the occasion, and even enlarged, the seating arrangements had not left certain members of the travelling party – i.e. Logan – happy. For one thing, Doom had called shotgun, on the grounds of navigation.

"Right," Peter said. "The burning part is kind of the sticking point. What guarantee do I have that this won't, you know, burn me alive from the inside out? Because I like chili dogs as much as the next New Yorker, but I'm not at downing a bottle of hot sauce levels of machismo, let alone, you know, magic-blood-that-might-be-magic-napalm."

"None," Doom said, and turned in his seat. "However, consider it like this, young man: if you do not drink that, then you will remain part-vampire on the verge of turning in full, and a risk of possession. That is a tactical risk that I will not accept."

"Uh, and what does that mean, Mister Doom sir?"

"It means, Mister Parker, that if you do drink it, you _might_ die, in which case I will personally ensure that your passing is quick and painless." His eyes narrowed. "If you don't drink it, then you will _definitely_ die."

Peter's eyes widened, his face paled even further, and with a faint whimper, he attempted to burrow back into the car seat.

Logan growled, and Gambit, who'd been running his cards through his fingers, warming them up, looked up.

"Watch it, bub," Logan said.

"I'd have t' agree," Gambit said. "Y' point is valid, but th' delivery's a bit harsh. Step off the boy a little. It no small choice he's bein' asked t' make."

Doom raised an eyebrow. "We have approximately twenty minutes before we're in sufficient range for Dracula's Lords Lieutenant to sense a part-vampire of the same bloodline, even if they aren't looking, and Dracula himself is indisposed," he said. "He has no time to brood over the decision. Even if he goes unnoticed, and he does not become a tactical risk, then he will turn into a vampire sometime today or tomorrow, an undead monster designed to hunt humans, a mockery of what he once was." His gaze shifted to Peter. "Part of him doesn't quite see it that way, however. Part of him is afraid, and not without reason. It is afraid and tempted by the power he now has, the freedom from all mortal ailments, the strength beyond mere mortal men. That part thinks that he'll be the exception, that he'll be the one to keep his humanity even once he turns. He is hardly the first, and he will hardly be the last. Turning, after all, is an abstract fate, not as clear a death. Better to take his chances with that, part of him is thinking, than with an uncertain and untested cure that may only bring him a horrible death."

Peter looked away, for part of him had been thinking that, and Doom's gaze shifted to Logan and Gambit, then to Bucky, who met his gaze coldly. Harry might be expected to have intervened at this point, but he was in a trance state, not quite asleep, and in communication with several others, so not paying attention.

"Don't believe me? Then look at Sergeant Barnes, formerly the Winter Soldier," he continued, tone calm and remorseless. "The most feared assassin of the Cold War, altered and reprogrammed into an unstoppable killing machine, with only one exception, something buried deep in the Red Room's files: he never killed a child. Not if he could possibly avoid it. With a conviction that deeply rooted, you would imagine he would have said something by now. But he hasn't." His gaze shifted to Alison. "If that is not enough, look at Deputy Director Carter here, one of the most legendarily effective agents SHIELD ever had. She is also a mother and a grandmother, with grandchildren the same age as Mister Parker. She might be expected to object. But she hasn't. Neither of them has. Because, like me, they understand that this is the only way, even if they do not like it. And that my tactics, of giving Mister Parker something concrete, something immediate, to fear, are necessary."

His gaze finally returned to Peter. "So, Mister Parker, your choice is this: drink, or die."

Peter, eyes wide and terrified, met his gaze and saw no mercy there. He gulped and nodded, before staring at the mug. "Well," he said, after a moment, before raising the mug and giving a weak, wobbly smile. "Cheers."

Then, he knocked it back.

For several long moments, nothing happened. Then, Peter's eyes bulged and he doubled over, clutching at his stomach, coughing and spluttering as smoke and golden-white sparks emerged from his mouth, first in a trickle, then in a torrent. His body began to twitch, then jerk sharply, like a gaffed fish, and Logan and Bucky had to pin him in his seat, the latter swearing as he found Peter's skin burning hot to the touch. And only did it burn, but his skin flickered from icy pale to a more usual pinkish-white, then back again, as if death and life were fighting within him for supremacy.

"What's happening to the kid?" Logan demanded.

"He's being purged," Doom said, watching Peter intently.

This went on for another couple of minutes, before Peter stopped, gasping. At first, it seemed like it was over, before, suddenly, bent over again and vomited something dark and foul onto the car floor. Bucky, with reflexes a snake would have envied, reached out and snatched it up with his metal hand.

"Peter?" Alison asked. "Are you all right?"

"And for my encore," he managed. "Tabasco." He wiped his mouth and glanced down. "Uh. Sorry about your car, Missus Carter." He glanced at Doom and gulped. "So, um, Mister Doom… I drank, so, you aren't going to kill me, right?"

Doom's hand, gleaming as if covered in a steel glove, snapped out, almost as fast as Bucky's had, and grabbed Peter's wrist. Then, he froze. Three adamantium claws and a pistol to the throat would have that effect.

"The kid did what you asked, bub," Logan growled. "Now back off."

"Seconded," Bucky said, in cold, steely tones.

"I am just testing him, Mister Howlett, Sergeant Barnes," Doom said calmly. "His blood, to be specific. All I need is a drop, and then I can make sure that the vampirism is truly gone."

"Swear on your magic first," Alison said sharply. "That you will not use any blood you take from Peter for any purpose other than, here and now, testing if he is still infected."

Doom stared at her for a long moment, before inclining his head very slightly. "I do so swear," he said. "On my magic, on my power, not to use Peter's blood, collected here and now, only to test if he is still infected."

Alison regarded him for a moment, then nodded, and said, "Logan. Bucky."

Logan grunted and retracted his claws, while Bucky lowered his pistol, and resumed examining the dark mass in his metal hand.

Doom glanced at it, then said, "I would throw that out the window if I were you. I doubt it will last long, but best be safe."

Bucky eyed at him, then met Alison's gaze in the rear-view mirror, before doing as advised.

"Now, Mister Parker," Doom said, extending a small blade from a gauntleted fingertip. "Count to three."

"One, two, ow!"

"Thank you," Doom said, dropping the hand and examining the blood on it. He murmured a couple of spells, drawing a pale glow from the ruby red blood, before nodding. Then, a helmet similar in style to one of Tony's suits but steely-grey with green eye-lights, formed around his head, rising from his torso, under his shirt.

"You've got your own Iron Man suit?!" Peter burst out, astonishment and excitement overwhelming his nervousness.

"Hardly," Doom said coolly, voice modulated.

"It look like an Iron Man suit t' me, _homme_ ," Gambit remarked.

"No," Bucky said. "It's not."

"He's right," Alison said. "Superficial resemblance aside, it's no more the same as an Iron Man suit than a Jaguar is the same as an Aston Martin."

Doom, armour folding away again, glanced up at her apparent total lack of surprise, and got a hard smile.

"Come now, Doctor von Doom," she said. "You do your research on potential enemies, and I do mine. Especially when potential copies of my godson's technology are involved."

"Then you will know that it is _not_ a copy," Doom said, tone becoming faintly irate in the first real expression of emotion since he had appeared.

"Mmm. Same principles, different execution," Alison agreed. "So far as I can tell. The hard sciences aren't my area of expertise, but I have picked up a few things during my career." She shot a sly sidelong glance at Doom. "It does have one thing in common with Tony's armour, though, doesn't it?"

Doom didn't so much as twitch. He didn't react in the slightest. And it was this studied lack of reaction that gave him away.

"I'm not looking to blackmail you, Doom," Alison said. "And even if I was, this is hardly the time or the place for that." She shot him another sidelong glance. "I just want you to know that I know."

Doom met her gaze for a long moment, narrowed his eyes, then nodded slightly.

"So," Peter said after another few moments. "What's the diagnosis, doc?"

"The young Prince's hunch was correct," Doom said. "You are cured. Not without alterations, I think, but cured nonetheless." His gaze shifted to Harry. "Remarkable," he murmured. "If the virtues of his blood could be synthesised –"

"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride," Bucky said flatly. "The probable 'virtue' in his blood that attacks vampirism and vampires isn't one that can be replicated." He met Doom's gaze. "And it's dangerous to those who try."

Doom said nothing, but continued to regard Harry with a thoughtful expression.

It was at that point that Harry spoke.

"Take a photo, it'll last longer."

Almost everyone jumped. Harry hadn't even shifted the pattern of his breathing, much less opened his eyes, though now he did both.

"You got what you needed?" Bucky asked.

Harry smiled dangerously and the scent of wood-smoke began to drift throughout the car.

"But of course, Bucky," he said. "To repurpose an old phrase… let there be light. _Let there be life_." His eyes shifted from emerald green to solid, incandescent white. _**"Let there be fire**_ **."**

OoOoO

Both Wanda and Cowl looked up at the earth-shaking roar of the imitation Long-Wyrm that Selene had become, one followed by a smaller, but equally furious roar from Dresden's zombified tyrannosaurus. Then, as they watched, the t-rex, 'Sue', charged at the giant, serpentine black dragon as her rider dropped off her back and began sprinting towards one of his fellow Wardens. A fellow Warden who was, Wanda noticed with a cold feeling deep in her stomach, challenging an unmistakeable robed figure - Voldemort.

"Well," Cowl said mildly. "I will say this much: your apprentice has quite the eye for the spectacular." He glanced towards Magneto, who had bound Kumori and rendered her unconscious, before turning to systematically destroy any undead that would threaten his daughter's back while she faced the primary threat. "Speaking of apprentices, is mine dead?"

He didn't sound overly bothered by the prospect, Wanda noted, sparing no more than mild regret. "Unconscious," she said. "And likely for some time, knowing my father."

"Yes, your father," Cowl said. "A tall, dark, and dangerous man. As he is, so was your mentor, and surrogate father, Doctor Strange, a titan on the magical stage – and now passed, going by the fact that you wear his clothes."

Wanda felt a stab in her heart, and ignored it. Now was not the time to grieve.

"Then John Constantine, the Laughing Magician," Cowl said. "Not as tall, or as dark in body – though plenty in spirit – he was nonetheless another dark one. And now your apprentice, Harry Dresden, the White Council's Black Sheep, and the Winter Queen's intended successor to the rank of Winter Knight." Wanda started slightly and Cowl sounded as if he was concealing a smile. "No need to look so surprised – it is common knowledge that the Winter Queen offered him the position of Winter Knight after the death of the Summer Lady a couple of years ago. Since the position remains vacant, it is obvious that he refused, and that she still awaits his acceptance."

"This conversation is pointless," Dark Bob complained irritably, and as he did, Wanda wondered at how quickly the incredibly knowledgeable, snarky, and harmlessly perverted spirit could have been perverted into something so cold and merciless. She didn't bother trying to entreat him, though, or appeal to his better nature – while he had been given a Name by Harry, only Harry could realistically use it to exert any influence. "Despatch or banish her; either way, her presence will ruin the spell if you do not."

Cowl ignored him, and his hood turned towards the battle royale in the background, where dragon and dinosaur ripped and tore at one another with primal savagery, trampling all those unfortunate enough to fall under their feet into dead meat and ectoplasm, with silver ghost-light and oily dark red flames clashing as they lit up the battlefield.

"And it is perfectly clear that he has quite a talent for the dark arts," Cowl continued. "He is just your type, isn't he, Ms Maximoff? And yet… all three of the others used you for their own ends, dancing you along like a puppet on strings. This one clearly has gifts in the same direction, to keep the Winter Queen at bay for so long. When will he become the next to use you, I wonder?"

"I am curious," Wanda said coolly, glancing up at the clouds, from which the rotating tip of the tornado, the vortex that would swallow thousands upon thousands of spirits, and whose collapse would kill tens of thousands more, began to descend. "What you hope to achieve by rambling on about this? As your spirit notes, time and stalling tactics favour me, not you, and if you think that I haven't encountered psychological warfare like this – far more effective than this – then you are far more of a fool than I thought."

"Little enough," Cowl said, shrugging. "I confess that I hoped to put you off balance, that you would already be off balance from your mentor's sudden death. I felt it might make you quicker and easier to take down."

"More fool you, then," Wanda said coldly.

"Indeed," Cowl said, and flicked his wrists. "The old-fashioned way, then."

"Indeed," Wanda said, flicking her own.

And in an instant, battle was joined once more.

Cowl unleashed dark red tentacles that tore through the earth like demonic earthworms, which Wanda countered with binding enchantments that tied each tentacle up with the ones next to it, reducing them to a tangled mess. Cowl responded by ripping them free, unleashing a huge cloud of obscuring mud and earth, then bringing them down again towards Wanda like a sickly red war-hammer. Wanda, though, was not where he struck, spinning on her toes with the grace of a dancer, fierce winds swatting the mud away, and a splitting enchantment separating water and earth, then turning one to ice and the other to steel, before unleashing them in a rain on Cowl, who banished the tentacles and raised a shield that blocked the spears of steel and ice.

And now Wanda went on the attack, fracturing the ground beneath his feet, setting him stumbling. As he stumbled, she jerked a hand towards her, pulling a quick, low line of force that slammed into the back of his ankles, starting a series of small, quick-fire attacks, designed to keep the powerful dark wizard off-balance and render him unable to formulate counter-spells while she closed in for the kill, acutely aware that she couldn't let a practitioner this dangerous breathe for even a split second.

Unfortunately, for just a split second, he did. And once he did, he took full advantage, unleashing a force blast that would have dented tank armour and, had Wanda not crossed her arms over her chest in a basic defence at the last second, turned her to crunchy jam. It was, however, sufficient to send her flying into the path of the battling Sue and Selene, and only an instinctive teleportation away prevented her from being crushed beneath their clawed feet. Regaining her feet, ten feet from where she had been, and gasping for breath, she reoriented herself, as Cowl steadied himself on his own feet.

"I will not be denied, Mistress Maximoff," he said. "You have fought well, but someone must claim the Darkhallow, and if not me, then who?" He gestured at the rampaging monsters. "Selene? Her apprentice, Voldemort, who toys with your apprentice as we speak?" A brief glance told Wanda that Voldemort was doing exactly that. "The Corpsetaker, who was still present, in yet another stolen body, unless she has been banished? Surely I am the lesser evil."

"Perhaps," Wanda said, closing her eyes and and drawing in her power. She had wanted to avoid doing this, knowing the risks of a backlash. But she had to end this now, before Selene went on a rampage beyond this battlefield and killed hundreds, thousands, to sate her hunger. Before Voldemort killed Harry, her apprentice, and the young Warden too, and escaped once more. And above all, before the Darkhallow was fully primed, or someone might well claim it as Cowl predicted.

"But the thing about lesser evils," she said, opening her eyes. They were solid crimson. Or rather… scarlet. "The very _important_ thing… is that they are _still_ evil."

Then with a furious scream of challenge, she struck out, unleashing a storm of the chaotic scarlet power that was her unwanted birthright, scarlet flames and lightning bolts lashing out like a storm gone mad. And this time, Cowl's defences, which had shrugged off everything thrown at them, shattered like dry eggshell in the face of the onslaught, collapsing as they were attacked on dozens of levels at once.

But that was only a side-note, for the vast majority of the scarlet power struck upwards in a twisting, coil vine of burning power. When it encountered the vortex, halfway to earth, it carried on going, punching up through it, turning it from silver-grey to crimson red and tearing it apart from within. It swayed back and forth for a moment, before finally lashing into clouds like the crack of a whip, breaking the supernatural storm with an explosion of furious, eye-searing crimson-white light that shook the entire battlefield and flattened almost all of those on it.

Wanda dropped to her knees and, as she blinked away the lights in her eyes, took the deep breaths of a footballer who's just finished Extra Time, and knows that they're about to go on to a Penalty Shoot-Out. Her night was not yet done.

"Wanda?"

She looked up and took her father's offered hand, grimacing at the mud on her knees. "I'm all right, father," she said. "Cowl?"

"Gone," her father said grimly. "His apprentice, however, remains securely bound."

"Damn," Wanda said. "Well, that is something, at least." She rolled her shoulders and searched the battlefield, spotting Selene's triumph over Sue, whose undead vitals the former was now alternately roasting and devouring, and Dresden, who seemed to be trying very hard not to die.

"You handle Selene – if you go after Voldemort, he'll notice, and run," she said, grabbing Bob, whose eye-lights immediately shifted back to a friendly orange and, predictably, focused on her cleavage. As a partial result, Wanda ignored him and stuffed him into an extendable pocket to muffled indignation, wearing a hard and determined expression. " _I'll_ take Riddle."

OoOoO

 **A few minutes earlier…**

Thunder crashed overheard as lightning struck, the two practically inseparable - which I suppose is what happens when you've got a storm right overhead. Brighter and more frequent, though, were the flashes of scarlet red against a darkness that went beyond a mere lack of light, appearing in one place then the next, side effects of Wanda's duel with Cowl, and the primordial bellows and silvery-white ghost-light clashing with oily red flames that indicated Sue's fight with Selene. I didn't look up to follow either for a number of reasons.

First, if I did, I might remember that for all Wanda's power, she was fighting a Warlock who had shrugged off a car being dropped on his head, and that Sue, my trusty t-rex zombie, was fighting a Warlock who had been old when Atlantis fell and ancient when humanity had started painting on cave walls again, and who had taken the form of an ancient Elder Long-Wyrm. No wings, all of the malice. Concentrated.

Second, the sheer awe inspiring nature of the power and skill on display might distract me.

And I couldn't afford that for the third reason, which was that I was in single combat with the self-named Lord Voldemort (and with a real name like Tom Riddle, I can see why he changed it, because that is not a name calculated to strike fear into the hearts of men), the most fearsome wanded Warlock in a generation, who was older than me, stronger than me, far more knowledgeable than me and capable of teleportation, transforming himself into black smoke, and surviving three shots to the head, all of which I was firmly convinced were cheating.

Oh, and the reason that it was single-combat was that Voldemort, who had comfortably been duelling both me and Ramirez, had got bored of fighting Ramirez, and hit him with a vicious torture curse, and something else I couldn't identify. Whatever it was, Ramirez was now down for the count, and I had to keep an eye on him to make sure that something didn't eat him.

Any hopes I might have had of his rep being exaggerated, that he was a flat-track bully, were dispelled when I saw how he swatted Luccio like she was a fly. That and the way he was throwing out major league spells without breaking a sweat pretty much confirmed to me that this was the guy who, in the Wanded Magical World, really had only Albus Dumbledore and the not-quite-dead Gellert Grindelwald for a peer.

He was better than me, stronger than me, nearly as quick on the draw, and efficient enough that any deficit was quickly compensated for. Plus, the aforementioned teleporting and smoke things. All in all, I was beginning to suspect that I was only alive because he was enjoying toying with me, and I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that all I could really hope to do was distract and/or annoy him - and as many a would-be villain or officious authority figure could attest to, annoying people is one of my many marketable skills.

"So, what brings you to my fair city, your lordship?" I asked, ducking a bolt of oddly coloured light. "The weather? The architecture? The world-renowned deep-dish pizza?"

"Oh, nothing much," he replied in a clear, high and amused voice that I might otherwise had mocked if it wasn't so creepy. "Merely ensuring that my mistress achieves her goals."

"So, wait, you're her _lackey?_ " I asked, feigning incredulity. "Man, that's a step down from being the terror of Britain. Or, you know, terror of the bits that had actually heard of you."

Something ugly flickered in his eyes, but he smiled. "It is a step, certainly," he said.

"Ah, you're planning the old double cross," I said sagely. "Wait until she fights her way through all your rivals, then sucker puch her and take the Darkhallow for yourself."

"Almost," Voldemort replied. "But not quite. This is far too chaotic a setting to attempt to claim the Darkhallow and be reasonably certain of success."

A cold feeling settled in the pit of my stomach. "You want the book," I said. "You're counting on Selene to kill everyone else, then you're going to jog her arm while she's trying to claim it."

"More or less," Voldemort said, tipping his head in acknowledgement to me. "I will claim the knowledge, for use on another occasion, while several key threats and irritants, in the form of Selene, Maximoff, Magneto, and those deluded worshippers of a failure's memory will be destroyed. And everyone will assume that you and your felow Wardens tragically perished, having given your lives to prevent the Darkhallow. With luck, I will also be assumed dead."

"Great plan," I said. "But how will you get a copy of the book when you gave yours to Selene, and Sergeant Kemmler's Lonely Hearts Club Band failed to find another?"

"Because you, Harry Dresden, found one first," Voldemort said. "I suspected that you would – you are a man who is excellent at finding things, given proper motivation. So I followed you, and once you were ambushed by Grevane and that slinking wretch, I ambushed Grevane myself. After that, I gave a copy to Selene." He smiled a toothy, nasty smile as the words 'a copy' sunk in. "Yes, Mister Dresden, I made a copy of the _Word_. And really, I doubt that a single vampire, even a Master of the Black Court, will prove much of an obstacle." The smile widened as my eyes did the same. "Yes, I know about Mavra's little scheme. Knowledge is power, Dresden. All that needs be done now is to pick my moment and convert it into something more... _tangible_."

My blood ran cold and I kicked it up a notch. Because now, I wasn't merely fighting for my life, or Ramirez', but millions of others too.

No pressure.

That, of course, would be why I chose to do something very, very stupid. I ducked a spell that probably would have ripped my guts out my mouth then hanged me with them or something similarly horrific, dodged one that I recognised as something that could cut right down to the bone, preparing a spell of my own.

I hadn't used Soulfire yet tonight, not even to bring back Sue. I didn't know much about it, but from what I'd been told by Bob, Wanda, and Loki, it came from gods. Or more likely, in my specific case, from Heaven. In other words, the sort of people who probably wouldn't be too pleased at me using their gift for necromancy, no matter how well intentioned and how technically it was within the Laws.

This time, though, I drew on a lot of it, pumping it into myself to reinforce my body, and the very big spell I was preparing, my staff's inscriptions glowing silver as I did. And as they did, I noticed with a spike of satisfaction that Voldemort hesitated, his expression of lazy confidence shaken. Then, when I was sure it was ready, or as near as I was likely to get, practically bursting with power, I thrust my staff high, aimed my left arm at Voldemort like cannon, and lunged at him, screaming, _"VENTAS FULMINO!"_

Lightning answered my call, pouring down onto the tip of my staff in an endless, eye-searing onslaught, one that made me feel as if I was being fried alive from the inside. But that feeling only lasted a moment, as with a raw scream, I unleashed the lightning, which crackled and spiralled down my left arm, just as it latched onto his face. There was a moment of silence, a frozen moment as shock and fury warred on his face, and shock and (probably) terror warred on mine. Then, with ear-splitting explosion, we were flung apart.

For several long moments, there was silence, as I lay flat on my back, unable to move. Then, I heard, through ringing ears, squelching footsteps. Voldemort was standing over me. He wasn't cool and confident now. Instead, his face was twisted, both with rage and with pain, as the lightning strike had melted a good chunk of his right cheek, leaving a savage dark red and black mark, and he was limping. But his eyes were clear, sharp, and dancing with fury, and when he levelled his wand, it was without a tremor.

I made another abortive attempt to sit up, but all I achieved was to flop on the ground, and for Voldemort to flick his wand, flattening me into the mud like a giant's palm, leaving me barely able to breathe.

 _So_ , I thought, with a strange calm. _This is how I die. Third time's the charm, I suppose._

"You _irritating_ little half-blood _worm_ ," Voldemort snarled, almost spitting with rage, words muffled by the damage to his face. "You dare wield the powers of creation against _me?!_ Who has gone _beyond_ the cycle of life and death?! And you have the arrogance to think that it will make a difference?!"

A scarlet bolt of power slammed into him, sending him flying, convulsing in mid-air.

"It makes enough," Wanda said coldly. "Hello, Voldemort."

As she spoke, Voldemort got to his feet, and she flicked a finger, hauling me to mine by the back of my coat. I stumbled, but managed to force myself upright with my staff, and Voldemort's gaze darted between the two of us, then sharply back to Wanda as she began to weave spells I didn't recognise. Quick as a snake, he levelled his wand at me and snapped two fatal words.

" _AVADA KEDAVRA!"_

I wasn't able to dodge; the spell was moving too fast, and my body was strung out from the lightning bolt trick.

As it happened, though, I didn't need to, as Wanda tackled me around the knees, knocking me to the floor, under the lethal cold green spell.

Voldemort, meanwhile, had vanished into a cloud of smoke and fled, as soon as he cast the spell. If there was any doubt about whether he was gone, it was ended soon enough. Wanda looked around, eyes shifting out focus as she used the Sight, then swore viciously in what sounded like Romanian.

"Gone," she spat. "He ran, the coward."

"He got what he wanted," I said, grimacing and rubbing my head. "He didn't need to stick around." I eyed Wanda. "And for some unaccountable reason, he probably thought that fighting you was a bad idea."

Wanda chuckled wryly. "If I was fresh, I could have taken him," she said. "But now, after going twelve rounds with Cowl? I'm not so sure." She shot me an impressed look. "But you managed to hold him off for a while. That's not an easy thing to do."

"He was toying with me," I said bluntly. "And rifling through my brain while he was at it." I shook my head, trying to quell the feeling of nausea the very idea aroused in me. "If he wanted me dead, if he thought I was a threat, I'd be dead. That's the only reason he was even still here – he just wanted to play with me." My gaze shifted to Luccio, dead on the floor, and Ramirez, alive, but semi-conscious at best, his body shaking with the residue of Voldemort's curse. "Others weren't so lucky."

Wanda's expression sobered. "No," she said, going to Ramirez's side, propping him up against the wall, and testing his breathing and heartbeat, before murmuring something over him. Whatever it was, his body went from taut as a bow-string to at least partially relaxed. "No, they weren't." Then, suddenly, her expression sharpened and her gaze snapped up to the building Luccio had exited from. Exited, a small party of me remembered, without Morgan. Without a word, she strode in, power at the ready, and I followed her example.

What we found looked like a butcher's shop. Blood was spattered all over the floor and walls, and most of it seemed to come from Corpsetaker's latest host, from whom also emanated the foul smell of pierced intestines.

A lot of it, though, came from Morgan. He'd had his hamstrings cut, and he'd narrowly avoided being skewered through the heart. Despite his injuries, he'd been grimly dragging himself towards the door.

"Morgan," I said. "Jesus… Corpsetaker."

Morgan grimaced, possibly because of the pain, possibly because of proximity to me, and nodded. "She… got me," he said, voice weak.

"Well, she looks like she's dead now," I said. "Or, you know, close."

Morgan shook his head as sharply as he could. "No!" he said, grabbing my coat with surprising force, forcing me to meet his gaze. "She… swapped bodies… with… the Captain!"

"And she got you in the Captain's body," I finished, getting it, as I did my best to patch him up. Morgan gave off the impression of being entirely loyal both to the Wardens in general, and to Luccio in particular. "Wanda! Luccio's in Corpsetaker!"

"I know," Wanda said, eyes closed. She had dragged Ramirez in as well. "I'm communing with her spirit. With a little luck, and a little cardiac jump-start, I might be able to put her back in her original body. The Killing Curse doesn't do any physical damage and primarily works as a spiritual attack, so there's a chance." She gestured at Corpsetaker's body. "If nothing else, this one's buggered."

Morgan nodded painfully. "I half suspected," he said quietly. "But not enough. And…" He trailed off, this time not because of lack of breath.

"Well, Corpsetaker's dead now," I said, and Morgan gave me a sharp look. "She came out of here and Voldemort jumped her. Ramirez and me thought it was the Captain, and Ramirez went after him. I kind of had to follow."

Morgan grunted. "Dead?" he asked.

"Ramirez or Voldemort?"

Morgan gave me a look that strongly suggested that he thought that I was an idiot. More than usual, I mean.

"Neither," I said. "I managed to stop him killing Ramirez, and I managed to survive him."

Morgan raised a sceptical eyebrow. "You duelled Voldemort? One on one?"

"He was toying with me," I said. "Then I hurt him enough to piss him off and he nearly killed me in about three seconds. Only reason he didn't was because Wanda stepped in after she waxed Cowl. He bugged out after that, and I don't think he has any real reason to come back."

Morgan nodded grudgingly, and glanced up at another a earth-shaking roar and a stream of oily flame the size of a small building. "The battle's not over," he said.

"What was your first clue?" I asked, getting a sour look for my pains. "Yeah. That's Selene. She kind of ate my dinosaur."

Morgan's expression seemed to be warring between disbelief, distaste for my dabbling in necromancy, and simple pain. "'Ate my dinosaur'," he muttered in the end, shaking his head. "Christ, what a world."

"I never thought I'd say this, but I am right there with you, Morgan," I said, and got another sour look for my pains. "Are you gonna be okay? Almost all of the undead are gone, what with a lot of them being wiped out and how Selene's the last necromancer standing – or at least, last conscious necromancer standing – and she's occupied with the dragon thing."

"The Darkhallow?"

"Dispersed," Wanda said. "Selene can do no more damage than she normally could." She heaved a sigh. "Though, regrettably, that is still considerable." She was cradling something small and glowing in her cupped hands. She spotted my gaze and smiled thinly. "And yes, Harry, Warden Morgan, that is Captain Luccio's soul. Warden, will you manage?"

"I will," Morgan grunted.

"Good," Wanda said. "Harry."

I nodded and heaved myself to my feet.

"Sure," I said. "Time to go slay a dragon."

Wanda snorted. "Hopefully it won't come to that," she said as she led me outside. "Between the lot of us, we might be able to take Selene, but without extensively remodelling Chicago. And I don't even want to _think_ about what her Death Curse could do…"

"So, you plan to ask her nicely to stop?" I asked dubiously.

Wanda chuckled as she knelt down by Luccio and carefully poured the light into the older woman's mouth, before pressing sharply on Luccio's torso, over her heart, once, then twice, then tree times. The first two times, Luccio merely flopped, but the third, she gasped, and her eyes showed signs of dazed awareness. Wanda grabbed her face and examined it critically, before nodding.

"Some brain damage," she said. "Oxygen deprivation will do that. But nothing that won't heal, though she'll be a bit unsteady on her feet for a while." She looked up and eyed the draconic Selene – currently trying to pin Magneto to the ground with her Will, and only partly succeeding – as if she was a recalcitrant dog in need of house-training. "You get Luccio inside. I'll have a little word with Selene."

"So… you're not asking her nicely?" I asked, as I managed to hoist Luccio onto my shoulder in a fireman's lift, then nearly completely ruined it by narrowly avoiding falling flat on my back. I'm a very tall guy, and stronger than I look, but Luccio was tall too, and had a powerful build. Also, I was still suffering the after-effects of a lightning strike, if one I'd brought upon myself. In other words, I wasn't in my best shape, and while it might not be polite to say it, Luccio was freaking heavy.

"I'm going to appeal to her self-interest," Wanda said over her shoulder.

"Good to know," I wheezed. "It might even work."

"Oh, and before I forget," Wanda added and smiled. "I have Bob." She patted one of her impossibly bigger-on-the-inside pouches for emphasis.

That sent a surge of relief running through me. Leaving aside the fact that Bob's knowledge was an extremely dangerous thing at the best of times – the way that he'd been used to manufacture a Darkhallow demonstrating the threat he could hold – I was fond of the mouthy little pervert. He was more than just a research tool, he was something of a friend, too.

I nodded my relief and thanks, before lugging Luccio back to the building.

"She's alive," I said, forestalling Morgan's first question. "Wanda says she'll probably be a bit brain-damaged and unsteady on her feet for a while, but she should recover."

It was hard to miss the naked relief in Morgan's eyes, and for once, I decided to be graceful and not tack on a sarcastic, "you're welcome." I'd suspected something about Morgan and Luccio's bond, even if it was only one way, and I'd been in his position too many times to mock his relief. Instead, when he gave me a grudging nod of thanks after I put Luccio down next to him, I returned it, and left. Any conversation between us after that would have been unbearably awkward.

Besides. Judging by the roars, crashes, bangs, and booms, I had work to do. So I accelerated to my top speed – at the moment, a shuffling jog that was just this side of a lurch – and managed to make it over to Wanda without being squashed, coughing up my lungs, or dawn coming first.

"So the self-interest thing didn't work out, then," I said, ducking a giant claw.

"Dark Lords and Ladies," Wanda said. "They just don't appreciate logic. Or know when they're beaten."

I hastily raised a shield against a torrent of flame, one that choked the air from me even by sheer proximity.

"I can't imagine why," I managed.

Wanda snorted. "She's running low on power," she said. "She looks strong, still, but the fact you can even see wounds –"

She indicated several large gashes, weeping molten hot red blood, as well as what looked like a traffic pole jammed through one of her rear legs, a large chunk of her tail pinned to the ground like free range sushi, and frightening amounts of home-made razor wire digging into and through her flesh, through gaps in her scales, even into her mouth. Clearly Magneto had not been idle. Or lacking in invention.

On the other hand, neither had Selene. At least two reasonably sized buildings had been levelled, and one, which going by the intermittent explosions had been full of science equipment, was on fire.

"– speaks volumes of how much power she's expended. Normally, her healing abilities would have taken care of this. But now…"

"Shoulda read the Evil Overlord List," I commented sagely.

"'I will not turn into a snake, it never helps'," Wanda quoted, then grinned at my gobsmacked expression. "Doctor Strange had me memorise it."

"At this point, I'd half expect him to have written it," I said, blinking.

"Always a possibility," Wanda said, performing a complicated hand-gesture that reversed a gravity enchantment Selene had attempted to lay on us, uppercutting the dragon with the full force of Sir Isaac Newton. Then, she looked thoughtful. "Harry, that trick with the lightning," she began.

"I'm not sure if I would survive repeating it," I said.

"I wasn't planning for you to do that," Wanda said, and as I relaxed, smiled winsomely. "I was planning something much more dangerous."

"Like what?" I asked warily. "I'm not going to like it, am I?"

"No, you probably won't," Wanda said bluntly. "But by your own account, you've done worse."

"Uh-huh… what is it?"

She told me.

We were both right.

I'd done worse. But I definitely didn't like it.

The plan was, in essence, quite simple – Magneto goes high and gets Selene's attention, Wanda catapults me onto Selene's back, Wanda forces Selene's head down, I make like St George with my staff (now with attached spearhead and steel cladding) into the base of her skull, Magneto draws down the lightning, and Selene is hopefully either dead or incapacitated. Of course, with my luck, she'd just be pissed off, but hey. You never know until you try.

"Remember," Wanda shouted, as Magneto lured Selene's head skywards. "Grab onto a scale as you get up there! You don't want to come down the other side!"

I gave her a wobbly thumbs up, and got a quick kiss in return. Unfortunately, I didn't have long to enjoy it, since Wanda's next move was to catapult me skywards.

Some dragon slayers, and heroes, have battle cries, noble and stirring to the blood, terrifying to the enemy. Some fly through the air with grace and aplomb.

Mine was more of a prolonged scream as I flew, limbs waving every which way like an upturned spider.

" _FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK!"_

Surprisingly, I made it, grabbing onto one of the ridge of spines – relatively small in the grand scheme of things, but large enough for me – and clung on for grim death as Selene registered my presence. And it was necessary, because her reaction was less to start bucking and twisting like a wild horse, more to imitate an earthquake, with added enraged roaring.

 _You DARE lay hands on ME?!_ a voice howled in my head.

 _Trust me, it's nothing personal, you're really not my type,_ came my instant and unwise reply.

If anything, that seemed to piss her off even more. Mercifully, moments later, a golden lasso shot up and snagged her muzzle wrapping tight and jerking down sharply with extraordinary force, forcing Selene's head down, and giving the opportunity to scramble down towards her car sized skull. Once I did, I raised my impromptu spear and thought vaguely, _isn't this Michael's job?_ The thought lingered for a second before I dismissed it.

"Harry!" Wanda yelled, clearly sounding strained.

"You rush a dragon slayer, you get rubbish slaying!" I yelled back.

"Here goes nothing," I said, putting both hands on my ex-staff, and filling it with as much force magic and soulfire as I could muster without falling straight off Selene, and aimed.

Then, I thrust, right at the base of her skull.

Speaking frankly, as spear thrusts go, it wasn't the greatest in history. For one thing, it didn't kill Selene, _per se_. Additionally, I didn't see much of the immediate result, because I leaned too far forward and promptly fell off, bouncing off Selene's flailing foreleg and half my face went straight into the mud with a desultory splat.

After that, it was all flashing lights, some brighter than others – most notably the one that Magneto called down to fry Selene – and darkness. The battle was won, and we'd kinda won, and if I'd been able to do more than mumble, I might have sounded a victory cheer. Instead, I passed out.

But before I did, I noticed two things.

First, Wanda worriedly checking if I was all right. I tried to smile, but the effect was rather ruined when I threw up. Wanda didn't seem to mind, though.

And second, a massive pulse of power, psychic power, from off into the East.

OoOoO

Dracula surveyed the chief room of the facility one last time, and nodded his satisfaction. It was secure, at least a hundred underground, and made of steel reinforced concrete, layered with other, stronger materials, adamantium among them. Every entrance and exit was guarded. Likewise, the rest of the facility was well armed and well defended.

The room itself was spartan, bare of all but necessities, as he was, stripped to his underwear: the vast and sophisticated magic circle, every part of which was composed of symbolism featuring the merging of two things to become one, composed of only the finest materials necessary – he wouldn't abide unnecessary flamboyance in a ritual of this importance, the five mages, all Master Vampires in their own right (if not quite of the level of the Lords Lieutenant), had all performed their duty of empowering the chair. And the chair itself…

He gazed upon it, the means through which he would gain power undreamed of.

It was not, as might be expected, an ancient artefact. Dracula had not felt the need to use the original and chance aged materials not holding up so well, or traps inset, not when he had the original specifications to hand – though he had had the construction compared and checked at each and every point, and tested.

Still, it was of ancient design, that much was true. It was a dark, metallic chair, with two sides and two seats, both sides lined with a selection of open claws, needle-tipped talons almost, designed to lock into flesh, hold it there, and draw blood from veins all over the body; legs, arms, torso, even hands, face, and feet. It would take it all and drain it into an enchanted tank that sat in between them. As constructions for rituals went, it was quite a simple one: both seats drew blood from the seated people's veins, draining them into the tank, mixing and melding them, before injecting them back into the recipient's – his – veins.

This, Dracula knew, was the means by which Varnae, his predecessor, had gained so many of the powers he had passed on to his brood. And this, tonight, was the means by which he would gain a new one: immunity to sunlight. He would break the Seal of the Dawn, that had kept his kind at bay for over a dozen millennia, allowing mankind to stumble around and grovel in the dirt, pathetically thankful for their stay of execution, until night fell.

The girl was in her half of the chair now, preparing for drainage. She too was stripped to her underwear, for the same reason – maximum skin exposure was required. The one downside of the chair was that it only worked when both donor and recipient were seated in it. Normally, he suspected that she would be violently objecting, but he'd knocked her out precisely because of that – there was every chance that she might disrupt matters.

It was, he felt, almost a pity to kill her. She would have been a fine one to turn, in a couple of years. Natural enhancements, combined with a fine tactical mind, a remarkable capacity for adaptability and determination… all would have made her a superb vassal. Her beauty didn't hurt, either. But there would be little enough left to turn, by the time he was done, and that was that.

"It is prepared?" he asked.

"All as you specified, my lord," Mikael said, from outside the circle. "We will leave you be and stand watch, in case any seek to disturb you."

Dracula nodded. "As ever, you serve well, Mikael," he said, sitting in the chair, laying his arms on the arm rests, and closing his eyes with a sigh as the needle tipped claws of the chair dug in.

"So it begins," he murmured.

And for a long ten minutes, there was silence, blood draining away, blood mixing, blood soon to be returned.

Then, Dracula smelt something, something normally innocuous, but tonight, after what he had smelt earlier, sent an icy dagger into his frozen heart.

"No," he whispered. "Not here. Not now. Not tonight."

As he spoke, he heard the sounds of gunfire, energy blasts from the new 'Deity-Class' weapons, and battle screeches from the more traditional vampires outside. But as the sounds began to be strangled, defiance turning to panic, as silence slowly encroached once more, the scent did not fade.

Instead, it twisted and slipped its way in to even this place, a hermetically sealed vault, growing stronger with every moment, echoing the growing pulses of psychic power, far stronger than any he had faced in decades. Stronger than the boy tonight, stronger even than Xavier enhanced. Strength he had hardly faced the like of before… save once. And as he opened his eyes, and felt the ground shake beneath him, as the vault was ripped from beneath the earth like a children's toy buried in a garden, he felt the death of his final hopes that this was not what he feared, not what had haunted his dreams for a century and more.

For this was a very particular kind of smoke.

And Dracula, of all people, knew to fear its fire.

But he was Dracula, and even cornered, short of blood, he would not die a coward.

"Come on then!" he roared as he ripped himself free of the chair. "Face me, demon! I do not fear your fire!"

His answer came not in words, and at first, didn't seem to come at all. Then, Dracula saw that the walls of his vault were vanishing, no, _dissolving_ , around him, turning to naught but dust on the wind. The far end of the vault, though, did something different. Instead of dissipating, it reshaped itself from metal laced concrete to a staircase made of something like congealed sunlight, leading down into the vault. And down that staircase, with every stair turning to wisps of dust in sunbeams, came a tall, terrible figure.

As soon as it became visible, five vampires leapt to their master's defence. Each was powerful, only a step below Master status. Each vanished in a terrible flash of bright flame, with hardly even ash to hint at their presence. All that followed found the same fate. That or they were turned to dust with a mere glance. Some, caught between fear of this being and of their lord, hovered and havered, but burned just the same.

Dracula's mages unleashed lightning from the skies above in a savage rain, as the shadows cast by that lightning reached out to capture, contain, and devour their enemy, dragging him into a shadow realm.

But the figure threw back his head and laughed in gleeful exultation at the lightning falling down on him, and the tendrils of darkness and shadow burned away when they got within even six inches of his skin. When they tried again, red rimmed portals opened beneath them, and flames, tentacles, even flaming tentacles, exploded upwards, wrapping them in a merciless death grip.

And Dracula, rooted to the spot by unreasoning terror of a monster he had only barely escaped once, watched as he strode forward, he became visible.

His face was long and inhuman, though less like a vampire's, more like one of the Sidhe, though perhaps too inhuman even for them, with features sharp and gaunt as a young, starved falcon's, eyes blazing with incandescent white fire, leaking it like tears of raging star-fire, and his hair blazed like the sun itself. On his brow was a golden circlet, and in its heart, a gem of starlight.

He was garbed in a long-coat that opened at the waist for freedom of movement, in a red so dark it was almost black, interspersed with actual black, black than the blackest of nights, making up the boots and the inside of the jacket, laced around the edges with gold like sunshine and silver like moonlight, and emblazoned on the chest with the simplified bird symbol that burned like the heart of a star.

But worst of all, on his face was a terrible, mocking smile, one that Dracula was paralysed before. Because he recognised this figure, both in what power he wielded, and who he had been. But a couple of hours before, he had left this boy, this arrogant young Asgardian Princeling, pinned to the road, handily beaten, spared only because his murder would incite a war that he, Dracula, could not afford. However, he'd sensed something in the boy, something he _knew_ that he recognised, something that the boy had taunted him about, something that had preyed on his mind, especially what with the way this power had been surging forward in bursts the last few months.

And now, here it stood, revealed before him, radiating power orders of magnitude beyond what even the boy had been capable of. Power, wrath, and mocking malice.

" _ **You don't fear my fire, little vampire?"**_ it said, the creature that had once all but destroyed his Court, now taken on new form and come to torment him again. _**"We both know that's a lie. But for the benefit of everyone else… let's prove it."**_

Then, the monster that haunted his nightmares for over a hundred years shot straight at him, swift as the winds, unstoppable as an avalanche, and trailing flames like the wings of the Phoenix.

OoOoO

"He's off," Bucky said, as Harry shot upwards like a reverse comet, dragging Dracula with him.

"All right, we've got a maximum of three minutes, twenty five seconds, starting now," Alison said. "Jean-Paul, take your run-up. Logan, get ready. Gambit… light 'em up."

There was a moment of silence, then series of fearsome purple tinged explosions throughout the compound, including in places that logic dictated that Gambit could not have reached undetected. A moment later, their after-effects merged with the berserker roar of Logan, who pounced on a pair of vampires on the edge of the compound, claws out.

As they increased the already present chaos among those who had survived Harry's immediate assault, including five of the Lords Lieutenant, Bucky aimed his rifle and began steadily picking off vampires. This time, however, he had ensured that Doom warded him first – just in case lightning did, in fact, strike twice.

"How many of the mystics are still standing?" Alison asked, eyes still focused on her binoculars.

"Three," Doom said. "They're strong. And familiar with tentacular attacks." His eyes narrowed, as sweat began to bead on his forehead, blood running from his nose. "And capable of counter-attacking." He smiled thinly. "But they're not as strong as me. Or as adaptable."

He gestured sharply, the red band of enchantment around his forearm stretching, and reality straining as he spoke a long, flowing spell, one that ended with several savage words of command.

Several red rimmed portals opened up over the compound, and not far from where they stood. Small, indistinct objects rained down from them.

"Limbs?" Alison asked, unsurprised.

"Indeed," Doom said. "They have failed to rest in peace… so now they rest in pieces."

"You are worse than my son," Alison muttered.

"But still not as bad as Tony," Bucky remarked, picking off another vampire. "Or Dresden."

"I should hope not," Doom remarked, before narrowing his eyes and barking, "'ware!"

Alison and Bucky both dived in opposite directions, evading a stream of machine-gun fire from a Predator drone.

"I shall handle this," Doom said, and as he spoke, his suit was subsumed by the same silver-grey armour that had formed gauntlet and visor earlier. "Beware of a follow-up attack," he added, voice modulated now, as his green eye-lights and flat visor tracked the drone, then he took off in swift pursuit.

"Not much of a one for small talk, is he?" Alison said, drawing her own gun and cursing. A wing of at least seven vampires was closing in. "I can take two on the wing," she said. "You?"

Bucky cocked his rifle, and picked his target. "I'll handle three in the air," he said, firing.

"Leaving one each on the ground," Alison remarked, as the hit vampires fell from the skies like burning lanterns. "Not the best odds, if these are half as strong as I think they are, but…"

"We'll make do," Bucky said. "Me and your dad always did."

"Because neither of you had any discernible sense of caution," Alison said dryly.

"There is that," Bucky said casually, taking out the last of his three. "But it always worked out in the end."

"True," Alison acknowledged. "But if it's all the same to you, I'd prefer to avoid the sixty plus year wait."

"Believe me, you aren't alone in that," Bucky said, ducking a blow from a landing vampire, swaying right as Alison swayed left, the two now back to back. He stepped forward suddenly and left a deep cut on his opponent, who hissed and quick-stepped back. "The kids will be fine, Alison."

"Easy for you to say, yours is bloody immortal," Alison snapped, grunting as she blocked one blow, taking a cracked forearm in exchange for stabbing her opponent in the gut.

"And he'll have yours back, come what may," Bucky said. "You heard him say it, you know he meant it."

"I know, but I still worry," Alison said. "Oh, shut up!" Her opponent had unwisely started laughing, and had promptly had a sticky bomb stuffed in his mouth for his pains, and taken a stomping kick that sent him flying.

"It's only natural," Bucky remarked, putting an enchanted bullet into his opponent's head, then briskly beheading her, ignoring the blood spatter.

"I suppose," Alison said, before tapping the radio. "Peter, any luck?"

"Yes!" came the ecstatic reply, followed by a string of excited babble.

"That's wonderful, sweetie," Alison said firmly, cutting him off. "Did you give them our coordinates?"

"Yes, Missus Carter."

"Repeat them for me?"

Peter obediently did.

"Excellent, well done," Alison said. "Did they give an ETA?"

"About… 90 seconds?"

Just as Alison heard that, a lightning bolt shot into the damaged vault, or what remained of it, and then emerged again a split second later, joining them on the hill. Jean-Paul had arrived, with Carol in his arms. Unfortunately, from the pallidness of her skin, and the limpness of her body, covered as it was in blood trails and needle marks, the prognosis was not good.

Alison's lips thinned and she closed her eyes briefly. "Tell them to bring a medical kit, okay, Peter? We've got someone here in need of stabilising."

There was a sudden, vast flash of lightning, and the associated roll of thunder hot on its heels, one drowned out by a unearthly scream of fury, as the skies began to twist and darken once more.

Alison met Bucky's gaze, then tapped the radio again. "Peter? I think that might be two someones." She glanced at Jean-Paul. "And Jean-Paul? You might need to be ready to do some running again. A lot of it."

OoOoO

Harry felt like laughing with delight – and did, a couple of times, though it came out more like the crackling cackle of a forest fire come to life.

It was working. It was really, _really_ working.

Dracula was putting up far less of a fight than he had before, half frozen by terror, by memories of the last time he had faced the Phoenix, memories that Harry had made sure to unearth and amplify. Normally, he couldn't have done such a thing, and he was very aware that he couldn't keep it up for long. Even though he was drawing on Jean and Maddie's power in support of his own, giving him a psychic might that he thought even the greatest of gods and demons would have marvelled and trembled at, a feeling of raw power that he'd just love to exult in and savour, a sense of connection, not just to minds, but to the very world around him on an absolutely fundamental level. It was a power unlike any other… except the Phoenix.

Because this was not the Phoenix, just a clever facsimile, replicated from his own memories of being a Phoenix host, being the Dark Phoenix. It was more than that, though. He'd been given further tips by Dumbledore over the phone, the power to fake it by Jean and Maddie, and advice on channelling such power by Charles Xavier.

Certainly, though, it was good enough to fool Dracula, chasing the Vampire King through the skies, hurling fire, swatting aside lightning bolts like they were nothing. It made him want to laugh. Using lightning, on _him?!_ Really? Did Dracula really think that the son of Asgard's Lord of Storms wouldn't know a few tricks there?

Hmm. Speaking of lightning, why not try a trick from Maddie's book, one he'd adapted?

He reached out and grabbed the roiling lightning in the skies above, and ripped it free, forming it into a shape, a vast bird made of sky-fire the size of the London Eye, one that loomed before Dracula and then engulfed him. For a moment, Harry sat back, content with what he had done, waiting for Dracula to emerge.

That was a mistake.

Dracula, burnt, scarred, and bleeding, erupted from the lightning construct in a blur, finally driven beyond fear into blind rage. He moved faster than Harry's eyes or thoughts could follow, and grabbed him in a crushing grip, breaking his conduits of power. There was a moment of stunned silence, as both of them realised what Dracula had done, followed by a split second of terrible fear, as Dracula feared his doom.

Then, he realised just what had happened.

He'd been _tricked_.

And Harry, suddenly no longer power drunk, entirely sober, and with one hell of a hangover, did the only thing he could do and said the only thing he could say.

"Surprise!"

Dracula, eyes now as red as blood, glared at him. "Am I to suppose that the purpose of this was to _distract_ me?" he asked, in deceptively soft, mild tones. "That the girl is gone?"

"Yes, and yes," Harry said. "Look for yourself if you don't believe me."

Dracula did.

"So," Harry said slowly. "I don't suppose you'd be willing to cut your losses and leave now, would you?"

The clouds roiled like a stormy sea, darkening like the black of night, lightning crackling within them more and more.

Then, a massive lightning strike tore across the skies, and the skies roared in sympathy, all but deafening Harry. But neither was a match for Dracula's scream of thwarted rage.

"Thought not," Harry said, marshalling what defences he had left.

They might as well have been tissue paper for all the good they did against Dracula's first blow, a punch which smote down towards the ground. And Dracula followed him down, raining blows that had it not been for his defences and his resilience, would have torn straight through him. As it was, they tore muscle, bruised flesh, and broke bone, until finally, he slammed Harry by the face into the ground with earth-shaking force.

"… Ow," Harry managed.

"Trust me, _boy_ , that will be the very least of my wrath you will face tonight," Dracula hissed. "You and –"

"All you meddling kids?" Harry suggested, with a weak smile, earning a blow that broke his nose and nearly snapped his neck.

"You think this is a _JOKE?!"_ Dracula half screamed, rationality falling away along with his human appearance in the face of his pure rage. "Do you have any idea how long I waited for this chance, how carefully I planned, what it has cost me to arrange this?!"

"Respectively," Harry said, spitting blood. "Yes. No. No. Don't care."

"No, I don't imagine you would," Dracula said, suddenly cold and rational again. "I shall make you understand, then. I will not kill you, as Riddle hopes I will. No, instead, I shall tear down, and apart, everything and everyone that you love and value. Maybe not tonight, maybe not this year, not even this decade, but I assure you that _none_ of them will _ever_ be safe."

Harry met his gaze. "And I assure you," he said. "That if you ever even look the wrong way at them, then the next time I come at you as the Phoenix… it won't be a distraction. It'll be for real."

Dracula rolled his eyes and turned to leave.

"Before you go," Harry said, now looking past Dracula with a faint smile on his face. "I've got one more thing to say."

"What?" Dracula demanded.

"Five."

"What?"

"Four."

"What are you counting down to?"

"You'll see in a couple of seconds. Three."

Dracula froze, looking around suspiciously.

"Two."

Dracula looked up.

"One."

He almost moved in time. Unfortunately for him, Mjolnir was faster.

"Zero," Harry said, with a certain degree of savage satisfaction. "Hi dad!"

The Mighty Thor, performing a perfect three point landing that felt much like an earthquake, spared his son a brief smile as a quick glance a) satisfied him that his offspring was alive, intact, and going to stay that way, b) informed him that his offspring had been hurt and he was therefore going to beat the perpetrator to a whimpering pulp.

"Dracula," he growled. "I would have words with thee."

Dracula struggled to his feet, fangs bared, then leapt forward suddenly, as a portal opened behind him and something huge and furious charged, roaring, out of it.

"HULK SMASH PUNY VAMPIRE!"

"Of that, my friend," Thor said, catching the slowed Dracula with an upper-cut blow. "We are of one mind."

"So we are, Hulk, brother," a smooth, sharp voice, like a stiletto blade, said. Its owner entered mere moments later. "Just be sure to leave some for me," Loki finished, before turning to his nephew and sighing. "Oh, Harry. What mess have you got yourself into now?"

"Long story," Harry managed. "See Carol first."

"Yes, we heard she was kidnapped," Loki remarked. "The boy on Alison's Avengers frequency informed us, in a somewhat scattered fashion. Now, where… ah yes." He teleported them over to where the rest of their little assault team had gathered, save Victor von Doom, who had dispatched his Predator Drones and long since made his goodbyes. The mood up there seemed grim, however.

"Carol?" Harry managed.

"Fading fast," Bucky said. "And too weak to travel far," he added.

"Blood loss?" Loki asked sharply.

Alison nodded.

And Harry stared at his best friend, a feeling of failure rising in him.

 _It wasn't enough, Harry,_ a voice, one that sounded much like his own, his self-doubt, whispered. _You weren't enough._

 _Bollocks to that,_ Harry thought angrily, dismissing it, and focused on Carol. He could still feel her mind. "She needs blood," he said slowly. "Not just blood, something to jumpstart her." And without another word, he grabbed her and took off, as fast as he could.

The others found him in the ruins of Dracula's vault, with the still intact chair.

"Harry, what the hell are you doing?" Alison demanded.

"A question I would like answered too, _mon cher_ ," Jean-Paul said grimly. "I already have one I care for dearly near death, perhaps two. I would rather not more."

"This," Harry said, putting Carol in one of the chairs. "Is designed to mix and transfer blood. Mostly transfer, really. It's how Dracula was planning to take on Carol's super soldier stuff, become immune to sunlight. I'm putting her back in it, but in _his_ chair, the receiving chair. I've emptied out the vampire blood from the mixing tank, cleaned it by magic, even."

"So where's the…," Loki said, before stopping. "Harry, no!"

"Carol needs more than just blood, she needs a jumpstart," Harry said, sitting down in the donor chair. "Besides," he added with a grin that turned to a grimace as the needles dug in. "Doctor Strange told me – I'm universal donor." He winced as the blood began to drain. "Besides," he said, strength fading with every word. "I don't need… to fill… her up… just give her enough to survive, to hospital at least."

Loki took a step closer to the artefact, and Harry's eyes snapped open, flaring dangerously.

"And if you try and detach me before she's safe, then so help me, I will spend my life making yours a misery," he snapped. "Oh, hey dad."

"Harry," Thor said, before stopping and staring.

"It's a long story, brother," Loki said, and at Thor's expression, added, "And no, I didn't let him do this. He'd already done it. It's a form of magical blood transfusion that Dracula hoped to use for power, and Harry hopes to save Carol's life." He stopped Thor as he made to go forward. "Brother," he said quietly. "Trust him."

"But," Thor began.

"If you stop him before she is safe, or heavens forbid, if she dies, then he will never forgive you," Loki said. "Nor would you, in his place."

Thor, torn, sighed and stayed where he was.

And Harry, meanwhile, like his counterpart in Chicago, peacefully, exhaustedly, drifted away.

OoOoO

Slowly, Harry's eyes opened again, blinking and confused.

"Hey."

Harry looked up to see Carol standing by the door. She was wearing jeans, a Captain America t-shirt, and a somehow hesitant expression.

"Hey," he said, propping himself up in bed. "Uh…"

"It's the third of November, and two thirty in the afternoon," Carol said. "And you're at Avengers Mansion." She waved a hand. "Loki fixed it, don't ask me how, though some bits aren't totally done yet – Tony's gone into mad repair and replace mode. Unsurprisingly, he's a bit spooked, considering…"

"Yeah," Harry said. "Considering." He looked up again. "How are the others?"

"Prof Lupin is fine, ditto Sirius and Diana, Uhtred's complaining about mandatory bed-rest and Jean-Paul is bribing him to stay in bed, though what with I really don't know, little Ada's being spoiled to within an inch of her life by her mom and dad and more or less everyone else, Bucky got a ludicrously long debrief/interrogation from your dad and uncle until Steve got them to knock it off and grandma helped fill in," Carol said. "And Parker, Peter, is doing fine too, and doesn't need glasses any more. Keeps looking in the mirror like he doesn't expect to show up, though."

"And Stevie?" Harry asked quietly.

Carol sighed. "Fine, I guess," she said. "Physically, yeah. Mentally? It's gonna be a bit of a road back."

Harry nodded. "It always is," he said, then focused on Carol. "How are _you_ doing?"

"Aside from having most all my blood drained from my body by Count freaking Dracula for some kind of fucked up magical ritual, then being clinically nigh on dead for a few minutes until you topped off my tank and nearly drained yourself dry?" Carol asked wryly. "Peachy. You?"

Harry's reply was just as wry. "Aside from being laid up in bed after having been stabbed with my own sword, beaten up, electrocuted, bitten, and..." he trailed off, glibness fading.

"And?" Carol prompted him quietly, padding over to sit on the side of his bed.

"And seeing my friends hurt," Harry said eventually. "Including..." He took a deep breath. "Including my best friend. My best friend, who..." He trailed off again, hesitating, trying to find the right words and force them out.

He let out a hopeless little laugh - he could fight the worst abominations the universe could offer, and that the Outside could offer too, without batting an eye. Twelve rounds with Dracula? Easy-peasy. Voldemort? Not a problem. But this? This was what stopped him in his tracks? He shook his head and tried to speak a third time, but as he did, Carol covered his mouth with her hand. It was, he noticed in the midst of his surprise, rather warm.

"I know," she said, and when Harry blinked in surprise, she let out a short, but warm laugh. "Harry... I've been in your head, and you've been in mine. Completely. When you were, to be frank, thinking a lot about me. Worrying a lot about me." Her lips twitched into a wry smile. "What I'm saying is that I might not be up to your standard, or even Diana's, on the psychic thing. But I'm not dumb. And I'd have to be pretty dumb to miss what you were feeling."

Harry looked away, his mouth moving clear of Carol's loose grip. "Yeah," he said. "And you're not dumb. Not in the least." He looked up at her, expression serious. "I meant what I said before. You're my best friend. That comes first. That always comes first."

"I know what you said," Carol said. Then, she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek. It was neither brief, nor was it lingering, though Harry, felt like he'd just been struck by lightning - again. This time, he reflected dazedly as he slowly raised a hand to his cheek, where the kiss tingled with warmth, was much more pleasant than the last. It also made him very glad for his bed's thick blankets.

"Buh?" Harry mumbled

"That," Carol said seriously, cheeks bright red, with an undercurrent of mixed nervousness and amusement in her voice. "Was because when you said it, I know that you meant it." She took his hand and squeezed. "And because of what you did. For me, and for Stevie."

"... You're welcome?" Harry managed. He coughed. "But, uh, you know I didn't just do it for that, right?"

Carol stared at him for a moment, then her shoulders started to shake. A moment or two later, she burst out laughing.

"Of course I do, you absolute fucking moron," she said, smacking his shoulder affectionately. Unfortunately, it was the one Harry had been stabbed in, so this sent another shock of sensation through him, one rather less pleasant than the last. He let out a strangled yelp.

"Oh shit," Carol said, eyes wide, standing up. "Are you okay, did I... oh shit, I'm so sorry."

"Don't worry," Harry said, wincing. "It's just one shoulder. I've got a spare."

Carol rolled her eyes. "Aaaand we're back to the bad jokes," she said. "Yeah, you're fine." Her expression softened, and she chewed her lip for a moment, regarding Harry out of the side of her eye as if making up her mind about something. Harry wisely chose to remain silent. Then, she grinned. "That reaction was, I have to say, worth all the awkwardness. Eyes wide, hair practically on end, face red as a tomato... seriously, we're talking funny cat video levels of reaction. I just wish I had a camera."

"Yeah, yeah, rub it in," Harry mumbled. His face was, indeed, as red as a tomato, and tingling where Carol's lips had touched his cheek. Funnily enough, though, he found he didn't mind all that much. No, he didn't mind at all… "Anything else I've missed?"

"Well, funny you should say that…"

 **And that, my friends, rounds of** _ **Bloody Hell.**_ **I wound up writing most of 10,000 words in a night (okay, more like 8,500 plus) to finish it off, and writing through the night, because the plot bunny just wouldn't let go and I wanted this one** _ **done.**_ **And now, it is. I hope you enjoyed it, and there will, in time, be another arc – something short for the First Task, I think. In the meantime, a few lighter, more relaxed chapters.**

 **Oh, and yes, Harry and Carol have had a kiss!**

 **On the cheek. Just one. Well, everyone has to start somewhere.**

 **Until next time!**


	34. Chapter 34: It's Complicated

**Well, here we are again. Sorry it took longer than usual to get this one done, my brain took a little rest after rounding off** _ **Bloody Hell**_ **. Then there's the small matter of my dissertation, among other things. Mostly, though, I just procrastinated. Still, here the chapter is now; quieter and more relaxed than many of the previous ones, but with a few important events and reveals.**

 **Before we get started, I've had a few anonymous reviews, some quite long, which I need to reply to. Therefore, those who didn't review anonymously/are not interested should scroll past to the bottom of the bolded section.**

 **Guest:** **First off, I'm glad you've been enjoying my work, and thank you for taking the time to review it. I only wish you had done so via an account, so we'd be able to converse more easily. Ah well. Now, to answer your points: I am rather fond of Bruce, hence why I've involved him with Harry Dresden, one of my all-time favourites. I have plans for him. Ditto Scott Summers. He's another favourite, and I firmly ship Jean/Scott. However, this story is primarily from Harry's perspective, and Harry is closest to Jean. As for Professor X, Sean, and Betsy, the X-Men he's spent the next most time with, they're psychics and/or teachers, guiding him through a difficult part of his powers. Scott hasn't had much chance for a major role yet, but he'll have his chance.**

 **The Wizarding World is… difficult. My thoughts on it have evolved over the last few years. I'm a Brit, I grew up primarily in the heart of London, around the British Civil Service, and I also went to boarding school in the countryside, which had more than a couple of Hogwarts like elements. The HP series is a sharp, often affectionate, but also often unflattering reflection of Britain, both in her muggle and magical worlds. In many ways, Wizarding Britain especially comes across as having a lot of the worst parts of real Britain magnified and concentrated. I interpret this as being because it's an isolationist society which has not changed primarily because it has not** _ **had**_ **to change. It's kept ahead, thanks to its natural advantages, for so long that it has become set in its ways. It has also lulled itself into the belief that muggle ignorance equals stupidity – even the nicer, pro-muggle wizards in the HP books tend to regard muggles with a fond condescension.**

 **Other more widely spread groups have had to adapt – though as is noted, groups like the White Council are pretty set in their ways too. Ditto with mutants, though, again, certain groups like the Askani aspire to a similar kind of isolationism. Even vampires are better adapted, what with their constant influx of, ahem, new blood and desire to blend in with the prey. Now, with the world changing very, very quickly, the non-magical population is becoming aware of the supernatural again on an unparalleled scale, those groups and people are much better placed to handle change than the Wizarding World.**

 **The point is NOT that the Wizarding World is awful and pathetic. Rather, it has been set in its ways for a very long time. Now it's being wrenched out of its comfort zone. And it is** _ **not**_ **adjusting well. Also, comparing the British Wizarding World to Asgard is about as fair as comparing a Stone Age coracle to Star Trek's USS** _ **Enterprise**_ **. Harry's power-set is informed by the fact that he's being prepped to take on Thanos. Still, thank you kindly, both for your kind comments and your thoughtful criticisms. And I shall be sure not to go 'full Marvel comics'. :P**

 **Valeyard1980:** **Thank you kindly. :) Harry's Asgardian side has been a bit slower to develop, and that's all I'll say on that score, for the time being.**

 **Dreamweaver543** **: I was thinking more** _ **Thunderstruck**_ **by AC/DC (which I maintain, no matter how awesome and appropriate** _ **The Immigrant Song**_ **is, should have been used in one of the** _ **Thor**_ **films). Or possibly** _ **We Will Rock You.**_

 **Guest:** **There was no way Harry was going to overpower Dracula (without the Phoenix, which would be a bad idea for oh so many reasons), and there was no trap he could arrange at such short notice with such limited resources. What he did was call on reinforcements, then keep Dracula busy (with a neatly faked case of the Dark Phoenix) while his allies whisked Carol out from under Dracula's nose.**

 **Black Fang:** **No. I appreciate you being inspired by my work, but I don't write requests, and if you want to post challenges, do it yourself and do it somewhere else.**

 **Ikki:** **I haven't read** _ **Odd and the Frost Giants**_ **yet. What powers do you mean? And no, I haven't watched RWBY, merely heard of it.**

 **To certain anonymous reviewers who know damn well who they are:** _ **I appreciate your love of my work, and thank you for taking the time to review it. However, please be advised of the following. Repeating your points (including recommending various Norse sagas which I am entirely aware of) on chapter after chapter, often multiple times on the same chapter under various different names – I don't care if you deny it or pretend otherwise, I**_ **know** _ **you're doing it – does**_ **not** _ **make me any more inclined to listen to you. It just annoys me.**_ **A** **lot** _ **. Sorry, but my patience is running**_ **extremely** _ **short.**_

 **Now, those many replies and that somewhat testy public service announcement aside, let's get on with the chapter, shall we?**

Harry was swiftly filled in on the main events he'd missed, by Carol. Namely, that Dracula had been chased off – or rather, had seen the odds turn very dramatically against him, let out a frustrated howl, and vanished into the Nevernever. Thor had been all for following him and turning him into Wallachian Jam, but Loki had advised against it – apparently vampires turned at bay like cornered rats. And if nothing else, they had had other matters to attend to.

"Us," Harry said.

Carol nodded. "I was pretty out of it, to be honest, but…" She smiled slightly. "I was still around to be out of it, if you know what I mean."

Harry nodded.

"I was awake pretty shortly afterwards," Carol continued. "They took me to the hospital, topped off my tank, and aside from a headache, I felt pretty okay shortly afterwards – thank the whoever for super soldier healing."

"I could have done with some of that," Harry murmured.

Carol's expression turned dry. "You did," she said. "You got some blood too. And considering the fact that you got skewered, electrocuted, and beaten to a pulp, according to Bruce, it's a miracle that you woke up this week, let alone being up and about. I, by contrast, mostly just got my blood drained." She examined her arm thoughtfully, turning it back and forth. "Which, by the way, means that about half of my blood is technically yours. Apparently, it'll be replaced in a few weeks, but right now…" She trailed off.

"Glad to help," Harry said feebly, uncertain of what else to say. Then, a thought struck him. "You haven't been feeling any… _different_ , have you?"

"Like superpower different?" Carol asked, then shook her head. "That's the first thing everyone wanted to know as soon as I came to, especially after Loki got a good look at that chair thing of Dracula's." She shivered slightly, and on instinct, Harry reached down and took her hand, giving it a comforting squeeze. For a moment, both froze, and shared a hesitant look out of the corner of each's eye, before Carol essayed a small, grateful smile and squeezed back. "Him, Bruce, and a few of the others put me through my paces a couple of times yesterday, but so far? Nothing."

Harry nodded, relieved. "And how are the others?" he asked. "You said they were fine, and Uhtred's mostly complaining, but I distinctly remember him losing an eye."

"It wasn't completely destroyed, and it's growing back, apparently," Carol said, and shrugged at Harry's stunned expression. "Score one for Asgardian healing factors. And another for magical medicine, I guess." She waved a hand. "But yeah, it's taking a while to heal, and he's got an eyepatch right now. Jean-Paul thinks it's sexy, and I can see his point. Diana agreed with me." She shot Harry a sudden, sharp look. "She also said a couple of things about the vampire who attacked Uhtred. About what he was doing. Who he was."

Harry was silent for a long moment. He remembered Dudley's death – or rather, the death of the vampire that had once been Dudley – with crystal clarity. He wished that he didn't. Not because of any particular guilt, as such, more because… it was something he wanted behind him. It was a chapter of his life he'd closed. Cut off, even.

"He was my cousin," he said eventually. "The main word, though… 'was'." He looked up at Carol. "There was nothing to save, even if I'd wanted to." He shook his head. "Honestly, he was a monster even before he turned into a vampire."

Carol grimaced. "Believe me, I know," she said.

Harry nodded. "He was a monster," he repeated. "He didn't want to be anything different, he loved it. In the end… all becoming a vampire did was change his diet." He sighed. "That's what I told Captain Stacy."

"That cop you talked to while you were recovering after your round one with Dracula?" Carol asked.

"Yeah," Harry said. "That's what I told him. I meant it. I still mean it – he was a monster, and the best I can say is that I made it quick and I didn't do it for fun. But…" He was silent for another long moment. Carol, recognising the signs of him gathering his thoughts, stayed patiently silent. "I wish he hadn't fallen into Essex's hands," he said eventually. "If he hadn't, then…"

"He'd have turned out a decent person?" Carol suggested quietly.

"Maybe," Harry said, then shrugged. "Or just stayed the fairly harmless, thuggish prick he was anyway. Either way, though, I don't think he'd have turned into a monster."

"Maybe," Carol said, a little sceptically, and at Harry's raised eyebrow, she sighed. "Harry, he wasn't the only one who that Essex creep got hold of. He had Maddie from birth, and he had Gambit for god knows how long. He programmed Maddie right down to the bone, and who knows what he did to Gambit."

"But they still chose to be better," Harry said quietly. "Despite being in his hands for far longer than Dudley ever was."

Carol nodded. "I don't know what went on with him and Essex," she said. "Hell, I hardly knew him at all. But it seems to me that there was a bit of monster, a lot of monster, in him to begin with. And somewhere along the line, he chose to embrace it. He might have been encouraged and manipulated and whatever, but he still chose it."

"And you think he might have chosen it, no matter what," Harry said.

"Maybe," Carol said, shrugging. "I don't know. He might just as easily have taken a good long look at himself, decided to stop being an asshole, and turned out to be a genuinely decent guy." She met Harry's gaze. "But it's also possible that short of screwing with his head, there's nothing you could have done to stop him going bad."

"Maybe," Harry sighed. "Anything else I missed?"

"Your godmom, Wanda, has been in a couple of times," Carol said. "Actually, more or less everyone is in." She paused. "Except…"

"Except who?" Harry asked.

Carol took a deep breath. "Except Doctor Strange," she said. "No one's seen him. Not since Halloween, when he was last spotted fighting vampires – different vampires – and lots of those Outsider demon things. And Wanda's got that amulet and cloak thing of his."

"You mean…"

"I mean that he's probably dead, Harry," Carol said, squeezing his hand. "I'm sorry."

Harry gave this due consideration, then shrugged and said, "Meh. I'll believe it when I see the body. And maybe not even then."

Carol raised an eyebrow at this but didn't look entirely surprised. "Your dad said something like that," she remarked. "Though with more swearing."

"That doesn't surprise me," Harry said.

"So… you really believe that he's still alive?" Carol asked. "Because Wanda mentioned something about him going on this last year or so about how he was going to die soon, and your dad agreed with her, your uncle too."

"I think that there's a big difference between dying and staying dead," Harry said. "If I can come back by accident, I'm pretty sure he can do it on purpose."

"I'll give you that," Carol admitted. "Though you had help from your mom there."

"True," Harry allowed. "But I'd imagine that Strange has got a favour or, oh, about a million, locked away somewhere. If he needed one."

Carol half nodded, half shrugged, the said, "Anyhow, most people have been checking in on you, to see if you were awake. Just now was my turn." She eyed him. "Also, speaking of which, are you _sure_ you're fine walking about? Because I was a little wobbly on my feet at first…"

"I'm fine," Harry said, and when Carol glanced pointedly at his shoulder, added, "More or less. Besides." He gave Carol a soulful, innocent look that was entirely ruined by his lips twitching. "Won't you catch me if I fall?"

Carol rolled her eyes. "You wish," she said. "Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention – Parker, Peter Parker."

"He who is no longer a vampire, no longer needs glasses, and keeps expecting not to show up in mirrors?"

"Good memory, and yeah, him. His aunt and uncle swung by while you were out of it, to pick him up and get the skinny on what happened," Carol said. "They had a bit of trouble coming around to the whole idea of vampires, but once they did, they mostly wanted to thank you. And grandma. And Gambit. And Logan. And Bucky. But mostly you, what with it being your blood that cured him, and you being all noble and dramatically bed-ridden. How does that work by the way?"

"Well, if you go toe to toe with an angry vampire king and get stabbed with your own sword and electrocuted, then give most of your blood…" Harry said, and grinned at Carol's exasperated expression. "I'm not really sure," he said honestly. "I just figured that it killed vampires, and that it might purge the vampire stuff from Peter before he fully turned."

"So… it was a guess," Carol said.

"An educated guess."

"But still basically a guess."

"… More or less," Harry conceded. "And Doctor Doom?"

"Not mentioned. It was thought best to skip the bits with the superpowered Eastern European dictator," Carol said. "Did he really threaten to murder Peter if he didn't drink up?"

"Yes," Harry said.

"Would he…"

"Without blinking twice."

"Jesus," Carol muttered. "I suppose you don't get your own country by being nice. Uh. No offence."

Harry shrugged. "None taken," he said. "It's not exactly a secret that Grandad's got a ruthless streak." He shot Carol a wry smile. "Besides, don't worry – he likes you."

"Which I had sort of guessed," Carol said. "You know, what with the magic shield. He still intimidates the hell out of me, though."

"From what I hear, he does that to most people," Harry said.

Carol caught the inflection and arched an eyebrow. "Not you?"

"Not as much he probably should," Harry said wryly, then shrugged. "After you've had dark wizards, demons, demon-gods, vampires, and whatever else trying to kill you, and you've actually been killed… not much actually intimidates you anymore." As Carol's second eyebrow joined the first, he sighed. "I'm not being arrogant," he said. "I know perfectly well I'm not invincible – I've only just got out of bed after being beaten to a pulp, zapped, and stabbed with my own sword by someone who barely even broke a sweat doing it. If it came to a fight, grandad would squish me in half a second with his little finger, probably a great deal less. And I respect him, a lot, I really do. It's just…"

"You get jaded," Carol said. "You're not intimidated. Hell, when a crisis comes up, you're thinking not 'oh god, someone's trying to kill me', but 'oh god, here we go again'."

Harry nodded. "Exactly," he said, then snorted. "Well, that conversation was cheerful."

"Well, who doesn't like to talk about a bit of death, intimidation, and being utterly unfazed by more or less everything in the morning?" Carol said. "Though, by the way, just a warning: Jean and Wanda are downstairs, which means that you will be mothered into oblivion and Jean will probably either make you eat the world's biggest belated breakfast, or psychically stuff you back into bed, and since she's way stronger than you are, there's diddly you can do about it."

"I think I can live with that."

OoOoO

Carol's prediction did indeed come to pass, as first Wanda, then Jean, then Thor, Sirius, Jane, Pepper, Darcy, Diana, and Jean-Paul all wrapped Harry in hugs of varying length, while others ruffled his hair or clapped him on the shoulder. All treated him like he was made of glass. And then, as Carol had also predicted, a troika of Wanda, Pepper, and Jean firmly sat Harry down and, blithely ignoring the fact that it was well into the afternoon, fed him a Continental Breakfast. It was very appropriately named, in Harry's opinion. It was not only from 'the Continent', i.e. Europe, but also approximately the same size as the landmass in question.

Harry found that he didn't mind either too much; the affection was very welcome, and the appearance of food reminded him that he hadn't technically eaten anything for several days. So as a result, this led to the interesting situation of the very spacious Avengers Mansion kitchen being mostly filled by people who were hovering around him, and to a lesser extent, around Carol. Carol expressed some relief at this, as now she could split the worried hovering between the two of them. Some of it would have been aimed at Stevie, but he was currently ensconced in the care of his mother and grandmother, and likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Harry, for his part, didn't mind so much, especially since his telepathy meant that he could both eat and answer questions without performing a Ron impersonation and spraying half the kitchen with masticated food. Another advantage of his powers was that via a combination of magic and telekinesis, he only needed to use one hand to eat, despite Wanda and Pepper's mild sighs of despair at the somewhat lax table manners. The other hand remained in Carol's grasp, and while more or less everyone noticed it, no one commented on it – something ensured by the way in which, without looking, Jane and Remus simultaneously reached out and covered Darcy and Sirius' respective mouths.

It was also at this point that he noticed that Maddie wasn't present. Nor, in fact, was Gambit. The latter wasn't especially surprising, but the former kind of was, especially since Harry couldn't sense her presence anywhere in the Mansion.

There were a lot of awkward exchanged looks.

"As soon as he knew that you two," Steve said, nodding at Harry and Carol. "Were fine, he vanished. I just thought that he felt his work was done. But…"

"There's more to it than that," Bucky said quietly.

Harry's eyes narrowed. "This is about Essex," he said quietly. "Isn't it?"

There was another round of shared looks, then nods.

"Wait, are we talking deeply buried psychic programming or something?" Carol asked, eyes widening.

"No," Bucky said. "Gambit was rigorously checked, by both Maddie and Professor Xavier, with his consent, both before and after this revelation. In some ways, it was actually worse." He glanced at the remains of Harry's breakfast. "You might want to finish that before we explain it."

"Funnily enough, I think I've lost my appetite," Harry said flatly. "What happened?"

Bucky glanced at Bruce, Loki, and Tony, the latter of whom was holding his daughter in a fashion that suggested that they might have to be surgically detached from one another.

"Doctor McCoy, Hank McCoy, up at the Xavier Institute studied the blood and DNA of all the former Red Room prisoners after their escape," Bruce said. "To make sure that there weren't any genetic time-bombs of some kind in there, or any damage done by experimentation. By and large, there wasn't any. But with Gambit, he found something unexpected. Something that he double and triple-checked with us, Professor Xavier, and Doctor Moira MacTaggert."

"A geneticist and a particular expert on the X-Gene," Loki supplied quietly. "Formerly of the CIA and –"

"Part of the First Class of X-Men," Harry said. "I know. Professor Cassidy mentioned her a couple of times."

"Dad always talked her up like she was the next Charlotte Auerbach," Tony remarked. Though his words were of a causal anecdote, the casualness was forced, the words tight, and his grip on Ada tightened briefly, until the baby let out a noise of protest. It didn't take a telepath, an empath, or even an expert in body language, to read his mood.

"What did you find?" Carol asked, patience clearly fraying.

"Gambit's DNA had been manipulated," Bruce said bluntly.

"More than that," Tony said. "It was designed, he was designed, to be a living weapon."

"What are you saying?" Carol asked.

"We're saying that Gambit is a clone," Loki said. "He was created in a lab. Based on his earliest memory, at the approximate age of seven, in New Orleans, I managed to find the location of the lab in question. It is long gone, of course, but enough remains that with close study of the memory and some inquiries of local residents, I think I understand what happened. A little under fifteen years ago, there was some kind of malfunction at the lab in question. The containment tube, a sort of artificial womb in which Gambit was being grown, and which allowed Essex to artificially accelerate the ageing process, monitor his development, and…" His expression tightened. " _Manipulate_ his creation… it opened, releasing Gambit. In a blind panic, he fled, and took up a life on the streets. According to Essex, he found Gambit in short order, but decided to leave him be for the time being, and instead observe how he developed 'in the wild'. The rest of his story, he, and we, already know – though given the circumstances of his escape, and Essex's repair of them may have something to do with the fact that he was… incomplete."

Carol swore horribly, ignoring Steve's disapproving look. "That's sick!" she said.

Harry, meanwhile, didn't look especially surprised. "It makes sense though," he said. "Horrible sense, but still sense. You know, considering who we're dealing with." He paused for a moment. "Essex cloned a lot of people. Including me. An army of Red Sons." His lips twisted into a wry smile. "A 'Red Army'."

"I remember reading notes about that project, the next step in the Red Room's consolidation of power," Steve said, and eyed Loki, Clint, and Natasha. "And I never got a very clear answer about what happened to it."

"I did."

Everyone's gaze turned back to Harry, whose own eyes were fixed firmly on his hands.

"I happened to it," he said. "When I went after the Red Room. They had a whole bunch of clones. Dozens. Hundreds." His gaze flicked up and swept the room, focusing on the Avengers. "Some of you. But mostly of Maddie. And of me." His gaze dropped again. "Lukin used them to try and stop me." His lips twitched in a mirthless smile. "As you might guess, that didn't work." He was silent for a moment, then shrugged. "They weren't really alive. No minds. They could respond to commands, but that was more or less it. Lukin was a control freak." He looked up. "Gambit's gone, then."

"And Maddie went after him," Carol predicted.

"More or less," Natasha said. "She's probably the best choice: expert tracker, powerful enough to look after herself, close to him, and well placed to understand shocking revelations about heritage."

"Do we know who he was cloned from?" Carol asked suddenly. "Because, I'm thinking that it's someone we know." She waved a hand. "I mean, leaving aside the fact that that's apparently the way our lives seem to work now, there's something weirdly familiar about Gambit. It's been bugging me ever since I first ran into him. Not like 'you look like someone I know really well' familiar, but… acquaintance familiar."

"Gambit's DNA, his X-Gene in particular, has been greatly altered, both in his creation, and in Essex's later repairs," Bruce said.

Two eyebrows, one black, one gold, rose in sceptical unison.

"Translation," Clint interjected helpfully. "You're right, we pretty much know who it is, we just think that the guy in question should know first."

Jean had been practically glued to Harry's side since he'd arrived downstairs, assuming the roles of doting big sister and of maternal-figure-who-was-going-to-make-sure-he-ate- _all_ -his-breakfast-yes- _all_ -of-it, the latter of which Wanda had ceded to her with a wryly amused expression. She and Harry had shared a few comments, some of which had nearly caused Harry to choke on his latest mouthful, but for the most part, she'd preferred to just be present. And once the conversation had turned to Essex and Gambit, she had fallen silent, letting Harry and Carol speak.

Now, though, she looked up and spoke in a low, steady voice.

"And what if I think I already know?" she said.

OoOoO

 **Twenty minutes later…**

"Okay," Harry said, in the calm, methodical tones of someone working something through. "I understand why Gambit ran off, why he's on a train – _this_ train – and why Maddie followed him. I also understand why Jean reckons she knows who Gambit was cloned from, by Essex, and why the others think she's probably right. And I even understand why, on balance, it was thought that a small group would be a good idea, because Gambit's probably even jumpier than usual."

He eyed his companions.

"What I _don't_ understand is how this group fits any definition of 'small'."

Thor and Steve shifted awkwardly in their seats as the Crescent train rolled on through the Virginia countryside.

"Everything's relative, darling," Wanda said calmly, reading a paperback she'd produced from a pocket that should by all rights have been far too small to hold it.

"Yeah, like a relative lack of elbow room, which, funnily enough, is caused by relatives," Carol grumbled, wriggling to try and find said elbow room. She was seated by the window, next to Steve. Since they were in a coach car, what might elsewhere be known as Economy, Standard Class, or Hell-In-A-Handbasket, and both of them were tall and well-built, this meant that she was jammed quite firmly against the window.

Steve, for his part, sighed, a sigh that transformed into a pained, teakettle-like hissing wheeze as Carol unwittingly drove an elbow right where it shouldn't be driven.

"… Oops."

Thor and Harry both winced in instinctive masculine sympathy. Jean winced in more general sympathy. Carol just winced.

"Children," Wanda said, not even looking up from her book. "Play nicely."

"You seem to be a lot more comfortable with this than the rest of us," Harry said.

"I've spent a lot of time on trains, darling," Wanda explained, lowering her book. "Planes are expensive and with my two power-sets, disasters waiting to happen if I make even one slip. Cars would be a decent option if I worked in one country or on one continent."

"What about Apparating?" Harry asked.

"It took me quite a lot of time to master Apparation over significant distances," Wanda replied. "And as Remus could tell you, more than one dark creature has mastered some very nasty counter-wards to prevent entry via such means."

"What about the Ways, through the Nevernever?" Thor asked. "I know that Strange taught you roads that even my brother does not know, and while they can be dangerous, their dangers are more than manageable with your powers."

Wanda's expression saddened. "He did," she said. "And if I need to cross oceans, or get places very quickly, they are my preferred option. But there are two main problems with them. First, the Nevernever is mutable, especially by the kinds of monsters I face. The worst of them can change it to their will, and even the least of them tend to know it and its Ways as well as I, if not a great deal better. Second, when you travel the Ways, you are observed. Everyone and everything has spies that watch those paths." She gestured at the carriage around them. "Most of those who post spies on the Nevernever, however, can't or don't bother to post them on muggle transport. And those who do? I can circumvent them. I can fade into the crowd."

"Which is what Gambit is doing," Steve said, voice still somewhat tight. "Or trying to do."

Wanda nodded.

"Which is why we're sitting here, while Gambit is several carriages away," Harry said, a touch sourly. "As is Maddie."

"This Gambit, he is running," Thor said quietly. "Running from Essex, from secrets he can never escape, to the one place he has ever felt safe and at home. I recognise the drive behind his actions, Harry – if we get too close, too quickly, he will flee."

"I know," Harry sighed. "I know that Jean's talking to Maddie, who's talking to Gambit to try and calm him down. I'm just…"

"Bored?" Wanda supplied dryly.

Harry opened his mouth to protest, then sighed at his godmother's amused grass green gaze. "… maybe?" he said eventually. "I know we can't push, I know we need to wait, and…" He scowled briefly, as he caught a dry stray thought from his godmother. "And I _know_ I should have brought a book, or something, like Carol."

Carol was indeed occupied with her phone, listening to music and staring out the window, having found a comfortable position at long last. Unfortunately, this position, unbeknownst to her, involved her elbow being firmly wedged in Steve's kidney. Steve, taking a penitential attitude to such things, seemed set on suffering in silence, while remaining aware of his surroundings.

Harry scowled again, knowing that it was true.

"It will be over soon, I think," Thor said bracingly. "Jean and Maddie are most persuasive young women."

"And I might not well him as some, but Gambit's a very stubborn bloke," Harry said. "Very independent. Prefers to wander off on his own."

Carol, though she could not possibly have heard him, gave him a pointed look, one echoed by Wanda and Thor. Steve did not, as he was taking the opportunity to shift Carol's elbow somewhere less painful.

"And yes, it takes one to know one, I know," Harry added, rolling his eyes. "Point being, we could be here for a while." He shook his head and sighed. "Never mind," he said, glancing up and down the carriage, then discreetly summoning a newspaper. "Maybe this can pass the time."

And it did, for about half an hour, as Harry flicked through the paper with varying degrees of interest. The New York blackout, he noticed, was being attributed to a lightning strike setting off a series of faults in the system, rather than its true cause of a plot by Dracula and a mixture of technology and magic. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same, he thought.

As he turned past an advert for a new theatrical run of _Wicked_ , Wanda smiled faintly. Catching her expression, Harry raised an inquisitive eyebrow.

"It's nothing," she said. "I've just had a fondness for musicals, ever since my teens."

"Especially ones where witches are portrayed sympathetically?" Harry asked perceptively, guessing from the poster.

"There is that," Wanda admitted. "Though it's a more general thing. I got into them when Stephen was teaching me about music and magic, in a similar, but rather more in-depth way to the way he is teaching your classmates now. They helped refine my command of English - which, contrary to the assumptions of most, is not my native language."

Harry blinked. It was an assumption he had made himself. If nothing else, Wanda's English was impeccable, most resembling Doctor Strange's usual RP accent – which, Harry supposed, made sense, since he'd probably been her teacher.

Wanda, reading his expression, smiled again, this time wryly. "I know, a surprise, isn't it?" she said. "Though most people might be similarly surprised by your Russian. It's more or less flawless. Though..."

"That might have something to do with how I learned it," Harry said. "Yeah." He looked up. "So, what musicals did you like?"

"All sorts," Wanda said. "I was really into 'Westside Story' for a while when I was 14. I couldn't see a live production, of course, because my powers were still hard to control... but I watched the film countless times." She smiled. "And then for a treat, Stephen arranged a live performance. Not with human performers, mind you: he called in a few favours with some of the Sidhe, blackmailed a few demons, and as for the backing dancers, the extras..." She chuckled. "Well. Let's just say that you haven't lived until you've seen several dozen Mindless Ones pull off a flawless street dance routine."

Harry, who was familiar with the Mindless Ones in the abstract sense (from textbooks, and from Wanda's filmed exploits in Chicago early in the year) as rocklike magical construct creatures the size of the Hulk, each with one eye like Scott's visor, was momentarily stumped by this mental image. Considering all the other things he'd taken without blinking, this was saying something.

By this point, Thor and Steve were also staring, while Carol had taken a headphone out and replaced it with an expression of disbelief. Even Jean blinked back to the present, startled.

"Of course," Wanda added cheerfully. "The street took a bit of fixing, afterwards. But it was worth it."

Harry and Thor shared a look for a moment, then said, in perfect unison, "... I'll take your word for it."

"Seconded," Carol said.

"I think we'll _all_ take your word for it," Steve added.

Jean just nodded slowly.

Wanda, for her part, simply chuckled.

Time passed. Then, eventually, Jean looked up. "He's ready to talk," she said.

OoOoO

Clark Kent was a young man in deep thought. Not about anything in particular, it had to be said – just mulling over life, the universe, and everything, particularly as it pertained to him. And, as ever, it rolled back to the matter of identity. Specifically, his, and with a greater urgency, what with his newly discovered 'x-ray vision', which he wasn't looking forward mentioning to Jean-Paul, because it was embarrassing enough as it was, and he just _knew_ that the other boy would spend a considerable amount of time laughing. And as it did, three questions played themselves over and over in his head: Who was he? What was he? And where did he come from?

He'd thought that he might be a 'mutant', whether natural born or one of those altered by the meteor rocks, or maybe even an Asgardian, or something similar, but Jean-Paul had firmly nixed those – and the small ship his parents had found near where they'd found him (or to be more accurate, where he'd found them) suggested that he was right. But there was an Asgardian connection there, that much Jean-Paul and his parents had agreed – or at least, Jean-Paul had suggested, and his parents suspected. Truth be told, there were far more questions than answers.

Some of those questions, however, were about to be answered, as he opened the door. "Hey mom, hey dad," he began, then stopped, faltering. "Oh. Uh. Hi. I, um, sorry, I didn't know we were having a guest 'round."

The guest that he was referring to was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking tea. He was middle aged, white, with receding dark hair, and was wearing both a good suit and a pleasant expression. He looked to be of about average height and wasn't particularly distinguished in any way. At first glance, Clark would have taken him maybe for a teacher, or an accountant, or some other kind of business man, and he'd probably have taken him as such at second glance, third, fourth, fifth, and many more… except for the eyes.

When he'd visited, Jean-Paul had generally preferred to listen to Clark talk, to keep his end of things vague, keeping Clark at arm's length and away from danger. But there was one thing that Clark had picked up from him, two pieces of advice:

First, always look at the eyes. Don't stare, don't look too long, but always look. Because it's always the eyes that give it away. And on some level, Clark recognised that these eyes were not the eyes of a simple passer-by, or an old friend of his parents. They'd seen too much to be anything so mundane as that.

Second, if you can't look at the eyes, or you're not sure what you're seeing, look at the people around them, how they're reacting. That was an easier read, Clark had to admit. After all, he knew his parents, he knew their body language, and right now, it was on edge. Even more so than when Jean-Paul had decided to reveal himself.

"Hello Clark," the man said, standing up. He was shorter than Clark by a couple of inches, but carried himself like it didn't matter, and when Clark shook his hand, he noticed that it was strong – at least, for an ordinary human hand. "I'm Phil, Phil Coulson. We've met, but it's been a while."

Clark blinked twice. "We've met?" he echoed, surprised. "I'm sorry, sir, I –"

"The last time we met, you weren't even up to my waist," the man said wryly. "Like I said, it's been a while. I'd hardly expect you to remember me."

Clark shot a puzzled look at his parents, who shared a tight look, before his father cleared his throat and said, "Clark… he's with SHIELD. He knows."

Clark started, mouth going dry, body ready to run in an instant. "He…"

"After your parents, I think I'm the first human you encountered," Coulson said calmly. "It's all right, Clark. I'm a friend. I'm the one who arranged the adoption records for your parents. And your birth certificate, as it happens."

"Uh… thanks?" Clark hazarded, as his eyes darted around the room, figuring out the quickest way out, with his parents, as a million horrific scenarios played across his mind – the general theme was SHIELD returning to claim their… investment.

"We asked him here, Clark," his mother said. "To talk about, well. Those dangers Jean-Paul discussed. How to deal with them, and how SHIELD might be able to help."

"But Agent Coulson wanted to stay and speak to you," his father added, the tension in the room ratcheting up. "Though he wasn't very clear on why."

"What do you want to talk about?" Clark asked, before, at his parents' expressions, hastily adding, "Sir."

"Your birth family," Coulson said.

Clark blinked. "You knew them?"

"No," Coulson said, shaking his head. "However, from what I've been told, your birth parents, particularly your father, visited Earth several times. The later visits, I am told, were to scout out the places they might send you. Eventually, they settled on Smallville." His gaze shifted to Clark's parents. "Specifically, on your parents."

"You knew my birth parents?" Clark asked, startled and somewhat betrayed as he turned on his parents.

"No," Coulson said. "They didn't. From the account I received, your birth father did most of the scouting, and preferred to observe from a distance, not to interfere. He also, apparently, had all the abilities that you do, to a rather greater extent because he was rather older."

"And he picked mom and dad to be my parents," Clark said slowly, absorbing this, memorising every word to help fill in the picture of his birth father – which, up until now, had been a blank slate.

"What I'd like to know," Mr Kent said pointedly. "Is where you're getting all of this from? Who's been telling you all this, Agent Coulson?"

Clark, curious himself, turned to Coulson, who simply sipped at his tea. "Someone who knew Clark's birth father, Mr Kent," he said calmly. "He'd visited Earth several times before, and he was neither alone, nor the first."

"Wait, aliens have come to Earth?" Clark asked, incredulous, before pausing. "Um. You know. Apart from me. And my birth father."

Coulson seemed to hide a smile. "Yes, Clark, they have," he said. "Earth has had a number of visitors from space, not counting Asgardians, and SHIELD is in regular contact with at least one. Until relatively recently, they were usually just individuals, or small groups. But…" He shook his head. "Your birth father made a few contacts on one of his earlier visits, some of whom have gone on to become powerful individuals in their own right. He went to one of them for help, just in case things went wrong. She assented, and through various means, she's been protecting you ever since." He met Clark's gaze. "I suppose you could call her your godmother."

"You never mentioned this woman before, Agent Coulson," Mrs Kent said, every bit as pointedly as her husband.

"I hadn't," Coulson said. "Because until very recently, I didn't know that she was involved. There have been rumours throughout the military and intelligence communities ever since Clark's arrival, stories of the so-called 'Lost Omega' –"

"Me," Clark interrupted, in a horrified voice. "It's me."

"Actually, it isn't," Coulson said calmly. "Not completely. The 'Lost Omega' isn't an individual. It's an amalgamation of rumours that someone or something came down in the Smallville Meteor Shower, and of stories of another young powered individual, a little older than you, whose powers manifested shortly after the Meteor Shower. The manifestation was in the mainland United States, it was extremely violent and stressful, and that led to more than a few assumptions being made."

"That they were Omega Class?"

"That the two of you were one and the same," Coulson said. "In terms of actual concrete knowledge of your existence and presence on the Kent Farm, until recently, I thought that it was restricted to four people: me, Director Fury, and two other men - Charles Xavier and Stephen Strange."

"Why would they know?" Mr Kent asked sharply.

"Doctor Strange is an extremely powerful seer," Coulson said. "And a time traveller. While he does not know everything, he comes very close, and we have no way of stopping him from knowing. As for Charles Xavier, there are several reasons, Mr Kent. For one thing, he's another contact of Clark's birth father. For another, he runs –"

"A school," Clark said suddenly, perking up. "A school for mutants, human kids with powers. People who're like me." His sudden bright mood faded a little. "Sort of." At his parents' expressions, he looked sheepish. "Sorry. Jean-Paul told me about it."

Coulson nodded. "He was right," he said. "Professor Xavier was informed in case the demands of raising a superpowered child, an exceptionally powerful superpowered child, should prove too daunting." He raised a hand to forestall Mr Kent's indignant expression. "Which they clearly have not. However, it was a valid concern. He also has resources to protect Clark that you do not."

"Like what?" Mr Kent asked, still clearly a little annoyed at the implicit insult to his and his wife's parenting abilities, valid concern or no valid concern.

"Like the fact that until last summer, Charles Xavier was the most powerful telepath in recorded human history," Coulson said flatly. "And in my own private opinion, he could still take any of the three who're nominally more powerful than him to the cleaners. He also has the school's faculty, and a significant number of powerful, exceptionally well-trained, and experienced former students to call upon should he need to. He's also familiar with the kind of threat that Clark would have faced, and may still face – like Clark, his students are potentially a goldmine for any nation or group interested in pre-made super soldiers."

Clark shivered.

"Who else knows?" Mrs Kent asked quietly.

"To my knowledge, Mrs Kent, only one other person," Coulson said. "Deputy Director Alison Carter of SHIELD. She put me and the then Agent Fury on a path that would bring us into contact with Clark's ship and, if all went to plan, the two of you as well. For a number of reasons, she apparently felt that we would be the most likely Agents to take the humane approach to your and Clark's situation."

"And you didn't know?" Clark asked, startled.

Coulson shook his head. "Neither Fury nor I knew," he said. "Not until recently."

"And she knew… my birth father," Clark said.

"She did," Coulson said. "And she would be here in person. However, the movements of a Deputy Director of SHIELD are carefully monitored even at normal times. Combine that with the fact that you've been drawing attention to yourself recently…"

Clark went pink at Coulson's pointed, if somewhat amused, look. "I kept out of sight," he mumbled. "Mostly."

"Aside from those you've fought and Lex Luthor, as far as I know, your secret remains exactly that," Coulson agreed.

"As far as you know?" Mr Kent asked sharply.

"SHIELD employs psychics, Mr Kent, but I'm not one of them," Coulson said bluntly. "As it is, aside from the so-called 'meteor mutants', we've seen none of the usual responses to an 084, such as posting on the more unusual forums, approaches being made to the papers, or activity from certain interested parties, so I would assume not."

"084?" Clark asked, puzzled.

"An object, or increasingly, a superpowered person, of unknown origin," Coulson clarified. "One of the more recent examples was Mjolnir, when it was in a crater in New Mexico. Another," he added. "Was your ship. Or it would have been, if it had ever been recorded."

"And another was me," Clark said quietly, and was strangely glad when Coulson nodded, doing him the courtesy of not trying to deny it. He looked up. "So, this Deputy Director can't come see me because otherwise people would notice."

"Allies and enemies alike, yes."

"And I'm guessing it would be the same for Director Fury," Clark continued.

"He's also quite busy at the moment," Coulson said. "But yes. It would."

"But not you?"

"I'm not as senior, and I'm good at not being noticed," Coulson said, and as he said it, Clark could see what he meant: the average height, average dark hair, average dark eyes, good but non-descript suit… he'd blend in, in all sorts of places, and including somewhere like Smallville. He might stand out briefly, Clark thought, but it would be more the suit that stuck in people's minds, and an experienced spy, he thought, would be more than capable of finding a change of clothes should he need one.

"Additionally," Coulson added. "I have an official reason for being in Smallville: I'm SHIELD's new regional commander for the Midwestern United States, and what with the meteor shower and recent development of a superpowered population, and your status as a witness to more than a few of the less law-abiding superhumans..."

"You've got a reason for being here," Mr Kent finished.

Coulson nodded. "Officially, I'm getting the lie of the land in one of the main superpowered hotspots in my command area," he said. "The other being Chicago." He met Clark's gaze. "More generally, part of my job in relation to Smallville is to assess the impact of the unexpected number of mutations, their nature, and their cause, which looks more and more like it's radiation from those fragments of meteor rock that we missed last time." He shot Clark a disconcertingly knowing look. "Radiation that seems to be having effects we never imagined."

"What about those who have powers?" Clark asked carefully.

"They'll be treated like anyone else," Coulson said. "Those who consciously use their powers to hurt others will be arrested and, hopefully, rehabilitated. Those who can't control their powers will be assisted in managing them and returning to normal life." He met Clark's gaze without blinking. "And those who can control their powers, who use them responsibly, will have every bit of help and assistance that they might need, should they want it. Above all, though, they will be treated fairly, and protected from those who would try and exploit them."

Clark slowly let out the breath he'd been holding in. He couldn't say he was totally relaxed – a lifetime of what could only be called preparatory paranoia, inculcated by his parents and reinforced by Jean-Paul, prevented that. But he was a bit relieved. "Okay," he said. "Good to know."

Mr Kent wasn't quite so convinced. "What about HYDRA, Agent Coulson?" he asked. "It's not exactly a secret that HYDRA nearly brought down SHIELD from the inside as well as the outside."

"Jonathan," Mrs Kent scolded, frowning.

"What, Martha?" Mr Kent asked, folding his arms. "It's a legitimate concern. And that's not even beginning to talk about those parts of SHIELD that might not take such a 'humane' approach to Clark if they knew about him."

Oddly, though, Coulson actually smiled. It was a sad, wry smile, but a smile nonetheless. "You're not the first to ask me a question like that in recent weeks, Mr Kent," he said. "Almost word for word – though in the other case, the question was asked by a young lady, who pointed out that even if HYDRA was entirely purged from SHIELD, they'd managed to hide in SHIELD's ranks for over half a century and blend in just fine. Unsurprisingly, that left her with a few misgivings about SHIELD, misgivings much like yours Mr Kent. Unlike yours, however, her misgivings came attached with a threat that she would bring SHIELD down around my ears if we even breathed the wrong way towards the relatives she was protecting." The smile faded. "It's a valid question. So, I gave her the same answer as I'll give you: I believe in SHIELD, as a defence for the defenceless, rather than a hammer beating them down like HYDRA. I've spent my life fighting against the latter, and come very close to giving my life to fight against it, and if SHIELD became like that… then I'd act accordingly."

There was a long moment of silence.

"I understand your misgivings," Coulson continued. "Not being sure who to trust. Until recently, I ran a SHIELD team that dealt with some of the most unusual things and people that SHIELD encounters. I trusted all of its members with my life. One of them, Agent Ward, was a Special Agent, one of SHIELD's best non-enhanced field agents. He turned out to be a deep-cover HYDRA Agent. He betrayed my team, nearly killed all of us, and in the process, left one of my younger team members with severe brain damage. After Ward was finally subdued, he escaped, killing half a dozen experienced SHIELD Agents in the process."

"I'm sorry, Agent Coulson," Mr Kent said, after another long moment. "I didn't know."

"No, we didn't," Mrs Kent said. "Agent Coulson, your team member, the one who was brain damaged…"

"He's functional, and steadily improving," Coulson said, after a moment. "But I don't think he'll ever fully recover."

"I'm sorry."

Coulson nodded. "I'm more than familiar with the possibility of betrayal," he said. "As a result, no one will be informed about Clark who does not already know, not without your permission. You'll be left means of making contact with me discreetly, and vice versa."

"And if you're unavailable?" Mrs Kent asked. "What then?"

"That is where the other part of my reason for visiting comes in," Coulson said, turning to Clark. "I'm here to offer an invitation, from Mrs Carter to you, Clark. She feels that it's time for you to learn about where you come from, and why you were sent here. She also thinks that it's time for you to have a few things."

"What things?" Clark asked numbly, reeling at the prospect of finally finding out the truth about where he came from.

"She didn't say what they were," Coulson said. "Just that your birth father gave them to her to look after, until the time was right. And in her words, 'now is as good a time as any'."

Clark, for his part, could only sit and stare.

OoOoO

Over a thousand miles to the east, more than a few others were sitting and staring, mainly out of windows or into the middle distance, this being accepted behaviour on long distance train journeys.

Others, however, were making their way down the train, through Economy class. In the case of Thor and Steve, they were doing so with a good deal of discomfort. The coaches were Economy sized, but Thor and Steve very much weren't. The shorter and slimmer members of the party found it rather easier, until they reached Gambit and Maddie's carriage, and Harry stopped abruptly. The reason for this wasn't immediately apparent, since aside from being a little quieter and grubbier than most of the other carriages, neither it nor any of its inhabitants really stuck out.

Harry's gaze swept the carriage, then he let out an exasperated sigh and his eyes flared gold. Instantly, the rest of the people in the carriage started ambling out, at a selection of speeds, talking to one another, in a movement that seeming to be entirely natural in every way except for the undeniable fact that it wasn't.

"Harry," Jean said, in tones that were half question, half firm disapproval.

"You know, I thought that the whole point was that we were trying to be discreet," Carol said. "And not doing weird super-things that, might, say, scare everyone's favourite fashion challenged Cajun." She spoke in an offhand tone, one belied by the careful way she was watching Harry. "Also, 'scuse me if I'm wrong, but isn't mind-control, you know, wrong?"

Harry, though, was not focusing on either Gambit or Maddie, the latter of whom looked rather puzzled, having come to understand that mind-control was wrong. Instead, his gaze was fixed firmly on the one person other than Gambit or Maddie who remained in the carriage: a man probably in his early thirties, with olive skin that would be at home anywhere around the Mediterranean, dark, curly hair, and durable workman's clothing. His eyes had, until this point, been shut and he'd appeared to be asleep. Now, though, he seemed to have gone straight from asleep to entirely awake, and those dark eyes were twinkling, and accompanied by a faint smile.

"It's not mind-control," Harry said. "I just suggested they find somewhere else to be. If they're hungry, they've gone to get something to eat. Thirsty, something to drink. If they need the toilet… well." He shrugged. "There'll probably be a queue."

"Story of my life," Carol muttered, relaxing slightly.

"It still walks a line," Wanda said quietly. "Which suggests to me that you had a very good reason for doing it."

Harry, without looking away from the man and registering the gentle but pointed question in his godmother's tone, said, "I did. It seems one of my cousins has decided to pay a visit."

"And you wanted to clear all civilians out of the potential line of fire," the man said. "A noble move, though…" He glanced around the train carriage. "Considering that this carriage is still connected to the others, probably still futile if I had hostile intentions."

"That can be changed," Harry said flatly. "And you don't, that's not your style."

Gambit, by this point, had stood up, cards dropping into his hands and a wary expression onto his face.

"All right," he said. "Ah said ah was willin' t' talk t' a few people. But ah don' like havin' surprise visitors sprung on me. Who de hell is this?"

"He once introduced himself to me as Joshua," Harry said flatly. "You'd probably know him better as…"

"Jesus," Wanda and an arriving Thor said in unison.

"Long time, no see, cousin," Thor added, relaxing a little.

Carol burst out laughing, laughter that echoed into the silence, before fading away as she saw the collected expressions. "Oh my god, you're not kidding," she said, before pausing. "My god… I just said my god, in front of someone who is, technically, sort of… my god."

Jean sighed. "Believe me, Carol, I'm right there with you."

Maddie's eyes had widened like saucers, while Gambit gaped in disbelief. Steve, meanwhile, was staring in a mixture of shock and awe.

"You get used to it," Harry said matter-of-factly.

"Really?" Carol mumbled.

"Yep. My reaction first time round was, well…"

"To yell 'Jesus fucking Christ', if I remember correctly," Jesus said dryly.

Harry nodded. "And yet, now…" He trailed off and gestured, as if to indicate his relatively relaxed reaction.

"Good to know," Carol managed.

Harry nodded, and folded his arms. "Not to be too blunt, but why are you here, Joshua?" he asked. "I know my illusion of the Dark Phoenix was good enough to fool Dracula, but going by the fact that I'm still here, I'm pretty sure it didn't fool those upstairs."

"Just to talk," Jesus said calmly, before shooting a meaningful look at Gambit, who started. "To both of you." He smiled kindly at the rest, Maddie, Carol, and Steve in particular. "Though should any of you want a word, then I would be happy to have a chat."

"I will join you," Thor said, stepping forward and placing a hand on his son's shoulder. It was not a question, and neither Jesus nor Harry objected. Harry's attention, though, was mostly elsewhere, as he and Carol exchanged a series of speaking looks, one that culminated in a long, lingering mutual hand-squeeze. Gambit cocked an interested and amused eyebrow at this, but wisely chose to keep his mouth shut.

"And in the meantime, we'll speak to Mr LeBeau," Steve said, having regained some of his composure. "If he doesn't mind."

Gambit grimaced, but sighed and nodded, while still keeping a wary eye on Jesus, as if not sure what to make of him. "Ah suppose dat this was gonna come sometime," he said. "Fine."

Jesus nodded, and took Harry's other shoulder, the wounded one, taking great care in doing so. As he did, however, Wanda broke in.

"Before you go," she said. "I'd like you to pass on a message, Yeshua of Nazareth, to the various Skyfathers and Earthmothers who have an interest in my godson."

"Gladly," Jesus said politely.

"Thank you," Wanda said. "The message is as follows: I am the Sorceress Supreme. Harry is my godson. And if any god, or goddess, or other entity of that ilk, even _breathes_ the wrong way towards him, then I swear by my power and my name that I will make them _wish_ that they were dealing with my predecessor."

"I would add a similar message," Thor said. "Though I think Wanda has covered most of the essentials."

"The same," Jean said evenly.

"With knobs on," Maddie added firmly, then at her sister's surprised look, shrugged. "London slang. Jono taught me. It means the same thing, taken to an extreme." She turned to Jesus. "Which is exactly what I meant."

"And I'll… hit them in the face with my shield?" Carol ventured. "Do they even have faces?" She paused as her great-grandfather's hand rested on her shoulder, and his unwavering gaze met that of the demigod in whose faith he'd been raised.

"Avengers stick together," Steve said. "No matter what."

There was a moment of solemn silence.

Then Jesus inclined his head. "I shall pass on the messages," he said. "Though I warn you, many of my relatives will not be pleased to receive such an ultimatum from mortals." He glanced at Thor. "Or at all. And I cannot promise they will listen."

Wanda shrugged. "I know," she said calmly. "I just want it made clear exactly where I stand, so that if it comes to it, none of them can claim ignorance."

Thor simply grunted.

"Well, isn't this cheerful," Harry said into the faintly ominous quiet. "It's nice to know that if anyone comes after me, I won't have to worry about back-up, though. Clearly there will be a line."

"You just have to ruin every moment, don't you?" Carol said.

"Excuse me, who was it who said 'oh my god, you total fucking drama queen'?" Harry asked.

"That's not the same at all," Carol said firmly. "You were being ridiculous and melodramatic, and ruining that moment was a public service."

"So was ruining this one," Harry said.

"What part of 'not the same at all' didn't you get?"

Harry opened his mouth to retort, when Jesus interjected. "Entertaining as this display of flirting is," he began.

" _We're not flirting!"_

The reply was indignant, and in unison.

"I've lost count of the number of times I've said that," Harry grumbled.

"No one ever listens," Carol agreed.

"Well, we listen," Steve said. "But…"

"But what, gramps?" Carol demanded, hands on hips, lethal elbows narrowly avoiding concussing Gambit.

"But we don't believe you," Thor said, and received an Evil Glare of Death for his trouble. As the brother of Loki and the father of a teenager, he was well used to such things, and let it roll straight off him.

Harry, for his part, loftily ignored this. "Anyway, we'll be back shortly, from..." He paused. "Where is it we're going?"

Jesus just smiled. And with that, the three of them vanished.

Gambit, meanwhile, stared at the spot where they'd been. "So," he said eventually. "Dat was Jesus. De original Jesus, not some mutant with teleporting powers who happens to be called Jesus, or someone else pretendin' t' be Jesus."

"Yeah," Carol said, sympathetically, in between shooting dirty looks at Steve and Thor. "You're not the only one weirded out by this, believe me."

" _Nom de dieu_ ," Gambit muttered, before chuckling sourly at the irony. "Maybe not, _cherie_ , but ah am de only one with certain other things t' deal with." He looked around and smiled mirthlessly. "Let's get dis out of de way, eh? For those who don' know, ah ain't y' average mutant. F' years, I thought ah was, but now? It turns out dat ah'm a clone, created an' artificially aged by de demon doctor that some know as Essex, or Sinister, an' I got away durin' a power-cut when I was a kid." He looked up at Jean. "An' I'm guessin' that y' want to persuade me t' come back t' that mutant school o' yours, not just because I'm a mutant, but because y' _know._ "

"I figured it out," Jean said quietly. "You're as different as night and day in the way you act, and the way you speak. But you can change those, easily. I'll admit the eyes threw me off, but once I looked past those, it was easier. It's in the way you look, even the way you move, even the way your hair grows. Those are harder to change. In the bone." She shared a look with Maddie. "And while Maddie knows you, I know…" She trailed off. "Well. It was obvious, once you know there's something to look for."

Gambit smiled slightly, this one sad, but genuine. "Beautiful, an' brilliant," he said. "Jus' like Maddie. Between th' two of y', mah secret never stood a chance." He settled back in the seat, tone now bitter and self-mocking. "Care t' share with de class, Miss Grey? Who am I cloned from? Who's mah 'brother'?"

Jean took a deep breath.

"Your brother," she said. "Is Scott Summers."

 **Well, there's a few twists, the last being one I've been foreshadowing for a while. Yes, not only is Gambit a clone, he's a clone of Scott Summers. And he's been sort of dating Maddie, while Jean and Scott, though seeing other people, are on an inevitably convergent course. Some tastes, it seems, are in the genes.**

 **I can't claim credit for having come up with the idea of Scott and Gambit being related, I must admit – during the 90s in particular, there was a persistent open question about the identity of the so-called 'third Summers brother', younger brother of Scott and Alex. There were also a lot of unanswered questions about Gambit's past, which was heavily intertwined with Sinister, who was also famously fascinated by the Summers family. Gambit and Scott also actually look rather a lot alike, if you except the eyes, and Gambit's powers of energy manipulation actually run surprisingly close to the usual Summers family style. Ergo, the theory ran, Gambit is a Summers.**

 **Eventually, it was revealed otherwise, with another Summers brother, Gabriel (incredibly powerful, utterly psychotic) being revealed. But I always liked the idea, and felt it was fitting, so I decided to use it, with a tweak or two – i.e. Gambit's a clone of Scott, albeit one whose DNA has been meddled with to produce a somewhat different mutation.**

 **Oh, and yes, Alison knew Jor-El, something that goes back to her run-in with the Red Room when she was a child, and also involves Natasha and Bucky back when they worked for the bad guys, and Captain Mar-Vell. And Jesus is back, temporarily. He's basically Harry's parole officer/social worker (though as Harry might grumpily remark, he's already got a therapist), and just checking up on Harry. And Coulson has other reasons for being interested in the Kent family than just Clark, ones I've alluded to before. As for Doctor Strange… well. That little matter will be attended to soon.**


	35. Chapter 35: Stepping Forward

**Hello again, persons of all varieties! Welcome to chapter 35 – the last one was a little later than usual, so this one is a little earlier, by a couple of days. You can thank insomnia, strange sleeping patterns requiring something to do at night, and my Muse being helpful for once.**

 **This one's another more thoughtful and character-based chapter, as the next one will be. Basically, I'm looking to slowly show how Harry has developed and is developing in response to what he's seen and what he's done, and showing it in situations** _ **other**_ **than grand-scale mayhem.**

 **Loki's Tongue:** **Okay, normally I try to be polite… but while that's not quite the stupidest suggestion I've ever had, it's up there.**

 **Ikki:** **Almost none of those are actual powers. And what have I said about copy and pasting from the wiki?**

 **Narcissist Anon:** **While a few entities of such an ilk are on their side, most aren't, and with Strange apparently out the way, some of them might think that their main obstacle has been removed. Wanda's sending out two messages. One is the literal one, the other is more subtext: 'I am not a soft touch or an easy mark. Screw with me and suffer'. And whoever said those threats were idle?**

 **It's amusing you should use that example, since the largest species of dolphin is the Orca, which has been known to** _ **kill**_ **Great Whites. And eat their livers. Just their livers, actually, removing them with what was described by scientists as 'surgical precision'. No one's quite sure why, but the Great Whites take it as a sign to flee as fast as possible (and under the circumstances, I can hardly blame them). Who says horror movies aren't realistic? Even pods of smaller dolphins can get the better of a Great White through numbers and brains. The latter is crucial, as while Great Whites are very powerful, perfectly engineered killing machines, they're also not all that bright – generally, they don't have to be. Actually, it's quite an apt comparison… while they aren't generally stupid (mostly), like many old things, Skyfathers tend to be very bad at adapting. But that's another matter.**

 **Mecha Manda** **: Respectively, no, not yet, most probably not, I haven't read Promethea, and yes, I have read Ragnarok, and Simonson is a genius.**

Harry was puzzled. A mere instant after Jesus had teleported himself, Harry, and Thor from the train carriage, they had rematerialized. That part Harry had expected and found had gone as expected. The location, though, was something of a surprise.

"London," Harry said slowly, looking around. "Specifically, Trafalgar Square. Is there any particular reason for this?"

"I felt that a pseudo-Kings Cross mental landscape would be a little repetitive," Jesus explained casually, as he sat down on part of the base of Nelson's Column.

"Still London, though," Thor observed.

"Of the large cities of this world, it and New York are the two with which your son is most familiar," Jesus pointed out. "And yes, Harry, there is a particular reason. While either would have served to demonstrate the point I am going to make, I felt that London would work better."

"What point is that?" Harry asked sourly. "Was my Dark Phoenix impersonation a little too realistic for their comfort?"

"No," Jesus said mildly. "Well, actually, it probably was, but that's not why I'm here. There are several reasons I'm here. The first is to let you know that you're being watched." He raised a hand that stopped Harry and Thor's joint outburst, signalled by a flaring of nostrils and a narrowing of eyes, in its tracks. "Please, let me finish. You are being watched, and as a result, your actions on Halloween night have not gone unnoticed. You showed extraordinary restraint and self-control under the most trying of circumstances. You resisted the doubtless enormous temptation to simply unleash the Phoenix within, turn Dracula and all his servants to ash, and bring the young woman you love home safe and sound."

He smiled faintly at Harry's sudden luminescent blush, and Thor's rumble of fatherly amusement, before his expression once more turned serious and earnest.

"You made the difficult choice at every turn, when you could have ended it all in an instant," he said. "You did it the hard way, choosing what was right over what was easy. I have no doubt that your father is proud of you, even more than he normally is."

"That I most certainly am," Thor said, giving his son a warm smile.

"And so am I," Jesus said. "Other observers are impressed as well. Very grudgingly impressed in some cases, and it would be like pulling teeth for them to admit it, but impressed nonetheless. And others still have been rendered silent, for the time being. Well done, Harry. Very well done."

"Thank you," Harry said quietly, after a moment of thought. He looked up, expression thoughtful and shrewd. "But I'm guessing that you're not just here to give me a pat on the back."

"Indeed I am not," Jesus replied equably. "Though the chance to pass on some well deserved congratulations, and to let you know that your efforts are being acknowledged and appreciated, is a pleasant by-product, it's not the main reason I'm here."

"Then what is?" Harry asked, eyebrow raised in bemusement.

Jesus' expression took on a far-away look, then he cleared his throat and said, "'this Halloween, I, we, are going to rescue Carol, give Dracula the most miserable night of his undead existence, and cure Peter here. And I am going to make all of those things happen, even if I have to bully and blackmail every single god in the heavens to do it'." His gaze returned to the present, and focused pointedly on Harry. "Sound familiar?"

"Oh," Harry said. "That."

"Yes," Jesus said. "That. Most of those observing didn't really notice – gods have simple tastes, by and large, and they were waiting for what they would consider to be 'the good bit'." His lips twitched in a wry smile. "It's not all that surprising when you think about it. A side-effect of immortal lifespans, or at least exceptionally lengthy ones, is that you learn to let things pass you by." His lips thinned somewhat. "And unless it is under very specific circumstances, like oaths, or great spells, they tend not to regard things said by mortal, or even semi-mortal, heroes as being worth listening to."

"Why does that not surprise me?" Thor muttered. Harry, however, was eyeing Jesus carefully.

"So, if I suddenly said I was going to –" he began.

"Become the Dark Phoenix once more, they wouldn't do anything?" Jesus finished. "Most probably. Though in that case, that is mostly because your grandfather is an enemy that none of them want to make unless they absolutely have to."

"They would have more than just my father to worry about," Thor said shortly.

"They would," Jesus agreed. "But these are Skyfathers and Earthmothers that we speak of. They would be more than willing to cross you, your brother, and the Sorceress Supreme. The rest of the Avengers, your allies and associates, wouldn't even enter their tactical considerations." His gaze returned to Harry. "A speech like that might well spur them into action, if they did not have Odin to consider. It would certainly qualify as exceptional circumstances. But since they do, they would instead wait until they saw the embers of the Phoenix within you igniting. Then they would act."

"But since they do have my grandfather to worry about, they wouldn't act on something I only said," Harry said slowly. "So… they wouldn't bother listening. Meaning that they wouldn't hear something that might be significant."

"Exactly."

Harry considered this. "That sounds unnecessarily convoluted," he said. "And bear in mind that this is coming from the nephew of Loki and a student of Doctor Strange. I _know_ convoluted."

"It probably is," Jesus said casually. "But convoluted or not, they missed it." His dark eyes focused on Harry's with all the inexorable pull of a black hole's gravity. "I didn't. And I didn't miss what you'd said just before. Your 'Plan B'. Which would have made your words a lot more than mere bravado."

"Oh," Harry said.

"Yes. Oh."

"Harry?" Thor asked, in a leading tone.

Harry eyed his father. "What?" he asked lightly. "Surprised I had more than one plan? I'm offended." He paused. "Actually now that I think about it, I can see why you might be."

"Harry," Thor said. "What is this 'Plan B'?"

Harry sighed and looked down at his hands, kicking his dangling feet against his stone seat. "If Carol was dead, or died during the rescue, I'd call up the Council Elite," he said reluctantly. "And I'd give them a choice: either they bring her back, or I do it. By _any_ means necessary."

Thor choked on air. " _Harry_ ," he managed, in a strangled, horrified voice.

Harry looked up, a curious mixture of apology, defiance, and anger on his face. "I won't apologise for it," he said. "They hate me, fear me, anyway. Jesus said it himself – if it wasn't for granddad, they'd go for me, especially now everyone thinks Strange is dead."

"You don't?" Jesus asked mildly.

"I'll believe it when I see the body," Harry said briefly. "And probably not even then." Then, he looked at both of them, and jabbed an accusing finger sharply upwards. "They want me gone; either dead, or _worse_ ," he spat, anger building with every word. "And that'll _never_ change, no matter how many times I prove I can keep my inner Phoenix in check, because they'll always be waiting for me to slip up, or get a bit too angry, or, or, oh, I don't know, have one bad day too many." He gestured at Jesus. "You say you mean it when you're congratulating me, and I'm sure you do. And I'm sure those others, the ones you mentioned who're backing me for whatever reason, they'd mean it too. But there are plenty more who'll never change their minds. They'll _always_ hate me, _always_ fear me, and they'll _never_ believe I can be anything more than their nightmare."

He folded his arms stubbornly.

"So to my way of thinking, if fear is all that they understand, I might as well use it," he said. "It seems to get results."

"By bluffing," Thor managed, horrified. "Harry, if they called your bluff…"

"Then I'd ask Heimdall to send me and Carol to the other side of the universe, and go Phoenix there," Harry said, and his expression softened. "I'm not stupid, dad. And I'm willing to do a lot for… for people I care about. But I'm not going to risk the Nine Realms over it."

"And yet, you would be," Jesus said calmly.

Harry blinked and stared at him.

"I understand your reasoning," Jesus continued. "And to an extent, you're right. Many gods, especially those who are more set in their ways, only respect power. That is part of why I said they would likely ignore your words, as they do most mortals, or even semi-mortals – they wouldn't mean anything, to them, unless there was tangible power behind them." He smiled wryly. "They wouldn't even listen to me, or my Father, if we weren't powerful." His expression turned sad. "And if we hadn't proved it."

Thor exhaled slowly, nodding. "I see," he said.

"I don't," Harry said, frowning.

Thor and Jesus shared a look, the latter ceding the matter.

"Harry, if the Council Elite called your bluff, it would not be simply by saying, 'go on, I dare you'," Thor said in a low voice. "They might cave to your demand, yes, but even if they did, they would not forget it. Contrary to your belief, there would be greater consequences than simply their hating and fearing you even more. These are ancient beings, Harry, ancient beings of almighty power and even more almighty pride. Once, not so many years ago, I was not so different. When I went to Jotunheim, for the sake of an insult – a petty insult, a mere tangle of words – I began a fight in which I slaughtered dozens, if not hundreds, and blasted a vast chasm in the landscape, killing who knows how many more. I did all of that, simply for the sake of offended pride. For that, aye, I was banished, and rightly so."

He gently gripped Harry's shoulders, meeting his troubled gaze. "The beings you would have insulted include vastly more powerful than I am, far more conscious of their pride, and the insult you would be offering them, my son, would be _immeasurably_ greater. They would not forget it. They would _never_ forget it."

Harry shrugged off his grip. "So they'd hate me forever more, so…" he began impatiently, before trailing off. His brain had reached the end of the train of thought, and his expression slowly began morphing into one of horrified realisation.

"They might not be willing to risk harming you," Jesus said quietly. "But there are many around you, many you care about, and many they care about, who are not so well protected."

The horror left Harry's face, and cold marble flowed into his expression in its place. "That would be a mistake," he said flatly. "A fatal one. If they knew anything about me, they'd know that."

Jesus smiled a gentle, sad smile. "You're thinking too open, little cousin," he said. "Too obvious. And too small. These are the gods of gods we speak of. They can do things as obvious as transforming your loved ones into monsters and forcing you to slay them, yes, or stealing their souls and dragging them to hideous tortures in the underworld, offering you the chance of a clear-cut heroic quest, to right wrongs and avenge the innocent. But. They have the luxury of time. You have seen how Doctor Strange arranges his plans, many centuries in advance. They can do the same – not as deftly, and without such insight into the future, or ability to travel through time. They can wait, and slowly bring about the destruction of everything and everyone you hold dear on this mortal plane, and they can do it without your ever being able to prove anything against them, anything that could give you the chance or right to strike back."

He sat back and regarded Harry. "Of course, you could fight back, play them at their own game. You have the aptitude for it, a cunning and unconventional mindset that could overturn their established game-boards and run rings around their usual strategies. But then you would run into the same problem that you would in case of their other possible responses."

"What would they be?" Harry asked quietly.

"To strike at you, swiftly and without remorse," Thor said, in that same, low voice. "For one of two reasons. First, to call your bluff and punish you for having the temerity to try and threaten them, let alone command them. Or second; to destroy, bind, or banish you, before you could gather enough power as the Phoenix to truly threaten them."

There was a long, grim silence, as Harry thought this through.

"Most of those gods don't do anything these days," he said eventually. It wasn't in a tone of dispute or disbelief. Instead, it was more of an observation.

"You're right," Jesus agreed. "They don't. And because of that, for the most part, they end up doing one very important thing: not a lot of harm." He sighed. "If it had come to that, the Council Elite striking at you, you'd have fought back. It's part of who you are, what you are. And because the Phoenix's fire burns all the hotter and faster in battle, even more when fuelled by rage and pain, it would soon have become a cataclysmic battle. A battle of a kind which this world had not witnessed in over a thousand years." He looked up and around at Trafalgar Square, and suddenly, they were no longer sitting on the base of Nelson's Column, but on a cloud high above London, looking down on the city below. "Until, that is, this summer just gone."

"The Battle of London," Harry said quietly. "Red Sky Day."

"Yes," Jesus said. "You know better than almost anyone the kind of damage that did, the horrors that were wrought as mere side-effects."

He waved a hand, and the scene of London as it was now – a bright and busy city, one that for all its scars and healing wounds was squaring its shoulders and firmly getting on with life – was replaced with one of how it had been only months before – a hellish warzone, with nameless monsters swarming in the river, on the streets, and in the blood-red skies, slaughtering and devouring everyone they could reach, as weapons and powers of all possible origins and varieties steadily flensed the city down to its bones, and then began to pummel those bones into powder. There were heroes there too, Harry saw, doing their best to mitigate the destruction and horror, but their efforts, while necessary to stem the tide, caused their own collateral damage.

And then, the image faded away, leaving London as it was now.

"That, as examples go, was a relatively mild one," Jesus said. "Dramatic and wide-ranging, yes, but the worst of it was reversible, by your efforts, and the conniving of Doctor Strange. But the damage that was done, before it was undone, should serve as a reminder of the kind of carnage that can be unleashed." He inclined his head. "Of course, I don't think you necessarily need a reminder of that. What you might need a reminder of is something else."

Once again, the world around them changed. This time, they were in front of a large, granite block, covered with marble. Several things were inscribed on it. What caught Harry's eye, though was the list of names.

There were quite a lot of them.

"Those who suffered the most in the Battle of London were the same as those who always suffer the most in any conflict of powers, mundane or otherwise, who are always caught in the middle: the powerless, the mortal, and the innocent," Jesus said, tone quiet and without rancour. "These are the victims – or at least, some of them. These are those poor souls who died because of Lucius Malfoy's ambition, HYDRA's hubris, Gravemoss' insanity, and Chthon's evil. But there are many more. Those who survived in body, but who instead had horrors imprinted on their souls. Those who saw their homes and the work of lifetimes crumble before their eyes. And above all, those who lost loved ones." His expression took on a faintly bitter twist. "All as _side-effects_ of the conflict of Powers, of gods, raging above them…"

He turned to Harry once more. This time, his gaze was more intense than any Harry had seen before, or, he felt, was ever likely to see again.

"This is what happens when the gods fight on Earth," Jesus said. "This is why the gods have wound down their activities on Earth in the last few millennia, and why the Celestials outright banned overt action by our kind a thousand years ago. This is my point, about your 'Plan B', and any similar ideas you might have: one way or another, the very people you are trying to help will get caught in between."

OoOoO

Those who remained in the train carriage had largely spent the time in silence. The main focus of any conversation would have been either Gambit's revelation of his origins, or the fact that Jesus had dropped by, then whisked Harry and Thor off for a chat.

As it was, however, Gambit had shown a remarkable disinclination to say anything. Anything out-loud, that was, as he and Maddie seemed to be engaged in a steady mental dialogue, one that seemed to have transitioned into an argument. Carol, who was a regular participant in such psychic communication, knew it when she saw it. She also knew sulking when she saw it, which was what Gambit seemed to have settled on doing, but then again, so did more or less everyone else.

Of the rest, they weren't doing much. Wanda had retrieved her book and picked up where she'd left off, Steve looked as if he was musing over the fact that he'd just encountered the man who was technically his Lord and Saviour, and Jean had folded her arms and gone into a mild snit, after her attempts to join in Maddie and Gambit's discussion-cum-argument and assist (or at least mediate) had led to what Carol assumed was the psychic equivalent of "butt out", or perhaps, "fuck off".

Eventually, after what felt like several hours, but Carol's phone informed her had only been ten minutes, Gambit leaned towards Maddie. He had what looked like an almost pleading expression on his face, and after scrutinising his face (and probably his brain as well) for some minutes, Maddie sighed and nodded. Gambit inclined his head in thanks, and stood up, looking around at the group at large, all of him looked up at him.

"Look," he said. "Ah'm thankful y'all came down to see me, t' see if I was all right after I found what I am. Ah've gotta admit, it a lot to take in." He glanced at Maddie. "Some of y'all, probably most of y', thought I was just runnin', wit'out thinkin'. But ah'm not." He sighed. "See, ah've been plannin' to head back t' New Orleans f'r a while now. Firs', though, I wanted t' be sure that Maddie was settled in, bein' treated right, an' most of all…" His gaze shifted back to Maddie, and a small smile settle on his face. "Dat she was happy."

"You didn't have to stay, you know," Maddie said quietly.

"Ah know," Gambit said. "But I wanted to, _cherie_. Ah have business in New Orleans, unfinished business, that is true. But it could wait. Now… y've got a home, a family. And y' happy."

"You could have those too," Jean said, tone earnest, but cautious, as if she was unsure of the response she might get. "I mean, Scott would, well, he'd be a bit shocked." At Gambit's raised eyebrow, she smiled wryly. "All right, he'd be a lot shocked. But…" She sighed. "Scott had a brother. Alex, Alex junior, named after their grandfather, Colonel Summers. He was killed in the same car crash that left Scott an orphan."

"Miss Grey, are y' tryin' t' guilt trip me into comin' back with y'?" Gambit asked, the other eyebrow rising.

"No!" Jean said, indignant. "What I was getting at is that he'd welcome a brother. He'd welcome you. So would Colonel Summers. And they'd give you a home, if you wanted it. And…"

"And what y' very carefully not sayin' is that y' think dat Scott deserves t' meet me in de flesh, knowin' who and what we are t' each other," Gambit said evenly.

Jean folded her arms again. "I do think that," she said. "Don't you?"

The reply came as quick as a whip, and with the same crack to it."Ah think that we don' always get what we deserve."

"Wow," Carol remarked. "I'm getting major _déjà vu_." She then blinked as everyone turned to her. "Oh. Sorry. Didn't mean to say that out loud."

"You may not have meant to, but I think it could do with being heard," Wanda said. "All of it."

Carol opened her mouth to protest, then saw the expressions on the others faces. She sighed. "Fine," she said. "What I was going to say – actually, what I was thinking – was that I think maybe we should double check some of those tests on your DNA, Gambit."

"An' why's that?"

"Because you're starting to sound just like Harry when he's in one of his sulky moods," Carol said bluntly. "Look, you both have points." She waved at Steve. "On Jean's side, I know a thing or two about discovering long lost relatives and then having them freak-out and decide they don't want to be anywhere near you for however long. Sure, it takes time to adjust, but after a while, you start to think that something's up with you. And it kind of sucks."

Steve looked acutely guilty, but when Carol gave him a semi-apologetic look, he shrugged a shrug of acknowledgement.

"And on Gambit's, not everyone takes well to playing happy families right off the bat," she added. "Or being cooped up in general. I know a thing or two about that, too."

Gambit and Jean shared a look. Then, after a few moments, Gambit sighed.

"New Orleans is mah home," he said. "But… I'll see if I can make it up for Christmas. Maybe." He met Jean's gaze, then Carol's. "I get what y' both mean. And why. Y'," he said to Jean. "Are lookin' out f'r y' friend, who, if I am not very much mistaken – and let's face it, I most probably am not – is also a great deal more t' y'. I understand that, an' I applaud it, even if it is gettin' a little on mah nerves right now, because ah'd do th' same in y' place." He looked at Carol. "An' y'," he began.

"Don't go thinking I've got a soft spot for you, or anything, I'm just trying to save us all some time and a lot of idiocy," Carol said, and shrugged a little too casually. "Besides – I owe you."

Gambit smiled one of those dazzling smiles that caused Carol's cheeks to immediately prove her a liar, and Steve's eyes to instinctively narrow.

"Then I would like t' thank y' f'r both th' saved time an' idiocy, one a commodity all too rare, the other a problem far too common," he said. "An' as f'r dat soft spot, _cherie,_ I know. In fact, ah know which young man does, which leads me to say this: the young man who has that… why, I'd say that death an' despair be damned, he's one of de luckiest men in de whole wide world."

This time, Carol's blush reached her ears, and Wanda let out a low, knowing chuckle.

It was, of course, at that very moment that Harry, Thor, and Jesus reappeared, the former blinking at the tableau, most particularly Carol's almost glowing face.

"What did we miss?"

Gambit, meanwhile, inclined his head, ignoring Harry's bafflement. He considered for a moment, then said, "Ah'll send a phone, wit' mah number, t' th' Institute. If y' ever need me… if Scott ever needs me… then jus' give me a call." His gaze slid over to Maddie and he smiled a half-smile. "An' if all else fails, then at least one of y' will always know where to find me."

And that, it seemed, was it.

OoOoO

After Gambit had made his declaration, Jesus had gone with him to have a chat about something – though he had first taken the time to repeat his offer of a chat with any of the others, telling them that all they would have to do is call his name.

"Three times in succession, to be exact," he said. "It stands out, mystically speaking, and means that you won't accidentally risk summoning me if you stub your toe, or something like that."

Harry, meanwhile, was in a pensive mood after his own chat with his cousin, and remained so after Wanda returned them to the Mansion. The others, sensing that he wanted to think, had left him to it as he made his way down to the armoury. His sword was there, he knew. Not just because it was the logical place to put weapons, but because he could feel it. In theory, he thought he could probably have summoned it. However, at best, that wouldn't have worked, or stuck point first in the ceiling of the armoury. At worst, it would have come to his hand, zooming through every wall on the way. So, since Harry didn't particularly want to increase the odds of accidentally decapitating someone, he took the simple route.

Once he picked up the sword, though, he immediately noticed something different about it. Before, it had felt like something enchanted, yes, but the enchantments were passive. Now, it felt more like Mjolnir, or his wand. Slowly, cautiously he drew the sword. At first, nothing happened. The only obvious difference was a faint reddish-gold tinge in the blade when it caught the light.

However this, while suspicious by itself, did not seem to be the cause of the difference in feeling. Then, as Harry looked closer, he noticed something playing around the edge, something beyond the normal sheen, a pale, silvery-white, and faintly eldritch gleam. Frown deepening, he held the blade out before him, turning it this way and that, before performing a couple of experimental cuts through the air before him.

 _That_ got a reaction, the blade flaring like a lightning bolt, leaving trails of fire behind it as it swept through the air with a sound like tearing silk.

"Okay," Harry said slowly to himself, as he blinked the after-images out of his eyes and the blade settled down from magnesium intensity to a more manageable pale whiteish glow, though it was now humming with power. "This is new."

OoOoO

As it turned out, though, fewer people were surprised than Harry expected. Part of this was because the Avengers, and those around them, had long since learned to roll with strange events, particularly where Harry himself was concerned. And part of it was that, frankly, the sword had yet to do anything more than display a strange reddish-gold sheen in certain lights, and glow brightly every now and then.

While flaming swords were liable to draw attention in most parts of the world, in Avengers Mansion, once it was established that it wasn't going to do anything more than glow brightly, the most they were likely to draw was a mild curiosity.

One of the most curious was Uhtred, who examined the sword he had forged. With his long dark blond hair tied back in a queue and the eyepatch that covered his healing eye, and the practical Asgardian leathers that he favoured, it lent him a particularly piratical look.

"These effects are not of my making," he said, puzzled. "Nor are they of any forging enchantment that I recognise." He rubbed his jaw. "Of course, I may simply have missed them before – it was bespelled by your uncle, Prince Loki, and he is the Lord of Magic after all."

"It is possible that you missed some of the spells I placed on that blade, Master Ullrson, but this is not the product of any of them."

Both young men twitched, and Uhtred quickly inclined his head to Loki, who stood in the doorway.

"Uncle," Harry said. "I was actually going to ask you next."

"I am sure you were," Loki said, striding over and taking the sword, examining it. "But were you going to ask the right questions?"

Harry was puzzled for a moment, then realised what his uncle meant. "I was going to ask what it was doing," he said slowly. "But maybe the question should be why it's doing it. And what caused it." He paused. "Actually, I think I've got a pretty good idea what caused it."

"And what would that idea be?" Loki asked, in the tone of a teacher inviting a student's theory, no matter how speculative.

"Well," Harry said slowly. "When I was fighting Dracula, the first time, I pumped a lot of power into it and skewered him, trying to fry him from the inside out." He smiled wryly. "Needless to say, that didn't work."

"It did leave a rather nasty burn mark, though," Loki remarked. "Which is more than most leave on the King of the Grey Court, certainly more than anyone your age has ever done."

Harry wrinkled his nose, and shrugged. "Then he wound up disarming me, and stabbing me through my shoulder," he continued, trying to ignore the twinge in said shoulder. "Which covered it, at least partly, in my blood. Which has some unusual powers. And then Dracula hit it with a massive lightning bolt."

"All the ingredients for a magical forging," Loki murmured. "A potent one at that – an already well-forged and enchanted blade infused with the power of a Prince of Asgard, then bathed in his blood, blood in which embers of the fires of creation themselves still smoulder. Finally, it is struck by lightning, summoned and directed from skies overflowing with power, at the behest of a Vampire King." He turned the blade over in his hands and raised an eyebrow. "Really, I'm almost more surprised that it hasn't done something more obvious."

"But it was not a forging," Uhtred said, frowning. "Not purposefully. It had the ingredients, yes, but they were not so arranged, not so bound. It would take a rare accident indeed for this to happen and for the changes to be fixed, rather than simply fading and falling apart. And though I am no mage, this feels like no accident."

"You are right about that much, young Uhtred," Loki said, smiling approvingly at the young Asgardian, whose eye had just widened as his brain caught up with his mouth and he realised that he'd just bluntly contradicted Asgard's God of Magic in a magic related matter. "This was no accident. There is more enchantment than mine on this blade. Newer enchantment." His eyes narrowed. "Familiar enchantment."

Harry let out a long-suffering sigh. "And suddenly I'm seeing the answer to several questions just rolling out in front of me," he said. "How I got from where Dracula left me to near Captain Stacy's police station, how my sword is doing this, and probably _why_ my sword is doing this too. And the answer to all of them is two words long: Doctor Strange."

"Which also most probably means that he is still alive," Loki remarked. "Of course, with Strange's known abilities as a time traveller, it is also possible that he could have done this centuries ago, on his relative time scale." He eyed the blade again for a moment, then handed it back to Harry, hilt first. "None of the enchantments will do you any harm, nephew, that much I can tell. Their precise details are hard to discern – Strange's spellwork is intricate beyond words. But I think that for the most part, Strange has simply given your sword a boost. In fact…"

He trailed off, regarding the sword thoughtfully.

"Uncle?" Harry prompted him.

"Doctor Strange was once Taliesin," Loki said. "Court Physician of Camelot, Royal Bard to Arthur Pendragon, and student of Merlin Emrys himself. He also has both an eye for symbolism and an unusual sense of humour." As Harry's eyes widened to near impossible extents, he smile faintly. "No, Harry, loathe as I am to disappoint you, I don't think that your sword has become Excalibur reborn. Or at least, not in the technical sense." He shook his head. "What few people know is that the sword known as Excalibur predates Arthur by centuries. And what many people forget is that in many versions of the tales of Arthur, usually those closest to the truth, Excalibur was not Arthur's only sword. Or at least, the sword that most think of as Excalibur was not his only sword."

"The name was transferred?" Uhtred asked sharply.

Loki nodded. "The sword that most people refer to as Excalibur, or think of Excalibur, only acquired that name in Arthur's hands," he said. "Before his time, and usually after, it was known by its current and original name: _Amoracchius_ , the Sword of Love. It is one of the Three Swords of the Cross, and generally considered to be the most powerful of the Three."

Harry, who'd long had a fondness for Arthurian legends (and on reflection, thought that this must have amused Strange immensely), put it together. " _Amoracchius_ was the sword that the Lady of the Lake gave to him," he said, before glancing at his uncle. "Supposedly. The real Excalibur – the original Excalibur, rather – was the Sword in the Stone." He looked up sharply. "And Merlin enchanted, and you think that Strange knows how, and did the same to my sword."

Loki nodded, with a pleased smile. "That it was, and that I do," he said. "Though not quite the same: the original Excalibur – the Sword in the Stone, for simplicity's sake – was originally forged by a mortal blacksmith from mortal steel, and was imbued with most of its powers by an Elder Wyrm, one of the last Great Dragons of Avalon. They were to the West of Midgard as the great _Lung_ Dragons are to the East, and the giant lizards that live in the hidden corners of the Earth are mere shadows of their might and glory." He sighed. "And most of them were either killed in the wars between Asgard and Avalon, or in the last great war with the Frost Giants, and the remainer either retreated to Avalon or fell to frightened humans."

He waved a hand, looking thoughtful once more. "In any case, the sword was well-forged by relatively normal means, then reforged and enchanted by explicitly magical ones. Indeed, the Sword in the Stone was reforged in a Dragon's flame, and your sword was reforged in lightning, a fire in and of itself, cast by a being whose very name means dragon. Yes, that kind of symbolism would definitely appeal to Strange, and it goes without saying that it would be highly magically significant, even before the probable Draconic links to the Phoenix, and the embers within…" He trailed off.

Harry and Uhtred waited politely for a minute and a half, before Harry cleared his throat.

"So," Harry said. "The original Excalibur, a.k.a. the Sword in the Stone, was forged in dragon-fire… then shoved into the stone?"

"Merlin used it a few times first," Loki said absently. "As did Uther Pendragon, once. It had a number of very useful properties, such as the ability to destroy the undead with remarkable ease, without resorting to magic. Then, yes, he shoved it into the stone. What happened to it after Arthur took up _Amoracchius_ is unclear – some say it was broken, leading to Arthur's needing to wield _Amoracchius_ , some say it was thrown into Lake Avalon, and some say it was returned to the stone, awaiting the return of the Once and Future King." His expression soured. "Of course, it is also entirely possible that Strange is keeping it in an umbrella stand. Or using it as a poker."

"It wouldn't surprise me," Harry said bluntly, while Uhtred's expression spoke volumes of his horror at the very idea of such cavalier treatment of such a famous blade. "So, Strange might have modelled my sword on the Sword in the Stone." He took a deep breath, in a valiant but failed attempt to keep his cool, while on the inside, his inner child was bouncing up and down in excitement. "The original Excalibur."

"Yes," Loki said, faintly amused. "Of course, intentional parallels aside, this blade was originally forged in Asgard, of Asgardian steel, by a gifted young Asgardian blacksmith."

Uhtred flushed at the praise, and Harry shot him an encouraging smile of agreement.

"And with the occasional guidance of one of the greatest mortal smiths of modern times, too," Loki continued. "It was also already somewhat enchanted, by me, before it was reforged. The Sword in the Stone, by contrast, was probably an entirely mundane though excellent weapon before its reforging – and even if it was enchanted as well, it would have been enchanted by Merlin." He shook his head. "It had different properties from the very start. Combine that with its infusion with your power and baptism in your blood, and Strange's own plans and intentions, and who knows what it could do."

"So," Harry said, after a long moment. "What you're saying, uncle, is that Doctor Strange probably arranged for it to get a sort of magical reforging, involving my blood, finished off the reforging with a bit of enchantment, and did it in the style of the Sword in the Stone." He paused, unable to prevent the beginnings of a gleeful grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. "The original Excalibur, which was originally reforged in Dragon-fire. But because of the different ingredients, it'll probably have some different effects. Does that about sum it up?"

Loki eyed him with a mixture of annoyance and amusement. "Yes," he said dryly. "It does, more or less. If you would prefer it in even simpler terms, you could put it like this: 'Dracula stabbed me with my own sword and struck me with lightning, now it's a magic sword, and it's all Strange's fault.'"

Harry considered this. "Maybe," he said, then grinned. "But it misses out the cool Excalibur bits."

Loki chuckled. "That it does," he said. "And speaking of named blades, no weapon so enchanted can go without a name."

Uhtred backed this up with a firm nod. "All the greatest weapons have names," he said. Harry did not miss the subtext, 'and I would like to be able to one day say that I forged a legendary weapon, and call it by name', nor did he begrudge it. It had been a gift, after all, and even before its transformation, it had been an amazing sword. One, he added mentally, that hadn't needed any extra enchantments to slay the undead. No, it had done _that_ just fine.

His uncle's voice, earnest and serious, pulled him out of his thoughts. "Harry," Loki said. "Be careful with that sword. It won't harm you, not unless you accidentally stab yourself in the foot with it or something like that, which I'm fairly confident you won't do."

"I'd rather not jinx it," Harry said.

"As you will," Loki said, with a brief smile, before sobering again. "But where it was dangerous before, it is far more so now. For one thing, I do not think it will be kind to anyone who picks it up without permission."

OoOoO

"So, that's why your fancy superpowered sword is hanging on the gym wall," Carol said. "And it doesn't have a name yet."

"More or less," Harry said, testing the balance of one of the practise swords in the gym. "And I haven't settled on a name yet."

Carol eyed his shoulder. "How about 'Kebab'?"

"No," Harry said firmly. "It will be a good name. A serious name. Because Names are Important." He looked sour. "And most of the good ones are taken."

The Avengers Mansion gym, which they were currently in, had a little bit of everything – or at least, everything that could be reasonably associated with a gym that was (via Loki's magic and Jane's science) bigger than logic dictated it should be, and acquired by someone of Tony's nigh-limitless personal funds. There was, for instance, a boxing ring-cum-gladiatorial arena specifically set up for bouts between Thor and the Hulk, which were a popular source of entertainment, though Pepper had vetoed Clint and Darcy's suggestions a), of selling tickets, b) of starting a superpowered version of the UFC and selling the rights to HBO.

"I'd like to find out what it does, learn how to use it, and stuff like that," Harry continued. "However, I'd also like to avoid accidentally cutting Uhtred in half and blowing up the Mansion – again – in the process."

"Yes, please don't, _cher_ ," Jean-Paul said. "I am very attached to both halves of Uhtred, and I would prefer for him to remain in one piece." He shot Uhtred a smile that spoke of things to be done in private corners and large cupboards, gaze focusing on the vaguely piratical eye-patch. "Not that there aren't certain… _compensations_."

Uhtred didn't exactly preen. However, he did smirk, and casually caught the practise sword that he'd be tossing up and down for the last couple of minutes, in a demonstration both of his extraordinary hand-eye coordination in spite of the fact that he was currently only using one eye, and of his willingness to show off for his boyfriend.

"We noticed," Harry said, in as deadpan a tone as possible.

"It was kind of obvious," Carol said, matching his tone.

"Obvious?" Jean-Paul demanded, seemingly too outraged to make a joke at Harry's expense.

"The first time you saw Uhtred with the eye-patch, you started drooling," Diana observed. She also had a practise blade, though the tip was grounded, and she seemed to be patiently waiting for her moment.

Jean-Paul folded his arms. "It was a perfectly justified reaction," he said defensively.

"It was also obvious," Harry said. "Now, can we get back to business?"

"Sure," Carol said. She'd acquired popcorn. "You and Uhtred get shirtless and sweaty together, Diana judges your technique, and me and Jean-Paul enjoy the view."

Once, Harry would have blushed like a tomato. Now, he merely rolled his eyes. "Sure," he said, drawing his wand and waving it. "If it makes you happy." A handkerchief appeared in mid-air, and he sent it over to Carol with a thought. "Here: for when _you_ start drooling."

Carol glowered. Diana smothered a smile. Jean-Paul stole the popcorn.

Uhted coughed. "Now," he said, stripping off his shirt, revealing the fading scar left by Dudley's attack and the slightly pinker flesh that had replaced that which was ripped away, and setting himself. "First, my lo –" He paused at Harry's pointed glare. "Harry. First, I shall be testing your level of proficiency with a blade. You are, after all, far stronger, faster, and more battle-hardened than you were last time we crossed blades."

Harry tipped his head in acknowledgement, mimicking him and ignoring Carol's wolf-whistle. Lacking Uhtred's level of healing ability, his own scars were more visible, including the reddish-white mark on his shoulder where Dracula had stabbed him. "Honestly, I'm kind of curious," he said, as the two began circling each other. "My actual sword fighting experience is mostly limited to stabbing a giant snake and getting bitten in the process, that little practise duel with you – which I won," he added with a smirk. Uhtred made a face at him. "And getting the crap kicked out of me by Dracula, who then stabbed me with my own sword."

"So little?" Diana asked, somewhat surprised.

"Bucky's taught me a bit," Harry said. "And I used my sword on some of the other vampires." He grimaced. "Including Dudley." He shook his head sharply. "But while he knows what he's doing, swords aren't really Bucky's favoured weapon, and most of the vampires were unarmed – or at least, they didn't have swords."

He darted forward, feinting at Uhtred's blind side, before sweeping his blade down at the other's leg. The lunge was firmly diverted, and only Harry's lightning fast reflexes prevented the counter-lunge from hitting him in the sternum.

"Actually, most of my fighting – my effective fighting – has been done at range," Harry continued, after another couple of experimental cuts were similarly blocked. "When I've gone close range, hand to hand or sword to sword, it usually hasn't worked out too well: HYDRA's Destroyer thing at Easter, Daken, Dudley first time round, and definitely Dracula."

"Every time you've fought someone or something with a name starting with 'D', you mean," Carol remarked. "Joking aside, though, all of those were either more powerful than you, more experienced, or both. And in the case of Dudley, weren't your powers were locked down? You ended up beating him to a pulp anyway, I know that much."

"And your abilities are best suited to fighting at range, are they not?" Diana remarked.

"Both true," Harry admitted. "But life isn't generally considerate enough to give me opponents either on my level or below it power and skill-wise, and when it does, they're generally cannon fodder or minions for something worse. And my enemies increasingly tend to be able to shrug my powers off and close the gap, which they do because it's a weakness, and an obvious one at that."

He looked grim and tapped the pale scars over his heart, and the reddish white one on his shoulder. "Daken exploited that. So did Dracula. I only survived the first time because mum brought me back, and the second time because Dracula wasn't interested in killing me." He paused. "Well, he might have been towards the end of our second fight, but he opted against it." He shook his head. "Anyway, the gauntlet helps, yes, it helps a lot – it reinforced the armour I was wearing when I fought Dracula, and it probably kept me alive. But if I'm using my psychic powers or magic on it, then I'm not using them on something else, and I have to keep concentrating." He waved a hand. "Point is, it's a weakness, smart monsters are going to keep attacking it, and them doing so has got me killed once, and nearly got me killed a couple of other times. I need to get better at protecting it."

"And learning how to sword-fight is part of it," Jean-Paul said, nodding.

"Bullets and energy blasts I can stop," Harry said. "And return with interest. Hand to hand I can do pretty well, and Bucky's teaching me. Swords, knives, claws, that sort of thing? That's something else. Bucky's brilliant with knives, and decent with swords, but like I said – not his favourite weapon. Hence this." He smiled wryly. "Actually, it was fighting Dudley the first time that sort of inspired me," he added.

"How so?" Carol asked.

"Agh! My powers. Were contained. By the suit. That the Red Room. Put me in," Harry gritted out, as Uhtred forced their blades into a lock and a trial of strength. "Then, I found out that I could use them _in_ the suit."

"The same way you would channel them through the gauntlet I gave you," Diana said.

There was a complicated moment, then Harry disengaged and slid away from Uhtred with a grace that would not have shamed Natasha, narrowly avoiding being clipped by Uhtred's out-thrust elbow. This got scattered applause from the sidelines.

"Exactly," he said. "Anyway, Dudley got in a few good hits before I realised that, broke a few bones, that sort of thing. And the main reason I beat him up so easily afterwards is that his fighting style is pretty much entirely based on being way more powerful than his opponent, being able to soak up anything they could throw at him, and being absolutely vicious."

Uhtred's expression darkened somewhat. "That he did," he said grimly.

Harry met his gaze, ready to apologise, but Uhtred waved it away.

"You avenged my wounds a hundredfold," he said. "Even though it meant slaying one who was kin to you, no matter how vile a monster he had become."

"Dudley and I never liked each other, and he hadn't been kin to me for a long time," Harry said flatly, suddenly stepping up the speed of the bout, setting his blade spinning through the air as he attacked in something just short of a blur. "Anyway, he'd been dead in the literal sense for maybe a month or more – Grey Court vampires are undead, after all."

Uhtred countered each blow with skill, economy, and increasing amounts of effort, before managing to divert a cut into the floor, before bringing the elbow of his sword arm up hard into Harry's jaw, snapping it shut and his head back, sending him staggering back. While he had pulled his punch – or rather, elbow strike – it would still have laid out anyone human. Harry, for his part, was mostly just a little dazed.

"True," he said. "But the ties of blood are hard to forget. And I do not think it was easy."

Harry, who was now rubbing his jaw, froze. Then, he closed his eyes briefly and sighed. "Honestly?" he said. "It was. Doing it quickly; not tearing him apart, flaying him alive, burning him from the inside out, turning his mind inside out… that was hard. After I saw what he'd done to you, I just wanted to kill him." He smiled mirthlessly. "Granted, I wasn't in a very good mood to begin with."

"You're not the only one to get feelings like that, you know," Carol said, after a long moment. "Especially when faced with something like that. Hell, you're in a better position to know that than the rest of us, save maybe Diana."

"True," Harry agreed. "But unlike more or less everyone, I've got powers that can reshape the world around me and that literally work by thought. And not always conscious thought, either. Oh, and there's also the fact that I've got a fragment of one of the fundamental forces of the universe that can give me the power to do more or less everything, at the small cost of possibly turning into a galaxy destroying cosmic nightmare, breaking open cracks in reality again, and being destroyed or locked away in some cosmic hellhole by the biggest and baddest gods and goddesses around, which actually feeds off anger and works even more off impulse." The smile turned wry at their expressions. "Yeah, it's a bit of a problem." The smile faded. "And it means I have to watch my thoughts. To stop them becoming reality. But, on the upside, I have been learning to control my temper, to use my anger for something other than general mass destruction and potential cosmic horror. So I did. I channelled it. Everything went cold, and I cut Dudley to pieces."

"So I heard," Uhtred said, into the silence, glancing at Diana, before moving into a swift, ruthless, and deceptively graceful attack that drove Harry back, forcing him to draw on every bit of speed, agility, and creativity he had. As the slimmer boy slipped away once more, Uhtred settled back. "But do you truly have no regrets?"

Harry hesitated, and flicked a glance over to Carol, then sighed. "About killing him? Not really. He was a monster long before he became a vampire," he said. "Like I've told others: all becoming a vampire really did was change his diet." He was silent for a few moments. "I regret that he fell into Essex's hands," he said, and glanced at Carol again. "But like Carol said, others who spent longer in his hands, like Maddie, and Gambit, still turned out as decent people. Dudley turned out as a monster. At some point he chose it. I regret… I regret that he didn't really meet someone who might have helped him make better choices." He sighed. "In the end, I'd like to think that what I did was justice. Not just revenge."

There was another long silence. Then, Diana broke it. "It wasn't justice," she said firmly, and met Harry's gaze. "It was mercy."

"I rather think, _mes chéris_ ," Jean-Paul said quietly. "That it was a little bit of both. And that he had not experienced much of either for a very long time."

"Maybe," Harry said, looking over at his sword, which had dealt the final blow. His expression, oddly, wasn't regretful, conflicted, or even content. Instead, it was somehow thoughtful. Or at least, it was until Uhtred took the opportunity to sharply smack his sword-hand, at which point it was pained, somewhat indignant and punctuated by a yelp.

The practise duel went back and forth for the best part of another fifteen minutes, before Uhtred disarmed Harry and pressed the tip of his sword against Harry's throat.

Finally, as Harry smiled and reluctantly raised his hands in the universal, Diana stepped forward.

"Your form is decent," she said critically. "Though basic and untutored. Your speed, creativity, and unconventional style helps make up for it, but you are prone to risks and flourishes that leave you open and that someone fighting you seriously would punish."

"Which is kind of what I'm trying to avoid," Harry remarked, grabbing a towel and throwing one to Uhtred.

"Exactly."

"There is always the option of armour."

Everyone turned to the door, against the frame of which Thor was leaning with folded arms.

"Tony, Sirius, and Loki have been discussing the subject," he said. "They were thinking about an expansion of your gauntlet; something along the lines of the armour in which you fought Dracula."

Harry looked thoughtful. "That could work," he said. "Though I won't need repulsors, or anything like that. I can fly, and…"

"And as Loki remarked to Tony on the very same subject, 'Harry does not need a weapons system, he _is_ a weapons system'," Thor said, and grinned. "Personally, I think he is underestimating you."

Harry matched his grin. "Definitely," he said. "So… something generally more like your armour, then?"

Thor nodded.

"That would help."

"It would," Thor agreed, heading over to pick up Harry's discarded practise blade. "But the flaws that Diana correctly discerned would remain, and there are weapons that can pierce even the finest armour." He ran sharp, assessing eyes over Harry, Uhtred, and Diana. "While you, Uhtred, remind me of my younger self. Leaving all eye related issues aside, tend to rely on your strength, bulk, and resilience, favouring the kind of power based attacks that work well with an axe, but not as well with a sword. You, Diana, by contrast do not rely on them enough – for much of your life, you have been small and slight, and moulded your style to compensate for that. That is a problem no more. You have grown fast, and now have height and muscle to add to your prior swiftness. Indeed, you both have much to learn from each other."

"And perhaps… perhaps from you, Prince Thor?" Uhtred asked, hesitant and hopeful.

"Most certainly," Thor said. "There are things I can teach you. Things I should teach you." His gaze lingered on Harry. "And things I would like nothing more than to teach you." Then, he looked over to Carol and Jean-Paul. "And I can teach you two as well, should you wish it. While your shield and your speed respectively are both fine defences and weapons in their own right, they have their limits. "

Carol and Jean-Paul shared a look. "I'm in," Carol said with a shrug, and shot a smirk at Harry. "But I'm keeping my shirt on."

"Damn," Harry said, in a deadpan tone which, while eerily reminiscent of Magneto, did not quite conceal a hint of disappointment. Going by Uhtred and Diana's expressions, he was not alone in this. Going by Carol and Jean-Paul's, it hadn't been missed, either.

"Shirtlessness is not mandatory," Thor said dryly, and Harry and Carol both went bright red. Really-Absolutely-Definitely Not Flirting in front of peers and close friends was one thing. In front of adults, worse, _parents_ , was another matter entirely.

"I will also take part," Jean-Paul said, after a moment of thought. A wicked smile slid onto his face. "If only for the potential entertainment value."

"Excellent," Thor said with a smile, and conjured three more practise blades with a flick of his wand, tossing them to those without. "Now… where shall we begin?"

"The beginning's a good start," Harry remarked lightly, casual tone belying the beginnings of a delighted smile.

Thor chuckled. "The beginning it is," he said.

OoOoO

After another two hours, the practise-cum-lesson ended, with progress being made all around. Harry, lingering behind, checked his phone, and frowned a brief, pensive frown. Then he collected his sword from where it had been hanging and weighed, that same thoughtful expression on his face.

"Having trouble thinking of a name?"

"Like I told Carol, all the good ones are taken," Harry said, turning to his dad, before pausing and looking back down at the sword in his hands. "Or almost all."

"You have an idea?" Thor asked, eyebrow raised. "It doesn't have to be anything complex, you know: Mjolnir is quite a simple name, as these things go."

"I do," Harry said. "And it's not too complex. It… it fits."

"Then why not use it?" Thor asked reasonably.

"Well, I'm not sure if it's taken," Harry said. "I mean, it is, and it isn't."

Thor looked puzzled. "How do you mean?"

Harry sighed. "I mean that I _think_ the original sword is long gone," he said. "But I checked with JARVIS on my phone – I didn't want to say in case it's already spoken for."

"And?"

"And another sword has used the name for a few hundred years," Harry said slowly. "It's a ceremonial sword, though, and it's a copy of copies, which might have been a copy of an original that no one – at least, not JARVIS – knows the location of, if it even still exists." He grimaced. "And that could make matters even more confusing, but uncle Loki mentioned that there were two Excaliburs, and that names can be passed on, and it fits, it really _fits_."

"Harry," Thor said, in a gentle but firm voice, taking his son by the shoulders. "What is this name you speak of?"

Harry was silent for several long moments, then said, "Curtana."

Thor blinked. "I have heard that name before," he said. "It was… a sword of Arthur Pendragon." He paused, then shook his head. "No, one of his knights."

"It was Tristan's," Harry said quietly.

"Sir Tristan," Thor said, and regarded his son. "Lover of Iseult. And you would know better than I that his story was not a happy one."

"You could say the same about mine," Harry said, then softened at his father's stricken expression, and smiled gently. "But I'm not planning to live his life. For starters, mine's been getting better recently. A lot better."

"I noticed," Thor replied, eyes dancing with amusement, and Harry did not have to read his mind to know what he meant.

"What? Wait, no, me and Carol, dad, you _know_ we're not –"

"I am certain. Rest assured that as far as I am concerned, whatever the two of you do in private is entirely your business," Thor said serenely. "So long as it is safe and sensible… though as I say this, I realise that I might be asking too much."

Harry said nothing, having gone scarlet as he slowly died of embarrassment.

"Instead," Thor continued happily. "I will accept the two of you waiting until you are at least past 18 before making me a grandfather."

Harry, having buried his burning face in one hand, let out a strangled mumble that might have approximated to either, "oh god, dad, why?", or "I hate you, I hate you, I hate you so much."

Thor let out a booming laugh, before sobering. "Why Curtana?" he asked. "And what other swords have borne that name?"

Harry looked up and took a deep, steadying breath. "Swords in the Crown Jewels," he said. "They've been used in coronations. And they've been called by two other names, which made me feel it was fitting: the Sword of Justice, and the Sword of Mercy."

"Fitting names," Thor said, after giving this some thought. "As the two qualities often reflect each other." He regarded Harry's sword. "And yours is forged so as to have one sharp edge, and one blunt one."

Harry nodded. "I felt it was fitting," he said. "Not just because of the symbolism, or whatever, but something I've realised." He gave his father a sober look. "Life isn't fair. The universe doesn't play favourites; gods, demons, cosmic entities, Doctor Strange, yes they do, definitely. But the _universe_ itself doesn't."

"What of the Endless?" Thor asked quietly. "They are pillars, personifications, of the universe, and they most certainly play favourites."

"They're personifications, yeah," Harry said. "But of things related to living beings, for the most part. There's a Death, yeah, but there's no personification of Gravity… is there?"

"None that I am aware of," Thor said, frowning thoughtfully.

Harry nodded. "Right. I'm not sure about Magic, but other than that, the closest it comes is the way that power has a price, a cost," he said. "There's a balance like that, yeah. But if you took apart the universe don't to its smallest bits, I'm willing to bet you wouldn't find any justice, or any mercy." He drew the sword and examined it. "There's no mercy in the universe. No justice." He looked up at his father, expression calm and resolute. "Just us. And what we do."

"And what do you want to do?" Thor asked.

Harry looked back down at the sword. "I'm not perfect," he said. "Not by a long shot. But weapons are named for what they do… and for what their owners want to do with them. What do I want mine to do?" He considered this for a moment. "If the universe is a dark place, then I want to bring some light into it. If there's no justice, then I'd like to create some. And if there's no mercy in the universe, then I'd like to try and show some."

As he finished, there was a sudden thrum of power, as of something clicking into place, and the sword once more burned with light. This time, though, while it was bright, it was not blinding, as inscribed a message down the blade in silver fire.

 _For justice, I am taken up. In mercy, I am cast away._

"It would seem that your sword has accepted its Name," Thor said after a moment, somewhat stunned. He rested his hand on his son's shoulder, and with a small jolt, Harry could feel his father's palpable astonishment, love, and pride.

"It looks like it has," he said quietly, and on instinct, turned the blade over. There was another, shorter inscription on the other side.

 _I am Curtana. Wield me wisely._

And to that, Harry felt, there was only one response.

"I'll try," he whispered.

 **Well, this makes things interesting. Lots to look at in this chapter (the reappearance of Jesus, lots of Harry/Carol stuff, father-son bonding, and ooh, magic sword), though I'd imagine that if there's one word to sum it up, it's 'Responsibility', and how Harry's expanding his scope for it (i.e. not just worrying about the immediate consequences of his actions, but the more general and less obvious ones).**

 **As for the sword, I spent a while trying to figure out its name, with both 'Mercy' and 'Justice' being frequent features in possible names. Eventually, I stumbled across Curtana, which really has been known as both the Sword of Justice and, more commonly in recent times, the Sword of Mercy.**

 **Curtana as a sword, and a name of swords, has an interesting and rather odd history. It really is part of Britain's Crown Jewels, and it is a rather fine blade with a squared off tip symbolising mercy, dating back over four hundred years. It used to be that they made one for every coronation, going back to the 12** **th** **century, and some sources claim that the original sword belonged to Edward the Confessor (reigned 1042-1066), though that's a touch unlikely. It's also claimed that the original Curtana was the sword of Sir Tristan, and I decided to run with that – and it was too good to miss, what with Harry being a bit of a King Arthur geek and Strange having grown up in Camelot, while allowing me to avoid making it too Arthurian. In the end, I felt it was fitting.**

 **Anyhow, next chapter, we'll have: Harry inquiring of Jean-Paul just** _ **why**_ **he was in Kansas, the whereabouts (and whyabouts) of Doctor Strange being revealed, Ron and Hermione popping into Avengers Mansion, and perhaps, Clark meeting his sort of godmother, Alison Carter, and learning about who and what he is. Plenty to look forward to, in other words. Until next time!**


	36. Chapter 36: Choices and Memories

**Hello again ladies and gentlemen! The sun is (or was – it's past midnight here) shining, with unusual tenacity and intensity for a British summer, I am back in London, having finished up in Edinburgh, save for my dissertation, which I continue to research and write and will until August 13** **th** **. After that, it's a bit of holiday, followed by job-hunting.**

 **Sorry about the delay, but finishing up in Edinburgh, packing up my stuff, scouring and handing in used library books, arranging for stuff to be sent back down to London, and above all, my dissertation… they've kept me busy. And I've had a little trouble focusing on writing. However, I have managed to do so, and here is the result – a longer than usual chapter, if not quite as long as some behemoths I've posted in the past.**

 **It includes more Clark – actually, lots and lots and lots of Clark, including his meeting with Alison, and a flashback featuring Jor-El. Unfortunately, there is no Ron and Hermione (they do appear at the start of next chapter, however, and would at the end of this one had I not decided that it was fine ending where it did). However, there is some rather fun Harry and Carol stuff at the end of the chapter. It's like the first chapter of this story but… different. Oh, and if you've watched/read** _ **The Princess Bride**_ **, then the last line will have an extra ring and meaning to it (if you have not watched or read** _ **The Princess Bride**_ **, do so immediately).**

 **God King Ghidora and associates:** **NO** _ **. I have been**_ **extremely** _ **patient, with you, and with all your sock-puppets/buddies. Now, the last of my patience has evaporated. I am NOT going to randomly upgrade Harry with 'runic magic' or whatever else, I am NOT going to merge Curtana with mithril, uru, the Odinforce and Laevateinn to turn it into some expy of Sting, and I am NOT going to add in aspects of**_ **American Gods** _ **, magnificent book though it is (I only just finished rereading it).**_

 _ **I appreciate that you have read this far, and I thank you for taking the time to review each chapter (probably multiple times), even if a lot of those reviews are damned irritating. However. Going by those reviews, you clearly want this fic to become the kind of formulaic Super!Harry fic that you clearly prefer. This, despite the fact that I have repeatedly stated that I won't do that, going out of my way to avoid it. You also refuse to understand or accept that I am**_ **NOT** _ **going to change my story on request. What I do is what**_ **I** _ **chose to do. What I add is what**_ **I** _ **chose to add. Questions on why I have done something or why I have added something are always welcomed. Repeated badgering requests are**_ **NOT** _ **.**_

 _ **If you are willing to accept that, and accept my story for what is, by all means, read on. If want a generic super!Harry fic, crossover or otherwise, then feel free to pick from the tens of thousands on this site and others. Or hell, write one yourself, I wish you the best of luck. But it's not happening here.**_

"So. The magic sword has a name now."

Harry rolled his eyes heavenwards. "Yes," he said. "Yes, it does."

Carol nodded, and resumed critically examining the blade. "And the ominous inscription…"

"Is Doctor Strange being dramatic," Harry said. "… probably."

Carol raised an eyebrow. "Wanna bet?"

Harry considered how often things Strange said or did having multiple meanings – that is to say, always. "Not really."

"Didn't think so. What did Uhtred make of it?"

"Half excited, half fascinated, half confused."

"That's three halves."

"If you'd seen his reaction, you'd understand what I meant."

"Fair enough. And Diana?"

"Stared at it for a little while, read the inscription a few times, then said 'interesting'."

"That's it?"

"More or less."

"And Jean-Paul?"

"Looked thoughtful, mostly," Harry remarked. "He made a 'playing with your sword' joke, but I don't think his heart was really in it."

"That would be a first," Carol muttered.

"Well, to be fair, he was mostly concerned with the fact that I was asking him a difficult question," Harry said.

"Like what?"

"Like what was he doing in Kansas on Halloween?"

OoOoO

Jean-Paul, unsurprisingly, had not been eager to answer, and had worn a prize-winning blank expression. Harry, unusually, was not willing to accept this.

"Jean-Paul, normally I respect your privacy, because what you get up to in your private time is your business," Harry said. "And normally, I wouldn't care about why you were in Kansas any more than about what you and Uhtred get up to in private. You're a private person, and you do your own thing a lot of the time, because that's the way you like it, and I am fine with that – like I said. It's your business, not mine."

A smile flickered briefly across the blank expression, before guttering out like a starved flame. "But this is not normally, is it?" the French boy said.

"No," Harry said. "It isn't."

"And what if I told you I was visiting Lex?"

"I would remind you that it's pointless to lie to a telepath."

Jean-Paul inclined his head thoughtfully. "I know you, _mon cher_. You don't go looking."

"You also know me well enough to know that I don't need to," Harry said evenly. "You're not a psychic. And while you're good, Jean-Paul, you're not _that_ good."

Jean-Paul smiled again, this one faint, but persistent. "All true," he said. "But why are you so interested in why I was in Kansas?"

Harry raised a finger. "Because you're hiding it," he said. He raised a second finger. "Because to my knowledge, Lex is the only person you know who currently lives there – your immediate family live in New York, the rest, in France, and no offence, but you don't have many friends. Of those you do have, most of them are in our little…"

"Community?" Jean-Paul suggested. His tone was light, but his eyes were half wary, half thoughtful.

"Community," Harry echoed. "None of them I know of live in Kansas, except Lex. If it was just an ordinary friend, you wouldn't be visiting in person if you could avoid it, not so suddenly – you're secretive by nature, especially with your powers around people not in the know, and getting from New York to Kansas as fast as you can? Even if you took it slow, going cross-country like that at random? Bit suspicious." He sat back, eyes never leaving Jean-Paul's. "And you wouldn't need to hide it." He raised a third finger. "So, whoever this is, whoever you're meeting, for some reason you're hiding them."

"How do you know it is not a whatever?"

"Educated guess," Harry replied, without missing a beat. "You're hiding them for a reason. It's not something wrong, like cheating on Uhtred –" At Jean-Paul's arched eyebrow, he smiled wryly. "I might not have Diana's skill at Empathy, but I'm pretty good, and I've been paying a lot of attention to you these last couple of days, especially when Uhtred is around. I feel a lot of emotions coming off you, Jean-Paul, but guilt isn't one of them. If it was, and that was why…"

"You'd have beaten me up?" Jean-Paul asked mildly.

"No," Harry said calmly. "Not if you actually felt properly guilty. I'd probably have just asked you why, then made you confess." He paused reflectively. "Wait, tell a lie, I'd have broken your leg first – to stop you pulling a disappearing act." He looked up. "If you hadn't felt properly guilty, though, there would have been trouble."

"I believe you," Jean-Paul replied.

Harry nodded. "So," he said. "You're visiting someone in Kansas that you want to keep secret, probably with powers, and probably not a mutant." He paused. "Oh, and they're probably in a place called Smallville."

Jean-Paul's poker face was excellent. Unfortunately, as Harry had pointed out just a couple of minutes before, there was no point.

"That was another guess," Harry said, smiling wryly. "But a pretty educated one – it doesn't take much research to figure out that the weird stuff in Kansas tends to focus on that town, especially not if you ask JARVIS nicely to hack into some SHIELD files. A lot of odd things are happening there. Something to do with a meteor shower apparently." His gaze met Jean-Paul's. "Including more than a few rogue superhumans popping up, causing trouble, then immediately being knocked down again by someone that no one ever gets a good look at. At times when I _know_ that you were in New York."

Jean-Paul sighed. "Very impressive, _mon cher_ ," he said. "You are right. There is someone like us, someone our age, who I have been hiding. He is… unusual."

Harry frowned, and sat back, crossing both legs and arms. "In what way?"

"We met on Red Sky Day," Jean-Paul said.

"When you were winding up to punch Chthon into orbit?"

Jean-Paul nodded. "I encountered him when I was passing through a town in Kansas," he said. "His school was on fire, and he and a girl our age were in it. I accelerated them, sharing my speed, and took them out. I then passed through that same town several times more. As I did, I noticed that he was trying to keep up."

"Which he could never do," Harry said, though the tail of the statement was inflected as a question.

"No," Jean-Paul agreed. "He could not. But he was also moving faster on foot than almost anyone I have ever seen. Several hundred miles per hour, in fact."

Harry's eyebrows shot up. "Definitely different," he said. "How do you know he's not a mutant, though? Or a demigod?"

"Because when I lend someone my speed, I get… a sense of them, _mon cher_ ," Jean-Paul said. "He did not feel like any mutant, human, god, or demigod that I have ever shared my speed with." He gave Harry a serious look. "I also have three other reasons." He raised a finger. "First, he has other powers as well – he is very strong, at least as much as Uhtred, if not as much as Diana, and resilient with it, healing fast when he needs to. More recently, he has developed X-Ray Vision." He grinned as Harry's eyebrows shot up. "I know, my reaction was similar. He was terribly embarrassed about it," he said. "He blushes even more adorably than you, _mon cher_."

Harry rolled his eyes, then looked thoughtful. "Speed, strength, durability, healing, those could all be connected," he said. "But X-Ray Vision? That seems… well, it seems a bit odd. Out of place."

Jean-Paul nodded. "So I thought," he said, and raised a second finger. "Second, the town he lives in, as you well know, was hit by a meteor shower. He was adopted shortly after."

Harry looked puzzled. "He was orphaned and exposed to the meteors as a child and they did something to him?" he hazarded. "Which, come to think of it, probably explains the strange number of rogue super-people down there."

"I wondered that myself," Jean-Paul said. "And for most of the 'super-people' in Smallville – and yes, _mon cher_ , it really is called that – I believe that is the case. But for him… no."

Harry stared at him for a moment, opened his mouth to ask what Jean-Paul meant by that, before closing his eyes, and cursing his own stupidity. "Of course," he said. "He's an alien. He came down with the meteors." He frowned. "Which leads to the question – wait, hang on." He looked up at Jean-Paul again. "You said three reasons. What's the third?"

" _La troisième raison?_ It is simple," Jean-Paul said. "You see, the two of you look alike. Extraordinarily so. You could pass for brothers."

Harry blinked. "Okay, that's strange, but…" He trailed off at Jean-Paul's upraised hand. "There's more, isn't there?"

"Indeed there is," Jean-Paul said. "When we first met, _mon cher_ , you looked almost identical to your father's…"

"Human form," Harry supplied. "I know. Everyone used to tell me that I looked exactly like him, except for my mother's eyes."

Jean-Paul nodded. "Now, there are differences," he said. He examined Harry's face for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "Being exhausted and occupied with my own near self-destruction, I did not see as much of your mother as I might have done. But… there is something of her about you, now, where there was not before." He cocked his head. "And there is more. When you smile, I see Jean. Normally, though…" He reached and very gently touched Harry's cheek. "Your face, it is thinner than hers. Sharper."

"More like Maddie," Harry said quietly.

Jean-Paul nodded. "The two of you have shadows about you, shadows that she does not," he said.

"Considering our respective life experiences, that isn't surprising," Harry muttered, before lightly brushing Jean-Paul's fingers away. "Where's this going, Jean-Paul?"

"My secret friend does not have those parts of your mother in him," Jean-Paul said simply. "He is bulkier, yes, more muscular, but that is a difference of upbringing. Had you stood side by side before they began to emerge, you would have been easily mistaken for twins. Except for the eyes, of course."

"Yeah, mum's eyes," Harry said. "So, he looks exactly like dad did. And he's not human. But… he's not Asgardian."

"Yes," Jean-Paul said, frowning. "Though he has power not far short of your own, I sensed it, burning like a star within him."

Harry arched an eyebrow. "If he does, then he should be _at least_ as strong as Diana," he said bluntly.

"He could well be. He fears his true potential," Jean-Paul said bluntly, before developing a grim, lopsided smile. "A feeling you should know well, _mon cher._ "

"Don't I just," Harry said. "But you're sure he's not Asgardian, or some other kind of god, but definitely an alien."

"He is neither Asgardian nor Olympian," Jean-Paul said, shrugging. "Unless other pantheons feel drastically different…"

Harry nodded. "And his appearance?"

"That is a riddle I have not got an answer to," Jean-Paul said. "He is just as confused. I would say that it is possibly a simple coincidence, but with you?" He shook his head. "No. There is no such thing."

Harry drummed his fingers, frowning. "No," he said slowly. "There isn't." He stared up at the ceiling.

Jean-Paul followed his gaze and raised an eyebrow. The Mansion had pleasant enough ceilings, as undecorated wooden ceilings went, but they were not renowned as a source of information and insight. Before he could say so, however, Harry spoke again.

"A star, you say."

Jean-Paul blinked, then nodded. "It seems a fitting description, _mon cher_."

"And he came down in a meteor shower," Harry said. He was clearly mulling something over. "Shooting stars," he said. "Fallen stars." He looked up. "Smallville… it's got fields. Golden ones, I'm guessing."

Jean-Paul raised an eyebrow, then nodded again.

"And this person… what colours would you associate with him?"

Jean-Paul's other eyebrow joined the first in a synchronised ascension up his forehead.

Harry rolled his eyes. "I know, it's a strange question," he said. "Just answer it, please."

Jean-Paul regarded him for a moment, then shrugged. "He usually wears blue," he said. "And a red jacket."

Harry nodded slowly. "So that's number two," he said quietly.

"Harry?"

"There's a prophecy," Harry said. "And a scarily accurate card reading. I mentioned it when we were in Diagon Alley." He fixed Jean-Paul with a sharp look. "And you looked very thoughtful about a certain part of it – a red star in a golden field. Like you knew who it meant."

"Ah," Jean-Paul said. "Yes."

"Did you know?"

Jean-Paul shrugged. "I suspected."

Harry nodded. "I think that your friend is mentioned in the prophecy," he said. "About a bunch of 'the lost'. It mentions Maddie: _'a hound in chains, that waits to break free.'_ This one sounds like _'a beacon in an ocean of fallen stars, that waits to be lit.'_ As for the the third, _'a memory in a cocoon of frozen time'_ … that one I have no idea about."

Jean-Paul nodded. "Then what will you do, now that you know?"

"Nothing, for the moment," Harry said. "Why? Do I need to?"

Jean-Paul shook his head.

"Then I won't," Harry said. "From the sounds of things, your friend – my not-quite-doppelganger – is safe and happy where he is. Besides, I've got one or two things I want to check first, and quite a few other things to worry about." He smiled wryly. "I'm sure he's got a few of his own."

"That, _mon cher_ , I can guarantee."

OoOoO

Clark did indeed have much to dwell on. Or rather, he didn't, but he did anyway. On one level he was eager to meet Alison Carter and learn more about his birth parents, where he came from, and what he'd inherited from them other than superpowers and a disquieting resemblance to a Prince of Asgard. On another, far deeper level, however, he was also rather nervous. Though he had been assured that Mrs Carter had been protecting him and keeping his secret, she was also a powerful spy. Even without a lifetime of somewhat justified paranoia regarding his secret, he would have worried. The presence of his parents did make it a little easier, though.

It was perhaps because of this that when he first met Mrs Carter, he was rather confused. For his first impression of Mrs Carter was that she did not look very much like a super-spy at all. She was tall, blonde and wearing comfy looking blue jeans, a patterned cream woollen jumper, and a warm smile that set cornflower blue eyes sparkling. If Clark had had to guess, she looked to be about his mother's age, maybe a few years older, age lines tracing undeniably beautiful features that were settling into a comfortable middle age.

"Hello, Clark," she said, revealing an accent which, if Clark had had to guess, he would peg as upper-class British. "And Mr and Mrs Kent, it's lovely to meet you at last."

"Call us Martha and Jonathan, please," Martha said.

"Then you must call me Alison," Mrs Carter said.

"Hello, Mrs Carter," Clark replied, and got a warmly amused smile.

"That goes for you too, Clark," she said, stepping aside and letting them in, before shutting the door behind them with a click.

Clark, being a well raised young man, tried not to twitch too obviously, but even as he shook her offered hand – and much to his surprise, he actually felt her firm grip, properly felt it – he was unable to conceal some trepidation. This was noticed.

"It's all right, Clark," Alison said gently. "As Agent Coulson will have told you, I've known your secret since before you came to Earth. Your father – your birth father, I should say – enlisted my help precisely because of my position. I've been keeping a secret from SHIELD, others like them, and others decidedly less friendly, all your life." She paused. "Of course, your father had another reason." She gave him a sharp look. "You felt my grip. Do you think that an ordinary man or woman would be able to do that?"

"I… no," Clark said, blinking, then paused. "You mean, you're…"

"Enhanced? After a fashion, and I'll get to that. For now, let's just say that I've got a secret or two of my own," she said. "And a certain sympathy with those who want to hide their own secrets from unfriendly parties." She smiled at them. "Oh, where are my manners. May I offer you something to drink? Tea, water, juice? A soft drink, maybe?" Her tone turned dry. "I'd offer you some coffee, if Carol, my granddaughter, hadn't drunk all of it. Again." She shook her head. "I love that girl to pieces, but honestly, she's worse than Tony. No mug of coffee is safe when either of them is around, and she's quicker than he is."

"Um, I'd like some tea, please," Martha said, and glanced at Jonathan who shook his head.

"I'll pass, thanks."

"Could I have a glass of milk, please?" Clark asked.

"Of course," Alison said, standing up. "Coming right up." And as she bustled off. Clark was not British, by birth or by upbringing, and thus did not know the word 'mumsy'. At this point though, when seeking to describe Alison's appearance and demeanour, he would have welcomed its addition to his vocabulary. She did not look, or act, like a super-spy – which, he supposed, was probably a sign that she was a very good one, which considering what he'd been told, he should have expected.

But the overpowering impression he got was that she seemed more like the kindly and understanding type of elementary school teacher, or, frankly, someone's mother. The latter was perhaps silly, considering that he knew that she _was_ someone's mother, and grandmother come to that, but it was true: if Clark had met her in the street, his assumption would have been less 'super-spy', more 'soccer mom'.

And that assumption was supported by the décor of the house, which was what Clark imagined would be a typical suburban home, albeit with a few touches and pieces of furniture that wouldn't be out of place in the Luthor Mansion. There were a number of photos along the dresser and the mantlepiece. Some were of a younger, happy looking Mrs Carter with a friendly looking man with brown eyes and dark brown hair flecked with grey – her husband, Clark realised when he saw a wedding photo.

Others with her and her husband with two children; the younger a fidgety looking boy with his father's hair and eyes, the older a demure and sensible looking girl with her mother's colouring. As Clark's gaze travelled along the photos, seeing the children grow into young adults, graduations from school, the boy – young man – in what looked like Air Force uniform and rigid with pride. Then there were more, of two more weddings, and of more children: two blonde and blue eyed girls hugging and laughing, and three boys of varying ages and attitudes – one older, dark and serious looking but for a small smile, and two younger; one blond, the other dark, both of whom looked every bit as fidgety and excitable as their uncle or father had been.

And then, there were the same progressions as had been before – sports matches and graduations, that sort of thing. There'd only been one of the latter so far, Clark noticed, of the older blonde girl, now a young woman, who'd graduated from High School and then somewhere else that looked vaguely military.

And there was something… Clark couldn't put a finger on it, but the house felt lived in. Comfortable, almost like a squashy armchair, which had shaped itself to its owner.

Of course, a small part of him noted as she returned with tea and milk, appearances deceived, after all. Squashy armchairs could conceal any number of sins, and whatever she seemed like, it was worth remembering one thing. This woman, Mrs Carter, had reached the very top of the world's strangest and perhaps most mysterious intelligence agency, one that so far as Clark understood, specialised in dealing with the superhuman and the supernatural. It was perhaps because of this focus that he didn't realise until later that after a certain point in the pictures, one of the five grandchildren was missing.

Once drinks were handed out, and all had settled down again, she smiled and said, "Now. Where were we?"

"You said you were different too, Mrs Carter," Clark said, thinking that she had known exactly where the conversation had been, and had only pretended otherwise for the sake of seeming, well… harmless. Or relatively so, at least. It was, he felt, like dealing with Jean-Paul, only more so. "Enhanced."

"After a fashion, yes," she said. "Though it would be more accurate to say that I'm the inheritor of enhancements. And again, please call me Alison." She sat back. "However, that's not the important thing. Your father, your biological father, I should say, left me a couple of things to give you, when the time was right." She reached down towards a bag by her chair.

Clark cleared his throat. "Actually, Mrs – Alison," he said firmly, with only a hint of a waver. "I think that is an important thing. You've been hinting that part of why my birth father chose you was because you know what it's like to be different and have powers, and that it's why I should trust you. But to be perfectly honest, ma'am, I don't know you. Agent Coulson said I can trust you, that you've been watching out for me, and I think I can trust him. But he also said that he didn't even know you were involved until just recently, and that you'd used him and Director Fury. Because of that, I'm not sure if I trust you." He folded his arms. "So I'd like to know about you, first. You, your powers, and how you knew my birth parents." He coughed, then added, a little bit abashed, "If that's all right."

Clark's parents, perhaps unsurprisingly, shot him looks that said that they agreed with the idea of what he was saying, but thought he'd been a little rude in the way he put it. Clark didn't notice, however, because Alison's expression had gone blank, and she'd fixed him with a long, penetrating stare. Clark, for his part, had fought his immediate impulses to apologise and shrink back in his chair, instead setting his jaw determinedly. And after several long moments, Alison had smiled.

It was a different smile to the one she'd worn only moments ago; sharper, more thoughtful, and somehow more honest. And it wasn't the only change, Clark noticed, as her entire demeanour shifting in a dozen little ways. It wasn't anything obvious, or overt, but in an instant, the friendly middle-aged soccer mom/motherly elementary school teacher was gone, and someone very different sat in her place. Someone who Clark didn't have any trouble imagining as a very senior SHIELD Agent.

She stared at him for another long moment, apparently content to let him grow more uncomfortable, then she broke the silence.

"You know, you remind me a bit of my father," she said mildly. "Quite a bit, actually." She inclined her head. "You make a very fair point, Clark. You don't know me, and you have very little reason to trust me. If I want trust, I should therefore extend some." She crossed her legs and steepled her fingers for a moment in thought. "Fortunately, the two things – my powers and how I know your father, are fairly closely intertwined, so it should be quick enough to explain. Though to start with, I think a visual aid would help."

She stood up and headed back into the kitchen – and even the way she walked had changed, Clark noticed, transforming into a more military looking stride – before returning with a packet of wet wipes. Smiling at the slightly puzzled expressions of the Kent family, she sat back down, removed one, then began to swiftly and briskly clean her face. As she did, age lines vanished from her face, until Clark found himself looking at a fresh faced young woman who looked as if she could have still been in college. Then, she set the wet wipes down, and in a quick and smooth movement, stripped off her pullover, which had covered a simple white t-shirt, and the physique of a physically very fit – and, Clark couldn't avoid thinking very attractive – younger woman.

"My name, as I said, is Alison Carter," she said. "My married name was Alison O'Neill, though I retained my maiden name for professional purposes. My mother was Agent Peggy Carter, who pretended off as my sister in an effort to conceal the identity of my father – Steve Rogers, better known as Captain America. I am more than sixty years old and as you might have guessed from the way I hardly look a day over twenty five, and you, Clark, from my grip, I inherited more than just his colouring."

Clark gaped.

Alison smiled. "I told you I had a secret of my own to keep from SHIELD," she said, before the smile faded. "That secret is one that certain people and beings would, and have, killed for. It was discovered, once, when I was a child. I was kidnapped by an organisation called the Red Room for the serum in my blood. My mother managed to get me back, with the help of several remarkable people. Among them was your father."

"My father?" Clark repeated, somewhat surprised.

Alison nodded. "I was eight," she said. "And he couldn't have been more than eighteen, only a few years older than you are now." She smiled sadly at Clark. "You look a lot like him, you know. Astoundingly so." She stood up and went over to the dresser, opening a drawer and removing an old, but well-cared for leather photo album, flicking through it, before settling on a page and turning it for Clark to see.

There were a number of photographs, but the one that immediately caught Clark's eye was a monochrome portrait of a strange, and somewhat battered looking group. They included on one side; a dark haired man of above average height, with a thin moustache and charming smile. He struck Clark as being familiar, until after a few moments, his memory flipped a card and Clark recognised him from history class, and the resemblance he had to his son – this was Howard Stark, father of Tony Stark, and a key part of the US war effort in WWII.

Next to him was a shorter, slimmer and younger man with wavy dark hair and boyish good looks, and a taller and well-built man with tan skin, cropped light hair and light eyes, and an expression of scientific curiosity apparently directed at the camera.

On the other side, at the end there were two darker skinned men of military bearing, with a strange tattoo on their foreheads, strange stave-like weapons, and stranger armour. One was lighter built, middle aged, wrinkled with a neat beard creased in a grandfatherly smile, while the other was quite young, powerfully built, visibly muscular, and completely bald. Though he looked a little uncomfortable, he too was smiling slightly for the camera. Next to them was a huge, muscular young man with cropped dark hair, a solemn and slightly sad expression, and the kind of wariness that Clark recognised as a fear that he'd accidentally break something or someone by breathing too hard.

In the middle stood a well-built and beautiful young woman of average height, with wavy dark hair, who Clark had seen in a thousand documentaries and history books about WWII – Peggy Carter. In most of pictures and films, though, she was either wearing a serious and professional expression, or only smiling slightly, not willingly to let her guard down. Here, though, she was not only smiling, but beaming with relief, albeit relief tinged with worry. And the cause for that, Clark thought, was the small pale haired girl beside her. The girl hardly came up to her mother's torso and in defiance of all decorum, had her arms wrapped around her mother's waist, and seemed ready to disappear behind her at a moment's notice.

The one who truly caught Clark's eye, however, was the young man standing between Peggy and the giant young man, wearing a warm, pleased smile. It was like looking in a mirror, and he wasn't the only one to think that.

"My god," Martha said, stunned. "Jonathan, look. It's uncanny!"

"That it is," Jonathan said. He looked up at Clark for a moment, then smiled a smile full of conflicting emotions. "He smiles like you do, Clark."

Clark, for his part, just stared at the picture of his birth father, trying to sear it into his memory.

"I have a few other photos of him," Alison said gently, after a few moments, pulling an envelope out of her bag. "I've made copies for you," she said, handing them to Clark's mother after seeing that Clark was occupied. "I never met your birth mother in person, so I'm afraid I can't help there. However, I think they left pictures, perhaps even video, on the things your father left me."

"Thank you," Clark said quietly, after a few moments. "Who were the other people? I recognise Howard Stark, Peggy Carter – your mother – and…" He trailed off.

Alison looked amused. "Yes, that shy little waif is me," she said. "I was eight." Her expression shadowed. "And after some time in the hands of the Red Room and their allies, I wasn't at my most sociable." She ran her eyes over the picture, then started pointing individuals out. "That," she said, picking out the young man with wavy dark hair. "Is Professor Charles Xavier, though in those days, he was just Charles, and was barely even a student, let alone a full fledged Professor. He's what is called a mutant, the next step in human evolution. They're born with powers, of wildly varying strength. Some don't even know they're anything other than ordinary humans, with the only difference being the ability to see a little better than normal, or know where north is. Others… others have been worshipped as gods, and have enough power that the difference is academic. Charles is one of the latter. He is an immensely powerful telepath, until recently the strongest ever to live. Even as little more than a boy, he was incredibly strong. Fortunately, he is also a very kind and very moral man, who runs a school for people born with powers." She smiled slightly. "After a fashion, I was actually one of his earliest students, though my abilities were relatively easy to control... give or take a few crushed door-knobs."

"That's something that sounds familiar," Clark's mother said dryly, and smiled as Clark blushed.

Alison chuckled and moved on. "Next to him is Captain Mar-Vell. He's also not from Earth," she said. "He's of the Kree, an incredibly powerful alien empire. Earth is meant to be off-limits, something Asgard enforces, but some of his people led by a scientist called Yon-Rogg had gone rogue and got involved with the Red Room. He came to Earth to bring them to justice, and he's actually still around, keeping an eye on us and making sure no one else does what Yon-Rogg did." Her finger slipped over to the other side. "Before we get to your father, the others are worth mentioning. The very tall young man is Piotr Rasputin. His tale, unfortunately, is not a very happy one. He is another mutant, with the ability to transform into an incredibly strong metallic version of himself. He's not merely bulletproof, but proof against anything but the most powerful bombs, and capable of tearing apart tanks with his bare hands. He was also a pacifist, using his strength to help out on the collective farm where he grew up, and refused to join the military. Unfortunately, the Red Room would not take no for an answer, and they killed his parents, then took his younger sister, Illyana, hostage, forcing him to fight for them. Ultimately, he turned on them after seeing what they wanted to do to me. Apparently, I reminded him of his sister."

"What happened to her?" Clark asked quietly.

"My mother and Charles helped him find her," Alison said sadly. "But by the time we did, she'd been taken into Faerie."

"Fairy?" Clark asked, baffled.

"Faerie," Alison corrected him. "The slightest of differences in pronunciation, the greatest of differences in reality. The short version is this: more or less every fairytale monster or nightmare you have ever heard or read about is real. The Fae, fairies, are among them. However, they hate being called fairies, preferring to be referred to as the Sidhe. They are very rarely anything like Disney or other more modern tales would have you imagine – the original Grimm's Fairytales, and Celtic mythology, would be a better reference. Even the kinder ones tend to be somewhat… inhuman. Following me so far?"

"More or less," Clark said. Jean-Paul had told him similar things before now, and frankly with the things he'd seen on Red Sky Day, he could well believe it. His parents were having a little more difficulty keeping up, but not much.

"Good," Alison said. "One unpleasant habit they have is of taking humans, often children, that catch their eye. A Sidhe-lord took Illyana, and since time between reality and Faerie is often flexible, while only two years passed in reality, it was closer to twenty years for Illyana." She sighed. "In truth, it was a relatively slight difference. The stories of young men and women wandering into Faerie, spending a night at a party, and then returning to find a century has passed, are very much rooted in reality. But even still, she was much changed, especially since she had developed both magical and mutant gifts – something which is rare, but has been known to happen. Those gifts, and the fact that she was no longer a sweet little six year old girl, no longer Piotr's 'little snowflake', but a grown woman in her mid-twenties, would have been difficult to adjust to, but not insurmountable. Combined with a somewhat off-kilter moral attitude more reminiscent of one of the Fae than anyone mortal, and a general disinterest in the doings of humanity, though..." She shook her head. "Life has conspired to render Piotr a very lonely man."

Her finger moved on to the latter two. "And then there is Master Bra'tac, and his student, Teal'c," she said.

"Are they aliens too?" Clark asked.

"In manner of speaking," Alison said. "More accurately, they are the descendants of humans kidnapped and genetically altered by the Kree thousands and thousands of years ago, as a sort of proto super soldier. Now, they are known as the Jaffa, a warrior caste of the Kree Empire. They served Yon-Rogg, but were working with Mar-Vell to bring him down and stop the Red Room's plans. In truth, I don't know what has happened to them since, but I hope they are well."

Her gaze, and Clark's, dropped to the final figure. "Your father," Alison said quietly. "Jor of the House of El, or more colloquially, Jor-El. He helped save me from a truly hideous fate – and I have been fighting the Red Room and their ilk for almost all my life, so believe me when I say that I _know_ hideous. I will not go into the details." She took a deep breath. "Suffice it to say, though, I was left understanding what certain organisations would do to get hold of someone… gifted, and I spent much of my life terrified that the same thing would happen to my children, and their children, if anyone found out – though until recently, none of them showed any real sign of sharing any of my and my father's gifts. That was part of why your father came to me for help. Because I understood."

Clark nodded slowly. "I believe you," he said. And he did. It was something about the look in her eyes as she talked about it. He'd seen that same look in Jean-Paul's eyes when he'd talked about, or avoided talking about, horrors that his friends had been through. He could be being tricked, of course, but he didn't think so. Then, he looked up, and asked the one question that had been burning away inside him for years and years. "Mrs Carter – Alison, sorry."

"Yes, Clark?"

Clark took a deep breath. "Do you know why my parents… why they sent me away?" he asked.

Alison nodded. "Yes," she said quietly. "I do. It's not an easy tale, so I should start with saying this: your birth parents loved you dearly, just as your adoptive parents do. The very prospect of sending you away broke their hearts; it was written on your father's face. The only reason they did it was as a very last resort, because they wanted to protect you." She leaned forward, taking Clark's hand and looking him in the eye. "Your parents loved you, Clark. If you take away even one thing from today, if you choose to believe only one thing, you should believe that."

Clark looked away as his eyes grew damp, and nodded. Alison patted his hand kindly and sat back.

"Now," she said, after allowing him a few moments to compose himself. "Comes the other part of the tale: why your parents sent you here, and why they needed my help in the first place."

OoOoO

 _1994_

Alison unlocked her door and walked into her home, making the usual, almost absent-minded checks for new bugs, traps and what-have-you as she did. One of the advantages of her children living away from home was that there were less avenues for enemy Agents to slip something past her guard.

Her mind dwelt on her children for a moment. Marie had married that awful Danvers man, but credit where it was due, he seemed to be making her happy, and their little girl, Carol, an adorable and energetic golden haired toddler, was absolutely delightful. Jack seemed to be going from strength to strength, shaking off the shadows of Iraq. Already a Captain, he was well on the way to becoming a Major before he turned thirty. It was a pity he'd never joined SHIELD; his undoubted skills as an operative would have sent him rocketing up the promotion ladder. But, of course, there would always be accusations of favouritism. While in looks Jack took heavily after his father, as well as having been prematurely aged by his experiences in the Gulf, and she had kept her maiden name for professional reasons, it wouldn't take a genius to figure out their connection, especially not at an intelligence agency. And with those accusations would come unwanted scrutiny.

Besides, Jack had quite reasonably pointed out that his skills as a special operative would mean that he'd be tied to that kind of duty for the rest of his professional life. What he really wanted to do, what he really loved to do, was to fly. And he was good, oh he was good, considered to be among the best in the Air Force. She could understand his choice.

Meanwhile, his little girl, Sharon, was a few years older than Carol – and something of a surprise to her parents, who had not expected a child so early – and every bit as delightful as her cousin, and every bit as golden haired too. At family meet-ups, such as they were, the two were frequently mistaken for sisters, and didn't seem to mind this one bit. Jack certainly didn't. Joe, Carol's father, did, and naturally, Jack took the opportunity to slowly and steadily wind him up. It was amusing to watch, but it did occasionally necessitate her intervention. She knew her son very well and knew that he would take great delight in being given an excuse to beat Joe to a pulp. While Alison deeply disliked the man, she didn't think he quite deserved that.

More importantly, though, it would also upset Marie. While Alison couldn't fathom what her daughter saw in the man, she accepted and respected the fact that her daughter saw something in him. She also grudgingly acknowledged that he was a reasonably good husband to her. And for all the disagreements between mother and daughter, many of which Alison now regretted – had she pushed Marie too hard? Had she driven her away? – she'd never wanted to see Marie hurt.

Her mind paused on her grandchildren for a moment, remembering the words of a young man, wise beyond his years and decades out of his time, spoken over thirty years ago now… at least one of those grandchildren would go on to do great things. She also remembered that that young man in question had now been born, and sooner rather than later, his life was going to get very hard. In any case, the countdown was ticking on something that had, technically, already happened. Time travel was confusing.

Speaking of children and grandchildren, her godson, Tony Stark, looked no closer to having any children than usual. Or at least, any children he would know about until the mother rolled up some months or years later with a small child and an accusing expression. That said, she had it on excellent authority that someday that would change. In the meantime, she just hoped that he didn't do himself any permanent damage. She, Charles and Edwin Jarvis, they'd all tried to rein Tony in, but there was only so much one could do without outright incarcerating him.

Besides, she mused, if you told him to do something, he'd do the opposite out of sheer contrariness. A lifetime of Howard telling him what to do had left him disinclined to follow orders, especially these last couple of years, since his parents had died – or, as she knew very well, had been murdered. To tell Tony that, however, would set him on the path to his own destruction. Tony as he was now was no match for the Hellfire Club. She and the others had taken their revenge on the Club (though to be frank, that had mostly been Erik's rage at work, and positively biblical it had been too) and left them scoured to their foundations. But even so, evil like the Hellfire Club didn't go away, and was most dangerous when at bay.

And in truth, she was afraid of pushing him away, as she had Marie. So for now, he remained in the hands of the very capable Lieutenant Rhodes, who Jack spoke highly of – and Alison had to say, she found him to be an impressive young man, well capable of corralling Tony; his new assistant, Pepper Potts, who seemed to be equally capable of managing Tony, his patient and ever-loyal bodyguard Happy, and Obadiah Stane, who seemed to have become a second father to Tony. Alison had her suspicions about that one, but they were only suspicions for the time being.

She pushed away her worries about the younger generation. She had more immediate concerns, ones that, sad as it was to say, she found much easier to deal with. She drew her concealed throwing knife, dropped and spun, hurling it at the heart of the figure who thought that he had gone unnoticed.

Who snatched it out of the air and said, slightly puzzled, "Is this a new form of Earth greeting?"

Alison blinked and stared at the figure. "Who are you?"

A tall, handsome man with black hair and grey eyes, who looked to be in his late thirties stepped out of the shadows. He was strangely dressed, in long white robes, and was still loosely holding her knife like it was some sort of knick-knack that he wasn't sure what to do with.

"I know that it has been a long time," he said. "And you were quite young. But I was hoping that you would remember me."

That immediately told her that this man was rather older than he looked – or at least, claimed to be. And he was far faster than any human, if he could so comfortably catch a knife thrown by someone like her. It wasn't Mar-Vell, though… something did nudge at her memory, from the time when she had first met Mar-Vell. Something about that face – younger, of course, and fast, so unbelievably fast.

Then it clicked.

"Jor," she said. "Jor-El. Yes, I remember you." She smiled. "You've hardly aged."

"As have you," Jor-El said. "Though you have disguised that fact very well."

"I'll take that as a compliment," Alison said dryly.

Jor-El smiled. "Good," he said, then held up the knife. "I think I understand: not a greeting. You were expecting someone else. Someone not friendly."

"Anyone hiding in my house, anyone good enough to avoid my security measures, is definitely not going to be friendly," Alison said. She smiled wryly. "Unless they're you, apparently. What made you think that it might have been a friendly greeting?"

"Asgardians have a strange sense of humour," Jor-El said vaguely, shrugging. Alison cocked an eyebrow, but enquired no further. There were other things at hand.

"Would you like something to drink?" she asked.

"No, thank you," Jor-El said. "I cannot stay long."

Alison watched him carefully. Jor-El wasn't human, but his body language was close enough. He looked nervous. "Then we had best get down to it," she said. "What brings you to Earth again, Jor-El? And what brings you to me?"

"I must confess, I came to Earth in hope of finding your mother," Jor-El said. "However, I soon found that you had been missing presumed dead for almost thirty two of your years."

"She's been gone for a long time," Alison agreed.

"I am sorry," Jor-El said. "I came to you next. If you cannot help me, I will turn to Charles." He hesitated. "I fear to presume, but I do not have many options, and… I believe that you will understand my plight."

Alison didn't need to glance around the room to know that photos of her children, and her grandchildren, were easily visible on the dresser. From that, it was easy to deduce what Jor-El's plight was.

"You have a child," she said. "One that you want to send to Earth, because of some threat on your homeworld, and you need help to conceal him."

Jor-El stared at her in surprise, then chuckled ruefully. "It seems that I have chosen well," he said. "Yes, I am a father, to a little boy. He would still be an infant, by both your standards and ours."

"You have my congratulations," Alison said. "Do you have a picture? An image?"

Jor-El reached into his robes and removed a small, clear crystal. A moving image of a baby boy appeared. He had dark hair, astonishing bright blue eyes and he was laughing.

"Oh, Jor… he's beautiful," Alison said. "What's his name?"

Jor-El smiled fondly at the image. "Yes," he said. "He is. He looks like me, but he has his mother's eyes. And his name is Kal, Kal-El. In the language of my people, it means Star-Child, and he is named for one of my ancestors, a great explorer, who travelled much among Earth and its associated realms." He put the crystal away. "And like all of my people, he would appear to be human at first sight, even at relatively close physical examination."

"That would help," Alison said. "But I remember how powerful you are, how advanced you suggested your people were, to be able to travel from your world to this one with ease. What could threaten them?"

"Our powers only appear under a 'yellow' sun," Jor-El said. "And they vary in strength among our people when they do manifest. I am among the strongest. In any case, under a 'red' sun, like Rao, our home star, we are little more than human. But nevertheless, Krypton is the most advanced world in the mortal universe. No small claim, I know, but it is true." His tone grew bitter. "However, we have grown stagnant. Ten thousand years unchallenged, and we have turned inward, become like a rotten fruit – well enough to look at, but decayed at the core. My people believe that nothing could threaten us and that we have nothing to learn from so-called 'lesser civilisations'. And that has been our undoing."

"How so?" Alison asked.

"An old enemy of ours, the Dheronians, have been aided by an unknown party," Jor-El said. "They have managed to slip past our decidedly lax guard and destabilise Krypton's core. I have tried to undo the damage and convince my colleagues of the danger, but I was unsuccessful and they were unmoved. My brother seemed to listen, and moved his family to our sister-world of Argo – not that that will help much – but no one else. Krypton is doomed and my people with it, thanks to their arrogance."

"Oh, Jor… there aren't any words adequate," Alison said, horrified. "But, I really am sorry."

"Thank you," Jor-El said quietly.

Alison nodded, then snapped back into business mode. "So, you want asylum for yourself, your wife and son, and perhaps your brother and whatever family he has?" she said. "I can arrange that."

"No," Jor-El said. "That is very kind of you, but I cannot accept. I know that you think that all of us can simply step through to Earth as I have on previous visits, relatively easily. However, the Dheronians, or their benefactor, are cunning. They have managed to make it impossible to travel from Krypton, as I found when I tried to call Asgard for aid." He smiled a sly, conspiratorial and infectious smile. "Well. Almost impossible." He sobered. "But even so, bypassing their block is a dangerous process. I only survived because I took the precaution of imbuing myself with the radiation of a 'yellow' sun like your own before stepping through. Even similarly imbued, Kal is far too young to survive the trip. Even Kara, my niece, who is an adolescent, what you would consider a teenager, would most likely not survive either and her parents..."

Alison nodded. "So what are you going to do?"

"I have designed and built a small ship," Jor-El said. "It is completed, but the Dheronians seem intent on ensuring that none of us will escape. They have gained a fleet, a space fleet, which they have placed out of reach of conventional scanners, but more than within reach of Krypton if any of my people tries to escape via ship. I only spotted it because I managed to briefly bypass their cloak, and I only managed to do that because I expected something to be there. They have since rearranged their cloak so that I can no longer bypass it, meaning that when I tried to replicate my findings for the Science Council, they looked like the ravings of a paranoid madman." He smiled wanly. "Not that many of them did not see me as such anyway." He took a deep breath. "As I say, I have built a small ship to take Kal to Earth."

"And you haven't included space enough for yourself and your wife because it'll be more likely to avoid notice," Alison said.

Jor-El nodded. "To maximise his chances of survival, Lara and I must wait until the last moment to launch it," he said. "Then, hopefully, his ship will be mistaken for debris, and by the time the Dheronians know their mistake, if they do at all, Kal's ship will have vanished into hyperspace."

"Lara…" Alison said. "That's a lovely name." She sighed. "It's a good plan. But there's only so much you can do from your end. You need help for when Kal gets to Earth. Like adoptive parents." She caught Jor-El's meaningful look and smiled sadly. "Oh, Jor… I'd be honoured, I truly would. But I can't. My mother, Charles and Howard did an excellent job of cleaning up after Yon-Rogg and the Red Room were defeated, and the fact that no one has come for me or my family since suggests that they were successful. But there are still people, people at SHIELD, who suspect. More than that, I am the Deputy Director of SHIELD. Which means that I am in a position to help you, yes, but not to adopt Kal. If I took him in, he would be scrutinised to within an inch of his life. His powers would be impossible to keep secret and make him an astoundingly enticing target for capture. And even leaving aside our respective secrets, he would be a target for kidnapping because of his relationship to me. My own son, Jack… he was serving in my country's military, in a war we had not so long ago. His mission went wrong and he was captured. Most of his unit was killed, but he was kept alive because of his relationship to me. While that was a relative blessing, the things that they did to him…" She trailed off.

"I am sorry," Jor-El said. "And of course, I understand. I suspected that you would not be able to, though I had no idea… forgive me."

"You didn't do it and you had no way of knowing," Alison said, ruthlessly locking away the memories of Jack in that cell in Iraq, a bloodied and broken ruin. "I presume that you have made other plans."

Jor-El nodded. "Yes," he said. "I have. A couple, Jonathan and Martha Kent. She is unable to have children, yet they want a child badly. I know them to be good, honest people."

"You interviewed them?" Alison asked, eyebrow raised.

"No," Jor-El said. "Though Lara and I examined their home, observed them from afar and used our enhanced senses to discern what others thought of them."

"Why them?" Alison asked.

"Their character, what we could discern of it," Jor-El said. "The fact that their home town, Smallville, is small, rural and likely to avoid a great deal of scrutiny, yet close enough to one of your nation's major population centres, Metropolis, so Kal can, as he gets older, understand multiple aspects to his new world."

"Earth's a very big and very complex world, Jor," Alison warned. "With many facets beyond Metropolis and a town in the rural Midwest of America."

"I am aware," Jor-El said, before pausing for a long moment. "I also chose them because Jonathan Kent's father, Hiram Kent, once did me a great kindness. I had been framed for the murder of a good woman and he trusted me without being given solid evidence for why he should do so. He had every reason to suspect me, an outsider, and yet..." He paused. "In any case, from what I can discern, his son is, as you say on Earth, cut from the same cloth. Of course, appearances can deceive."

Alison nodded. "I'll do a background check," she said, heading over to her computer. "Give me an hour or two."

A couple of hours later, she returned. "Everything I can find, immediately at least, agrees with your and Lara's assessment," she said. "The Kents seem to be good people. But how can you be sure that they'll be the ones to find Kal?"

"DNA tracking," Jor-El said. "The ship will know to find them and land as close as possible to them without harming them. However…" He hesitated.

"You don't know how they'll take it," Alison said. "A ship carrying a baby dropping out the sky, that's quite a lot for a rural Midwestern couple to take in – while Martha Kent seems to be a bit more cosmopolitan in her background, I don't think her experience extends to crashed space ships. And in any case, SHIELD will be on something like that like a rat up a drain, and so will other parties. I can protect Kal from them, and if the Kents don't pan out as you hope, I can make other arrangements for him. However, I can't guarantee that they won't take his ship. I might have to sacrifice it to keep Kal hidden."

"I understand," Jor-El said. "I had planned to send a database of sorts, to advise Kal when the time is right, along with artificial copies of myself and Lara, to give him a taste of his homeworld, but I accounted for that too." He pulled out a long crystal. "It is, essentially, a back-up in case the ship is lost or damaged. It will activate at his touch. It also has an additional message for the Kents, if they prove to be the parents I hope they will be. Please look after it until he is old enough." He paused. "Also, I am aware that, even with his abilities, Earth is a dangerous place, perhaps more dangerous than even you know. We of Krypton have a vulnerability to magic, one that disrupts many of our abilities under a 'yellow' sun. While I believe that the House of El, my family, has a certain resistance to this owing to certain theorised aspects of our heritage, in any case, it would be limited. And if the Dheronians and their benefactor ever discover him..."

"Wait, stop, the people who can destroy your world might follow Kal here?" Alison asked.

"Might," Jor-El said. "And I accounted for that too. In the simplest terms possible, Earth is protected by a race called the Asgardians, our oldest allies. They are as advanced as we are, and they are higher beings, what most call gods. And unlike us, they are not quite so stagnant; they are far more militant. Earth is part of their 'Nine Realms', worlds they protect and extend a loose sovereignty over. While they only rule two directly, the rest follow their lead, and they protect them all. They have not acted overtly on Earth in a millennium, yet they still protect it. While some, like Yon-Rogg, have managed to evade their scrutiny and reach Earth, they only did so by chance and the response was… harsh."

"Harsh how?" Alison asked. "And Asgard, I recognise the name, from myths, children's stories..." She rubbed her jaw. "How powerful are they?"

"Yon-Rogg was of the Kree Empire, one of the two mightiest powers in the mortal universe, a favourite of one of their most prominent political factions," Jor-El said. "After he was defeated, Asgard isolated those who had aided him and demanded their heads. From any other power, such a demand would have been answered with war for the sheer insolence displayed. But not Asgard. They received the heads immediately, with copious apologies attached." He shook his head. "The Dheronians cut us off from Asgard because they fear Asgard's power, and rightly so."

"Can't you ask Asgard to intervene from here?" Alison asked.

"I could," Jor-El said. "But it is already too late. It took me so long to slip through the lock to get to Earth that we now have mere days. To arrange and plan a decisive assault on the vast Dheronian fleet, even with the might of the Allfather and his sons, would take too long. Asgard is vigilant and they are a warrior people, but it could take them time to gather their full strength. And even were it possible, the technology the Dheronians now possess and the sheer size of their fleet – I believe it holds their entire population – I cannot guarantee that they will not be able to destroy Krypton before they are destroyed themselves. In fact, I can almost guarantee it. Further, while Asgard could evacuate Krypton's population in theory, it would have to break the lock that prevented communication in the first place, as opposed to merely slipping past it, as I did. While it could be done, it would take time and…"

"The Dheronians would see it coming," Alison said. "Resulting in the destruction of Krypton."

Jor-El nodded. "And there are further problems," he said. "Krypton is in a state of civil war. My warnings, you see, weren't entirely ignored. One of my old friends, Dru-Zod, believed me. He is the commander of Krypton's military and –"

"He saw the inaction of your Science Council and decided that a military coup was necessary," Alison said. "We've had them on Earth. Not in America, thank god, but in a lot of other places."

"Yes," Jor-El said. "The civil war rages and grows ever more vicious. My friend, I believe, has gone mad. He has even reprogrammed the AI that ran much of our planet's infrastructure to serve him. Worse, a cult has risen up, the cult of the Eradicator, venerating a creature of Kryptonian myth and claiming that Krypton's death is not merely inevitable, but to be embraced." He looked haunted. "And they venerate me as their prophet, the Herald of the Eradicator. Zod's forces, meanwhile, also champion me, hold me up as a martyr to their cause and proof of the Science Council's corruption, that it would 'conceal its shining light and silence the voice of truth'. I have only managed to stay neutral by hiding myself and my family away." He shook his head. "All I ever wanted was to warn my people, to save them. And this it what came of it. Millions dying in the name of what should, at worst, have been a scientific dispute. Both sides have become fanatical, taken their views to the point of insanity and beyond. Krypton and Argo are both consumed by madness."

Alison looked in pity at this kind, gentle, brilliant man who had only ever tried to help, who just couldn't understand the horrors he had unleashed with a few simple words, words that had been appropriated by monsters, murderers, and madmen. She could, however. She could understand it very easily. "I am sorry, Jor," she said quietly.

"It has all grown so poisonous that even if we survive, we risk exporting the chaos of our wars elsewhere," Jor-El said eventually. "At the very least, it would make it impossible to co-ordinate an evacuation. Part of population refuses to believe that Krypton is on the brink of destruction, others do because their commander tells them to and believes the former to be treasonous scum fit only for death, and more believe that Krypton is about to die and anyone who dares to refute or impede that, meaning both of the other sides, must die." He shook his head. "No. It saddens me to realise it, but Krypton is lost, Argo with it."

Alison nodded, not bothering with platitudes. Words would do no good here. "What about Asgard? Surely they'd be willing to take your son in," she said.

"They would," Jor-El said. "My ancestor, the first Kal-El, was fostered with the current King of Asgard, the Allfather, raised as his brother. Kal would be given a place of highest honour and would want for nothing."

"Nothing except his parents," Alison said quietly.

Jor-El nodded. "I will not send him to Asgard," he said. "While they are more engaged with the universe than Krypton was, they are still detached, looking down from on high. I want my son to grow up understanding the younger species of this universe, to use the knowledge that his mother and I will send with him, and the powers given to him by the 'yellow' sun of Earth, to do good. I understand why Asgard has retreated, but sending him to Asgard would be like putting him in a cage. A gilded cage, one of luxury, but one made all the more confining by the fact that he would likely never see it for what it was."

His expression turned grim.

"Besides," he said. "Though my information is outdated, the last I had heard was that Thor, Asgard's Crown Prince, had vanished. I do not know what it means, but there may well be dark things brewing in the Realm Eternal. Sending Kal there could mean sending him to his doom, and I will not take the slightest risk with his safety that I do not have to."

" _Definitely_ recognise the name," Alison muttered. "Okay, I think I understand. All right." She rubbed her hands. "Kal will need a faked birth certificate, adoption papers, that sort of thing. That's easily enough done, but I can't be seen to get involved directly myself. I can't call on Charles' skills either, for the same reason you couldn't have sent Kal to him – he's currently dealing with some dark forces of his own, the sort that would pounce on Kal in an instant." She thought for a moment. "I know a couple of agents I can dispatch to the scene, indirectly of course. Hopefully it should be a small enough matter that only two moderately senior agents will be required to deal with it."

"You trust them?" Jor-El asked.

"Better than that, I know them," Alison said. "Agent Fury and Agent Coulson would never allow a child to be harmed, human or not. Especially not one that looks like that. Fortunate, really…"

"Alison?"

"Oh, it's nothing," Alison said. "It's just that your son bears more than a passing resemblance to the son of a young woman Agent Fury was very close to. She was like a sister to him and he was unable to prevent the murders of her and her husband. He was equally unable to do anything for her son, though he tried very hard. It will give him added incentive to protect Kal." She shook her head. "In any case, I'll be keeping a close watch on the incident. If things go wrong, I can step in."

Jor-El nodded. "And what if it is not a minor incident?" he asked. "Forgive me, but you are the Deputy Director of SHIELD. Surely there is a Director, who could overrule you?"

"In theory," Alison said. "But Jim Woo's a decent man, and even if he does get involved, I can persuade him."

"And if you can't?"

"He's the Director, but I've got deeper roots in SHIELD than anyone else, and he knows it," Alison said coolly. "So if it comes to it, he'll do what I tell him, or face the consequences."

Jor-El stared at her for a long moment. "You have become very much like your mother," he said, tone neutral.

"I'll take that as a compliment," Alison said calmly.

Jor-El said nothing, though he looked a little troubled. Alison debated pointing out that you didn't get points in the spy game by being nice, but decided against it. He probably knew, and just didn't like it. She couldn't blame him. It wasn't pleasant.

"How long will it take Kal to get here?" she asked.

"A few months," Jor-El said. "A year, perhaps? Less, probably. I am afraid I cannot be more precise." He paused. "I will send a signal ahead, in Kryptonian. It is primarily intended for Mar-Vell, or any Asgardian who happens to involve themselves with Earth, in case matters go astray, and…"

"And I am unable to help him," Alison said bluntly. "Sensible. Every plan needs a back-up, preferably several." She looked him in the eye. "Jor, I promise you this, on my children and grandchildren's souls: I'll do everything for Kal that I can, everything that I would do for one of my own. I will protect him as best I can."

Jor-El smiled gently. "Of that I have no doubt, Alison," he said. "And thank you."

"You saved my life all those years ago," Alison said. "It's the very least I can do." She sighed. "I only wish I could do more, to save you and your wife. Can't you at least try to slip off Krypton to Earth as soon as you've got Kal launched?"

"We must wait until the very last moment," Jor-El said. "And calculate when that last moment will be to ensure that Kal has the best chance of survival. Anything less would put him at greater risk than needed. Neither I, nor Lara, will countenance that."

Alison nodded. "I understand," she said.

Jor-El nodded. "I thought you would," he said. "Oh, and before I go…" He looked a little embarrassed. "I became so wrapped up in explaining the potential dangers to Kal that I forgot to give you this."

He handed her another crystal. "Lara made this, though I added a few touches of my own. It will respond to Kal's touch and his alone. It is a form of armour, a redesign of suits worn for the exploration of dangerous environments on Krypton, mixing in certain principles of Asgardian technology and Kryptonian military technology. It is designed to co-exist with Kal's abilities under a yellow sun and primarily, protect him as far as possible from those things his abilities will not; or at least, will not as a young man. It has a number of functions beyond the obvious." He chuckled softly. "Lara is a military woman by training and believes in being prepared for everything, and then some. I think that the two of you would get on."

"A woman who designs a suit of apocalypse proofed armour for her kid?" Alison said, examining the crystal. "Oh, I definitely think we would." She smiled sadly. "I'm sorry I didn't get the chance to meet her. And to get to know you better."

"As am I, Alison," Jor-El said sadly. "As am I." He stood. "I must go."

Alison nodded. "Oh, and Jor?" she said.

He turned. "Yes?"

"Goodbye. And good luck."

He gave her one last smile of thanks, and then vanished in a gust of wind.

OoOoO

 _The Present_

"So, you made sure that I went with mom and dad?" Clark asked.

"I helped," Alison said. "It took a bit of quick and fancy footwork too: Jor didn't anticipate a significant amount of Krypton's debris being dragged along with you, and as a consequence, I didn't anticipate that it would be anything as high profile as it was. Nor, I think, did he anticipate the divide between his message arriving and your arrival." She inclined her head. "Though under the circumstances, that might have been a good thing. Some people were looking into it who most certainly should not have been."

"Like who?" Clark asked cautiously.

"Like Lionel Luthor, among others," Alison said grimly, before waving a hand. "He never knew what he was dealing with. I made sure of that." She focused on Clark again. "In any case, once you arrived, I went to work," she said. "The two Agents I chose were the ones to find you, and your mom and your dad, and they accepted you staying with them. They talked to Director Woo, who was undecided. I had a little word with him, and he became decided, in your favour. After that, I ensured that the faked documentation was up to spec – which it was. Agent Coulson was and remains excellent at covers. In that respect, at least, the meteor shower helped. So many lost children, so much chaos… it was easy to pass you off as the child of an out of town couple killed in the meteor shower."

Clark nodded. "What about the other people who know?" he asked.

"Director Woo forgot," Alison said calmly. "With help." Clark felt a shiver go down his spine, and his parents exchanged unreadable looks. While this woman, who even after her attitude shift still looked uncannily like a typical suburban soccer mom from central casting, was kind, friendly and had clearly done a lot for him, she was also kind of scary. "Agent Fury is now Director Fury. After my retirement, which I had to take because the elements of HYDRA within SHIELD – not that I knew for sure what they were – were taking a rather uncomfortable interest in me and mine, he took up the bulk of using SHIELD's might to keep you a secret. Agent Coulson helped in that regard, something helped by the fact that few guessed at his involvement – though really, one would think that if rumours were going around of Fury's involvement, Coulson's name wouldn't be far behind – and the fact that he has been legally dead for the last few years. I, of course, was not idle either."

"Rumours?" Clark asked, puzzled.

Alison sighed. "Yes," she said. "Apparently, I was not so thorough as I had hoped. Though that was only partly it, as far as I can tell. A couple of years after you landed in Kansas, rumours starting running around about the so-called 'Lost Omega' – an Omega Class being is SHIELD's way of describing people who are off the charts, power wise, who could affect a continent or even a planet. It's a bit vague, considering that some Omegas are palpably much more powerful than others, but it does the job. Other Omega Class beings include Thor and the Hulk. They are rare. Ones that like you are, shall we say, vulnerable… they are much, much rarer."

"But, I'm not that powerful," Clark protested. "Agent Coulson said that the rumours were me being mixed up with some young psychic. She's the Omega, whoever she is."

"So she is," was Alison's calm reply. "And one day, so you will be too." She looked Clark in the eye. "I saw your father in action, Clark," she said. "And from that, and a couple of other things I've picked up over the years, I've worked out that at full strength, he compared favourably with Thor. I have every confidence that you will too." Her brow creased somewhat in a small frown. "Though from what he had told me, I would have expected a few more of your abilities to have manifested by now…" She trailed off, then shrugged, as if it was of little consequence.

Clark nodded, pondering this. "Sorry," he said after a while, realising that he was still under observation. "I'm just taking it all in. It's…"

"It's a lot to adjust to, I know," Alison said kindly. "I can't even begin to tell you how shocked I was when I found out I was a super soldier and the truth about my parentage. My granddaughter, Carol, could tell you a similar story. And her friend, Harry Thorson, who you greatly resemble, would also be able to relate. You are far from alone in this, Clark."

"Shouldn't it be Kal?" Clark asked, and shot a hesitant look at his parents. "I mean, that's my name… my original name. Isn't it?"

"Your birth name, yes," Alison said. "Why, do you prefer it?"

Clark shook his head firmly. "No," he said. "I mean, it's nice enough, but it doesn't feel very… me."

"Well, that's hardly a surprise," Alison said dryly. "It could be useful, though."

Clark looked puzzled.

"A number of superhumans adopt codenames," she explained. "Some as a means of distancing themselves from their human backgrounds."

"I don't want to do that," Clark said quickly.

"While others do so as a means of simply embracing their mutant abilities and identities," she continued gently. "And still others for use when dealing with those who would view them poorly, as a mask to wear. Others do it because they think it sounds cool, and want to emulate the superheroes they idolise. Captain America is an often cited example."

"Kal doesn't really sound like a codename," Clark said doubtfully. "I mean it's not like Captain… oh, I don't know, Captain Marvel."

"That one's taken, I'm afraid," Alison said, amused. "Besides, Thor and Loki act under their own names. And I've been keeping an eye on you, Clark. Last summer in particular, you were running around Smallville, saving lives, all in a blur."

"So?" Clark said defensively.

"So, it's a very good thing," Alison said gently. "And a sign of a very well raised young man," she added, gaze turning to Clark's parents. "Jor chose well when he chose the two of you," she said. "I worried, at first, but I was wrong and I have never been more glad that to be so. Clark is a credit to you both." Her expression saddened somewhat as she looked over at the pictures of her family. "I only wish that I had done half as good a job with my own children," she said. "They've turned out as wonderful people, and parents, in their own right, but I rather fear that that was in spite of my parenting rather than because of it."

"I'm sure that's not true," Martha said.

"I'm afraid it probably is," Alison said. "I am not simply fishing – dynamite fishing, even – for compliments. I was always a much better spy than a mother, though my late husband rose to the occasion magnificently." She shook her head. "In any case, my parenting skills are not the subject up for discussion. What was… ah, yes. Names." She turned back to Clark. "If you ever get spotted, wearing a costume, a suit, and using a different name could keep eyes away from your ordinary life as Clark Kent." She shrugged. "All I'm saying is that it could be useful. You say it doesn't fit you? Well, it could come in handy for the times when for one reason or another, you might not want to be you."

Clark frowned thoughtfully. This bore some consideration. "You said that my… my father left a couple of things for me," he said. "May I? I'd… I'd like to see them."

"Of course," Alison said, pulling two crystals out from the bag beside her. "I was only ever looking after them until you were ready. And be careful – like I said, they're touch activated."

Clark hesitated. "Can you put them in a bag or something, then, please? For later."

Alison nodded. "Of course," she said, drawing a handkerchief. "Will this do?"

It turned out that it did, wrapping around the crystals, which Clark took and held for a moment, feeling their contours through the cloth. I slipped into his pocket. "One thing I don't understand," he said. "I asked… someone, but he didn't know." He paused, considering Jean-Paul's enigmatic nature. "Or he wouldn't say. Anyway, I was hoping that you would know."

"Someone, eh?" Alison asked, raising an amused eyebrow. "Would this someone be about yea high, slim, French, and an outrageous flirt?"

Clark could not prevent his jaw from dropping, and Alison chuckled. "I keep my eyes open," she said. "And in any case, I know Jean-Paul Beaubier of old. He's one of my granddaughter's best friends." Her gaze sharpened thoughtfully. "As is a certain Harry Thorson, come to that."

"Right," Clark said. "I wanted to know why I look like him. Harry Thorson, I mean. From what you said, and the picture you showed me, Alison, my…"

"Birth father," Alison suggested. "Or just father, which is a little less clunky." Her gaze slipped across to Clark's parents. "Jonathan Kent, of course, being your dad."

Clark nodded. "He looked just like me," he said. "And like Harry. Do you know why?"

"I don't, I'm afraid," Alison said. "Your father alluded to Asgard and Krypton being closely connected, your family in particular, though whether that connection extended to blood, I really cannot say."

"Right," he said, then bit his lip. "Thank you," he said, before adding, as this seemed somewhat anaemic considering what the woman in front of him had done for him. "I mean, really. Thanks. For helping me, for making sure I stayed with mom and dad… for… for everything."

Even this seemed insufficient to Clark, but Alison smiled a smile as warm as a ray of summer sunshine, as if she understood exactly both what he was saying, and what he was trying to say.

"It was my pleasure, Clark," she said. "And it was my honour, too."

OoOoO

Unfortunately, not all members of the extended Carter-Rogers clan were so happy, as became clear later that evening. Steven 'Stevie' Danvers was, needless to say, still suffering from night terrors, among other textbook post-trauma psychological symptoms, and was therefore taking up most of his mother's attention. What time she had left was being spent on Joe junior, who was unsurprisingly acting out after the way his father left without, from his point of view, any real explanation, and the confusion over what had happened to his older siblings.

Carol, meanwhile, seemed to all outward observation to be casual, relaxed, happy, and generally to have shrugged off her latest round of dicing with death like an old coat. And for the most part, she had. Her memories of the fighting, and the part she'd played in it, on Halloween and as far back as Easter, didn't really faze her. She'd learned to adjust.

The chair, though. That was one thing she hadn't adjusted to. She hadn't been entirely conscious when she'd been put into it, but her body remembered. Oh, it remembered. Every time the thought came halfway to crossing her mind, or something even remotely similar, it came sliding back, not surging, but sliding, crawling through the cracks in the darkest parts of the night, to the front of her mind.

It was as if the events were replaying themselves: first, the sensation of those cold claws resting against her skin, as delicate as tips of grass and as light as needles, and the terrible, helpless anticipation: a slow, roiling feeling of terror and rage churning in the pit of her stomach.

And then, there'd been a moment of sharp pain, like being injected, followed by a dull paralysis, a numbness that left her registering the presence of the chair's claws and the way they were buried in her flesh as simple facts, without any of the expected accompanying pain. And then there'd been the slow, creeping lack of sensation as she felt the blood, the life, flow out of her, being slowly drained dry and drifting away without being able to do a damn thing about it... and then, on some semi-conscious level, she remembered what felt like a rush of blood to the whole body, a surge of pure energy jolting her back to life, yanking her back from the brink.

She wasn't sure what was worse – the feeling of slowly having the life sucked out of her, or teetering right on the brink, terrified for an instant that she might not come back.

Carol closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and pulled her legs into a fetal position, wrapping her arms around them, and waited for it to run its course, trying not to shiver.

"Having trouble sleeping again?"

Carol, caught off-guard, twitched violently and wound up in such a tangle of arms and legs that she nearly fell off the bed.

It spoke volumes of the situation that Harry, the speaker, didn't crack a joke, but instead crossed from door to bed in a blur. As a result, instead of falling off and potentially smacking her head against the bedside table, Carol wound up getting a faceful of Harry's thin t-shirt and through it, his chest. For a moment, they just stayed there, frozen in a strange tableau. Then, Harry broke the silence.

"You know, if this was the other way around, it would much more embarrassing," he said mildly.

Carol snorted as she reached up and pushed off, propelling herself upright, thankful that the darkness concealed a faint blush. While this meant little enough around a very powerful telepath, even not considering the psychic connection the two shared, Harry was tactful enough not to mention it. In any case, he was rather more worried by what had drawn him to her room in the first place. However, unlike how he would normally proceed, he instead hopped up onto the side of the bed, a couple of feet from Carol, and waited.

"You sensed it, then," she said eventually, in a flat tone.

Harry nodded. "It felt familiar," he said quietly, and tapped first his shoulder, then his heart. "Dracula and Daken," he said. "The latter in particular. I felt myself slipping away, life draining out of me…" He paused. "And I suppose there was the basilisk too, but being bitten by one of those mostly just hurts like hell, and Fawkes dropped in before it got too far, so that doesn't really count." He waved a hand. "Point being, I know something – a lot of something – about what you're feeling. You don't have to try and bottle it up because you think other people and their issues need to take priority." He rested a hand on her shoulder and met her gaze. "You're important too. And what you're dealing with? You don't have to deal with it alone."

Their gazes remained locked for what felt like an eternity.

"Also, I cannot believe that once again, _I_ am telling _you_ not to be excessively noble and self-sacrificing."

Carol scowled at him for a moment, then, at Harry's raised eyebrow, grumbled, "Touché." She looked away. "I just… I didn't want to talk about it."

Harry nodded. "Did anyone…"

"Diana did," Carol said. "But like I said, I didn't want to talk about it. Natasha, maybe, but… everyone else has been busy." She shrugged. "Besides, it only generally pops up at night. Well, not always, but mostly. And aside from that, I'm fine." She shrugged again. "It's like a pulled muscle. As long as I don't move it the wrong way, I'm fine."

"It still means that something's wrong," Harry said quietly.

"I know!" Carol snapped, eyes suddenly damp, and burning with frustrated anger. "I _know_ that something's wrong, and I _know_ that it's not some creepy super-evil magic thing, and I _know_ that it's 'just' in my head." She looked away. "Which makes fuck all difference when it makes my skin crawl and feel like…" Harry gently squeezed her shoulder as she trailed off, and while she didn't say anything, she leaned into it, just a little.

"Like it's happening again," Harry finished. "Believe me, Carol, I know. I would even without telepathy and that connection we have. And there's two other things I know." He raised a finger on his free hand. "One, it does get better." He raised another finger. "Two, I can help. Really, I can. I've had people help me with similar stuff; grandma and cousin Joshua, mainly, and between that, Jean, and Maddie, I've picked up a thing or two." He removed the hand on her shoulder, expression serious. "But I won't do anything you don't want me to. _Ever_." He paused. "Well. Psychic wise. On you. You know what I mean."

"Probably more than you do," Carol said, smirking. "But what else is new?"

Harry stuck his tongue out at her, drawing what Carol would deny with her dying breath was a giggle, before sobering. "There are other options," he said gently. "I mean, it's not just me or gritting it out. There's plenty of therapists out there, plenty of them psychic, and, well…" He smiled wryly. "I've had reason to get to know a few of them."

"You astound me," Carol said dryly.

Harry rolled his eyes, unable to conceal a bit of a smile. "I'm sure," he said. "But like I said – there are other options. And if there's anything I can do…" He frowned. "No, scratch that: if there's anything you want or need me to do to help, then I'll do it. Even if that is walking out this door and leaving you to it."

Carol's hand slipped across and took his. "I know," she said quietly. "I…" She chuckled suddenly. "Okay, I'm getting a massive sense of déjà vu."

Harry grinned. "Me too," he said, glancing down as their fingers intertwined, before locking in place. As if this was the signal for Carol having made her decision, it was accompanied by a deep breath.

"I trusted you then," she said. "And I was right to." She smiled a little. _Even if things didn't quite go how we expected them to_ , she added.

 _That was an accident,_ Harry grumbled.

Carol patted the bed next to her, and getting the message, Harry budged up to sit next to her, back against the headboard. _Maybe,_ she said. _But it worked out. I mean..._ _odds are, if we didn't have it, me and Stevie would both be dead. Or worse._

Harry inclined his head in acknowledgement.

"Besides," Carol said aloud, resting her head on his shoulder, and glanced up at him with a slight smile. "It is kind of fun."

"That's true," Harry agreed. "Though not the way Jean-Paul keeps insinuating."

"It could be," Carol said casually, then grinned as Harry's eyes nearly popped out and he flushed a shade of scarlet that wouldn't have shamed his godmother's costume. "Oh my god, I can _feel_ you blushing."

"And I can _feel_ you grinning," Harry said sourly, then paused as he noticed Carol's arms snaking across his body, one behind, one in front. The rest of her was following suit. Normally, the fact that he had a very attractive girl, that he had _Carol_ , pressed up against him would have rendered him non-verbal. The fact that she dressed in what he was acutely aware was a t-shirt and a pair of what he increasingly suspected were his boxer shorts and nothing else did not help.

"They're yours," Carol said, head now resting on his chest. "That connection of ours is a two-way street, remember?"

"I do now," Harry muttered, cheeks burning as he reached up to brush some wayward strands of blonde hair out of his mouth. "Any particular reason you're, uh, cuddling up to me?"

"I'm cold," Carol said calmly, though her voice wavered slightly as she added, "in more ways than one." She wriggled closer, hooking a leg around his "And you're warm. And I'm pretty you're okay with it." She looked up at him, and her grip loosened suddenly. "You are, aren't you?"

Harry paused. "Yeah," he said eventually, in a slightly strained voice. "I am. Fine with it." Coughing, he changed the subject. "And why did you steal my pants?"

"Not pants, your… ooh, this is a British thing, isn't it?"

There was a bewildered pause. "My complaining about underwear being stolen is just a British thing?"

"Believe me, no, it isn't. It's the whole Brits using 'pants' when they mean underpants thing."

"Right. And the complaining part. Why do I get the feeling there's a story here?"

"Because there is one."

"What story?"

This time, the pause was grumpy.

"Think of it as the price you're paying for my pants."

"Fine. Joe once stole one of my bras and tried to use it as an eyepatch while pretending to be a pirate. Unlike Uhtred, it was not a good look, but the little shit wouldn't give it back."

"Um."

"What?"

"The eyepatch thing. I mean…" Harry coughed awkwardly, caught between embarrassment and trying madly not to laugh. "Wasn't it a little, um… _big?_ "

"Yes," came the grumpy reply. "It was. I'm already regretting telling you this."

There was a stifled snigger.

"Go on. Do it. Get it over with."

Peals of laughter rang around the room, and were it not for the superior sound-proofing, would have done so through the rest of the Mansion too. They went on for some time.

"Done yet?" Carol asked impatiently.

"Done," Harry said, a hint of snicker around the edge of his voice. "I'm sorry, it's just the mental image, after all that's happened, it's so ridiculous but… not _my_ ridiculous, if you see what I mean."

"You mean that nothing exploded?"

"… More or less, yeah," Harry said. "It felt good. To laugh about something fairly normal." He paused. "Weird, but normal. I think. The closest I've ever had to a sibling was Dudley and the only clothes I had were things he didn't fit into or didn't want, so I really wouldn't know." He snickered again. "And the mental image…"

Carol let out a reluctant chuckle. "Okay, yeah, it's kinda funny," she admitted. "And like you said. Normal." She sighed. "You know, before I met you, I'd have given anything to have a life that was _not_ normal. And I still would," she added hastily. "I mean, god, I'm not saying that I regret meeting you or anything."

"I know," Harry said quietly. "I know exactly what you mean. And not through telepathy. You'd like normal, but weird normal, not boring normal. The same way, once I found out I was a wizard, I just wished that I was a wizard, but that I had my family and a relatively normal life, only worrying about homework and stuff like that, instead of this destiny rubbish and people trying to kill me."

"Right," Carol said. "I mean, the weird stuff is amazing, the life or death stuff – the fights, I mean – well, I'm not gonna lie, they're exciting. More than that, it's… it's incredible. But things like –" She stopped sharply, then stayed silent for some minutes. "Like the chair," she said eventually. "And Dracula." She paused. "Well, I could do without that."

"Yeah," Harry said. "So could I." He looked down at her. He had a question to ask, but he didn't need to say a word, because as he looked down, Carol looked up at him, and he saw her answer in her eyes. Even in the darkness of the middle of the night, as Autumn began to drift towards Winter, they were round and sparkling like a blue sky on a frosty morning as she looked back at him.

Their faces were so close that he could smell her breath, feel it on his lips as it hitched, and he had no doubt that she could do the same, leaving him with a faint wish that he'd remembered to brush his teeth. Time seemed to freeze around them, in one agonising and ecstatic moment that seemed to go on forever. All of Harry's senses seemed to be sharper than razors, taking in everything, every sense and sensation, as everything about them, both of them, teetered on the razor's edge between one choice and another, neither choice totally right, neither choice totally wrong. It hung in the air like a frozen strand of a spider's web, gleaming and glistening, and liable to snap the first move either one of them made.

Harry, eventually, made it, leaning down and gently kissing Carol's brow, as his hands slipped up to her temples. After a moment of hesitation, silent confirmation that she was okay with this, he made contact.

What happened was not the same as what had happened barely a few months before – though both participants would agree that it felt like far longer. For one thing, it was far defter, far more controlled and patient, and the golden glow was a mere faint illumination this time. Even still, it seemed to take an eternity, until Harry finally lowered his hands.

"Better?" he asked.

"Better," Carol said quietly, hitching herself up so her head was now level with Harry's once more. "Thank you. It's still there, but…" She fumbled for the words. "It's more like what happened at Easter. I know something bad happened, I know what happened, but the reaction… the reaction's gone." She stopped. "Almost. I mean, I can feel a tingle and –"

"And it still feels cold," Harry said. "Yeah. Sorry, I can't do much about that. Not yet."

Carol met his gaze. "Yes," she said quietly. "You can."

Harry blinked slowly. "How?" he asked quietly. "Anything you want, anything you need…"

"Stay," Carol said, after a moment, then tried a shrug. "Like I said earlier," she said, not entirely casually. "You're warm, in more ways than one."

Harry could have replied with something dramatic, or smooth, or even both, like, 'You lit my way out of the dark. Now, it's my turn to do the same for you.' Or he could have if Carol's wriggling to get more comfortable hadn't just fused his vocal cords. But even once he'd managed to get his brain back in gear, he didn't. It wouldn't have felt right.

So instead, he simply slipped his arms around her, and said three simple words.

"As you wish."

 **And that, I think, is the appropriate place to end it, don't you? Yes, I am a horrible tease. It's part of the fun of being an author – and possibly a by-product of it, come to that. But yeah, Harry and Carol… let's just say that now there's a certain awareness of their feelings for each other that goes beyond previous practical, reasoned acknowledgements. One in blood and bone.**

 **Next chapter will have Ron and Hermione, the return of Doctor Strange, and the return to Hogwarts, in which Harry will start preparing for the First Task.**


	37. Chapter 37: One Merry Morning

**Well, it took a bit longer than usual – my dissertation is in its editing stages – but here we are again, and in recompense, you have a somewhat longer than usual chapter. This is… well, it's not totally a filler chapter, because there is plot progression, sometimes of the less obvious kind.**

 **It is a little more relaxed, and a little funnier, though. This is the point where Ron and Hermione and a certain couple of others re-enter the story, and Harry, finally, returns to Hogwarts. But first, there is fun, oh yes. Enjoy!**

Harry awoke the next morning at what might reasonably be called the crack of dawn. Though not exactly an early bird by nature, a lifetime of being expected to get up early at the Dursleys, then for different reasons at Hogwarts, had worn a groove on his psyche. Added to that, he didn't really need much sleep these days to feel well-rested, not under normal circumstances.

However, he didn't just feel well-rested. No, it was more than that, he thought somewhat muzzily. His sleepy brain, after taking a few moments to click into gear, ascribed this feeling to the pleasant warm weight spread out across his upper-body that was soft and firm by turns, and an apparently connected feeling of… connection. Security. Rightness.

Then, Harry's brain registered three things, just as his memories of the previous night kicked in.

First, this 'pleasant warm weight' was none other than Carol, whose room he was in, whose bed he was lying in, and whose hair was tickling his nose. She'd been having flashbacks, persistent sense-memories, of the chair Dracula had put her in to drain her blood, he'd come in to help in any way he could, and they had had… a Moment. One that hadn't gone anywhere, as it happened, and they'd instead gone to sleep wrapped around each other, Harry acting as her security blanket of sorts.

Second, she was, as she had been the previous night, only wearing a shirt and a stolen pair of boxers, and some time in the night, their respective tossing and turning had resulted in her lying across his torso, arms wrapped around him like he was a favourite pillow and legs trailing out behind her.

A small smile appeared on his face as he saw how peaceful she looked – post-trauma nightmares were hell on wheels, as he very well knew, and put peaceful nights of sleep at a premium. As he watched, she mumbled something indistinct and shifted position, and for a moment, everything was perfect, and a large part of Harry wished that time could just freeze around this moment.

Then, he noticed the third thing, that made a lot more of him desperately wish that time would freeze and Carol would stay asleep, and above all, not notice. Because as he was very suddenly aware, a part of him that had little to do with his brain had noticed this a good deal earlier and was very pleased with it, bringing to Harry's attention the exact shape of Carol's body, combined most particularly with the pleasurable way certain thinly covered parts of it were being pressed against him by the inexorable force of gravity.

Of course, Harry being a teenage boy, it wasn't hard to guess which part this was, or to realise that this wasn't exactly an unusual occurrence. Far from it, in fact. As Harry could have been told by any of the other male inhabitants of the mansion, it is something that happens to all teenage boys, it can be caused by anything up to and including the wind changing direction, and it is a significant part of the male half of the private hell that is puberty.

As a result, this led to a rather strange tableau: a teenage girl happily dead to the world and lying sprawled across the teenage boy who was her really-absolutely-definitely-and-indisputably-not-boyfriend. Meanwhile, said teenage boy who had until a few moments ago been happy to remain as he was for the next few hours, was moving with more caution and care than the most daring cat-burglar in a heist movie, trying desperately to slide away from her, out of bed, and into the bathroom for a long – and probably very cold – shower, without at any point waking her up.

It was this moment (or indeed, Moment) that, Harry would later decide, split the difference with near-mathematical precision between 'almost perfect' and 'absolutely mortifying.'

OoOoO

Harry partly got his wish – Carol didn't exactly wake up while he slipped away, but she did register it, pushing her into a vague doze that the sounds of the shower awoke her from. Blinking slowly, she shuffled over into the warm patch Harry had left behind, making herself comfortable by dragging the covers up to keep warm against the November chill, and grumbling.

Had she been properly awake, or more of a morning person, she would have complained, "what happened to that sound-proofing Tony promised?"

As it was, her grumbling came to something more like, "Fuck off noises, 'm sleeping," before she buried her head under the pillow that Harry had been using in an attempt to go back to sleep. This prospect was defeated, however, by the very sudden realisation that the noises of rather vigorous showering were coming from her bathroom. With that realisation, she shot bolt upright, and like Harry, her memories obligingly replayed the night before. Her reaction was slightly different, however, as she stared at the wall in stunned disbelief and increasingly pink cheeks.

"Oh god, oh god, oh _god_ ," she managed in a steady mumble, resolutely ignoring the probability that what with the situation, their mutual attraction, and their limited pyjamas, it was unlikely to have stopped at a single kiss. Heavy making out for sure, she thought, her cheeks progressing from pink to red. And what then, she wondered. How would that change things between them? What would they do next? Her treacherous imagination presented her with a very detailed suggestion, which led to Carol going completely crimson and ensured that she most definitely did not have to worry about feeling cold.

Almost simultaneously, a surprised shriek emanated from the bathroom, immediately followed by the squeaking sound of someone slipping, a yelp, and a loud crash. As a long multi-lingual litany of curse-words began, along with the noises of someone who has fallen over in the shower trying to get up without falling over and adding over-much to the bruises they had already received, Carol realised something – you know, in between her utter mortification and a burning desire for the floor to open up and swallow her. This both confirmed that a) last night had not been a dream and Harry was the one in the bathroom, b) their psychic connection was still going strong.

About a minute later, Harry emerged from the bathroom, wincing, looking damp, and towelling dry hair that was even messier than usual. He was wearing the same shirt and boxers he'd slept in, this apparently being preferable to actual nudity. Carol met his gaze, and for a long moment, there was a very awkward silence. Carol took it upon herself to break it.

"We should talk," she said. "About last night. What happened. And what…"

"Almost happened?" Harry supplied in a faux-casual voice, tossing aside the towel and sitting down on the side of the bed.

"What actually happened, what almost happened," Carol said, then paused and closed her eyes briefly. "What was said." At Harry's puzzled expression, she smiled wryly. "Harry, I wasn't completely asleep, and I've seen _The Princess Bride_."

"Ah," Harry said, going pink. "Um. Did you like it?"

Carol rolled her eyes in amusement. Even after the changes wrought by most of a year in time, most of a foot in height, and most of any self-respecting deity in power, Harry was still a dork. And an adorable one at that. "Look," she said, marshalling her thoughts. "You basically said that you love me."

Harry looked awkward. "Look, Carol, I don't –"

"You meant it."

"I know, but –"

"I love you too."

Harry goggled. It was quite impressive, actually, complete with dropped jaw, eyes like saucers, and a stunned expression like someone had smacked him between the eyes with a small planet.

"Not romantically," Carol hastened to add.

"Right."

"Platonically. As a friend."

"Okay."

Carol squirmed internally for several long moments. Harry, having retreated into an especially unreadable blank expression that she suspected he'd learnt from Natasha, was no help. "All right," she admitted. "And, maybe, a little bit romantically too."

Harry met her gaze, then looked away and sighed. Carol folded her arms and glowered. She wasn't sure what reaction she had hoped for, or expected, but this was emphatically not it. For one thing, she'd expected more in the way of an actual reaction. Then again, she mused, he was a super powerful telepath, he'd said before that empathy – like Diana's – came part of the psychic package, and that wasn't even counting the connection or the fact he'd literally been in her head on Halloween. Maybe he already knew?

"I suspected," Harry said quietly.

"And you don't look especially happy about it," Carol said. "Which is a little surprising, since of the two of us, I'm the one with issues with the opposite sex that aren't just shyness or anything like that. You've got many, _many_ issues, but those aren't among them."

Harry sighed and flopped back on the bed. "No," he said. "I don't. What I do have, though, are issues about controlling my powers."

Carol raised an eyebrow. "And what does that have to do…" she began, before trailing off as the bottom dropped out of her stomach. "Oh."

"I'm an Omega Class psychic," Harry said flatly. He was staring at the ceiling. "I don't understand a tenth of what I can do with my telekinesis, and that's the side of things I'm strongest on. My telepathy? I understand about a hundredth of what I can do with that, at best. Once, I was in a pensieve – a magical memory viewing thing – and it was showing a memory of what happened at Easter to me, Ron, Hermione, and Professor Cassidy. I lost control inside it, I trapped us in there, and nearly got us all killed. When I cut loose fighting Maddie, the psychic fall-out didn't just warp the Nevernever around us and tell the Avengers where to look, it nearly fried the brains of thousands and thousands of psychics worldwide. One of them manifested her powers in the middle of it and went sort of mad." He looked over at Carol. "And when I just tried to help you with some bad memories and nightmares, I sealed a permanent psychic connection between us that works across continents."

"And you're scared that you're, what, projecting your feelings onto me?" Carol asked carefully. "That subconsciously, you're making me… feel the way I do?"

"The thought had occurred to me," Harry said.

Carol considered this for a long moment, and found to her mild surprise that she wasn't especially worried, because she thought she had the answer. "Well," she said. "We know that you're not influencing anyone else around you. Or at least, you're not worried about it happening. So, it's because of our connection."

"It's two-way and not just like a phone," Harry said. "I sometimes get shots of what you're thinking and feeling, and vice versa. Sure, the same happens with Maddie and Jean, though it isn't as strong, and it usually needs to be conscious."

"And they're even more super psychic than you are."

"That too," Harry said, a little wry, before giving Carol a serious look. "I hadn't brought it up before because it was like a little worry, at the back of my head, but while we were still just friends, it was just a little worry."

"And you had bigger worries. Like the Red Room, and having your own head screwed with."

Harry nodded and looked away. "I didn't have to worry about me subconsciously influencing you into wanting something you wouldn't. Until now. And I don't want that. I really, really, _really_ don't want that. Especially considering…"

"Considering my troubles with assholes only interested in one thing," Carol said bluntly. "Well, it looks like normal service is being resumed."

Harry looked puzzled.

"It's you being stupid and noble again, not me."

Harry upgraded to confused, and Carol sighed, and laid down beside him.

"Look, I didn't want to say this, but since what with what happened last night and the fact that the space in your brain reserved for angst is empty and open for business, I will," she said. "I get why this is something you're genuinely agonising over, and I'm not diminishing that –"

"That wasn't what it sounded like."

"You're the one who gets melodramatic when they're upset. Which you have reason to be. A lot."

"Point. Two points, actually."

"Thank you," Carol said primly, before her expression softened. "Anyhow, I've seen how superpowerful you are, hell, I've _felt_ it. And that was just with that little bit you could share across the Atlantic. But I've also seen how incredibly careful you are about controlling it, how scared you are of screwing up and hurting someone. And you haven't." She took a deep breath. "Because..." She looked up at Harry. "I can't say that we haven't influenced each other – and yeah, we, it goes both ways. We probably have, because that's what friends do, psychic links or no psychic links. But even if you had, what with the number of super psychics we know, and paranoid super-spies used to spotting weird behaviour, and Doctor Strange, because even he isn't that warped, it would have been spotted."

"I'm not so sure about Strange," Harry said, but wryly, as the worry seemed to be falling away.

"Okay, maybe you've got a point there," Carol conceded. "But it isn't his style – people manipulation, yes. Mental manipulation, no."

Harry bobbed his head.

"Point is, it's sweet that you're so worried about that," Carol said. "I mean, most guys wouldn't question providence. Especially since we both know that you wouldn't mind us…" She coughed. "Stepping it up."

"I wouldn't," Harry admitted, after a very long moment. "You know that."

"And I know that you meant you said, about us being friends and that coming first," Carol said gently. "Like I said, most wouldn't question it. But you did. You took a moment to think."

"You mean, when something good happens in my life, I tend to wait for the other shoe to drop," Harry said, with a faint half-smile.

"Well, yeah, and with a life like yours, I can kind of see why," Carol said. "But anyway: what I'm thinking and feeling? It's me. _All_ me." She looked Harry in the eye. "What we both did last night? The snuggle? That was all both of us. And I liked it."

"I did too," Harry said.

"I noticed," Carol said dryly, and grinned as Harry went scarlet. "More like guessed," she amended. "But I know the noises the boiler here makes, and that shower was all cold."

Harry was momentarily speechless, but looked relieved when Carol simply looked amused. And she was. It was funny, and sort of adorable, that he was so embarrassed over something that he had absolutely no control over, having been asleep. Of course, if she'd been properly awake and noticed it, rather than just guessing from the cold shower, then things would have been rather different. And it wasn't like he'd had the monopoly on needing cold showers recently, she thought, before realising what she was thinking about, who she was thinking it near/had been thinking it about, and pulled the emergency stop on the train of thought.

It might, she reflected as she felt crimson armies marching up her face as inevitable as the Russian march to Berlin, have been a moment or two too late. In fact it definitely was, going by Harry's expression – which wasn't totally surprised. His shower slip hadn't been inspired by a sudden daydream of the two of them snuggling. Or at least, not in the technical sense.

After several long, deeply embarrassed minutes, she shot Harry a sidelong glance. "What you've said, meant, whatever, is that you kind of want to step it up," she said carefully. What I'm saying, in a roundabout way, is that part of me… would like to step it up too."

This time, Harry's eyes widened. "You're saying," he managed, trying to squash the tinge of hope in his voice.

"Not yet," Carol added. "I mean, I've got issues."

"Many, _many_ issues," Harry said solemnly, eyes sparkling with mirth.

"But still not as many as you."

"That's a given," Harry said lightly, before sobering. "And if, when, it does happen, I don't want it to be because you're trying to do it to hold the many pieces and issues of me together."

"Likewise," Carol said evenly. "I think we can agree that we both deserve better than that." She eyed him pointedly. "Even if you, Sir Self-Sacrifice of Romantics 'R Us, would probably do it anyway."

Harry had the good grace to look guilty.

"So, yeah," Carol said, and closed her eyes. After taking a moment to centre herself, she said, "I'm not sure when I'll be ready to date, let alone get… you know. But it's probably not an if. More like a when. Probably."

"I see," Harry managed, in slightly strangled tones.

"But not immediately."

"Definitely not," Harry said, conjuring water for the glass by the bedside and gulping it down

"But not too long away, either. Maybe. For now, snuggles are the limit."

"Of course."

"But long enough," Carol said, paused, then unable to resist, added with a smirk as Harry was mid-gulp, "So get used to the cold showers, buddy. You're sticking with them for a while."

Harry, predictably, almost choked, before shooting her a dirty look. "You," he said. "Are evil."

Carol laid her head on his shoulder, slipped her arms around him, and grinned. "You love it," she said.

"Gods help me, I do," Harry muttered, the mock-despair denied weight by his answering grin on his lips. Then, the grin faded slightly.

"Oh, what now?"

"This, us, whatever happens. It could get messy."

"Par for the course with you," Carol said wryly. "Everything you're involved in gets messy, then explodes – HYDRA bases, houses, giant worms… nothing's safe." Her expression softened at his troubled look. "Look, I can't see the future. I can't tell you what will happen. But one constant in our crazy lives – and the crazy, by the way, the messy parts and the exploding parts, they're half the fun – is that you care for me, and I care for you. We… we love each other, I suppose. Like you said earlier; before everything else, we're best friends. Whatever else happens with us, that'll stick."

Harry smiled a little. "That's one thing about you I do love," he said quietly, voice stumbling only slightly over the l-word. "Your optimism."

"Take that back. I'm a cynic and proud of it."

"Make me," Harry said impishly.

"Don't tempt me," Carol warned him. "You won't like my methods."

"I probably wouldn't," Harry said, sounding rather matter-of-fact as he carefully slipped an arm around her waist, at every moment seeming ready for a rebuke. "But the optimism thing. What I meant about that, is you believe. In me." He half-smiled. "But not blindly, either." The half-smile morphed into something warmer. "It's nice."

"You've shown me enough times that you're someone worth believing in," Carol said, firmly pulling the arm around her waist and yanking him closer. It wasn't the smoothest of lines or moves, she had to admit, cobbled together and a bit awkward. It certainly wasn't perfect. But when it made Harry's face light up, she thought that, like them, it might just work.

OoOoO

"So, Albus," McGonagall said, in tones of careful, controlled calm. "You are telling me that when Harry disappeared – again – it was to fight some unholy horror – again – and he will now be missing several days of school. _Again._ "

"Only one, or perhaps two at most," Dumbledore said serenely. "He should be back tomorrow, or the day after at the latest. For the most part, he has simply missed the weekend."

McGonagall did not miss the choice of words and eyed Dumbledore. "What do you mean, 'missed'?"

"He has been in a healing sleep," Dumbledore said.

McGonagall's eyes narrowed. "Why?" she asked, in dangerous tones.

"In short, Dracula was after his friend, Miss Danvers, for the power in her blood," Dumbledore said. "Harry, as a consequence, picked a fight with him. Two, in fact. He lost both, though he won the strategic battle in the latter case. In the former, he was rather impaled on his own sword. Quite literally, as a matter of fact." As he noticed McGonagall's sudden horrified expression, he added, "I am informed that it was only through the left shoulder, which is now quite functional once more, and he is otherwise as fit as the metaphorical fiddle."

McGonagall stared at him for a long moment, relief warring with exasperation, then closed her eyes and sighed an explosive and long-suffering sigh.

"Minerva?"

"One term," she said wearily. "One. Term. That's all I ask: for just _one term_ to go by without Harry finding some new, spectacular, and undoubtedly horrifying way to risk his life and take years off mine."

"I would advise asking for something more practically attainable," Dumbledore said. "Perhaps a month." He paused and considered. "Or maybe a fortnight."

McGonagall just sighed once more and shook her head. "Well, I suppose that at least I won't be badgered by Hermione Granger and Ronald Weasley about his whereabouts and state of health," she said. "I take it that this won't interfere in his participation in the Triwizard Tournament?"

"I believe it will not," Dumbledore said. "By all accounts, he is awake, active, and in good enough health to engage in a lengthy sparring match with one of his Asgardian friends, Master Ullrson."

McGonagall sighed again. "And psychologically?"

"He is, if anything, in even better mental health than before," Dumbledore remarked. "According to Thor, he has had something of an epiphany – that life is not fair, and that the universe is not an inherently just place." He raised a hand to forestall McGonagall. "And therefore, he should try to make it so."

"A worthy aspiration," McGonagall said. "Though I can only say that it is a pity that his illusions have been shattered so young."

"A pity indeed," Dumbledore agreed. "Though not exactly a surprise." He inclined his head suddenly, eyes focusing on something in the middle distance. Then, he chuckled, and raised his voice. "And speaking of shattered illusions… good to have you back with us, Stephen."

"The pleasure is all mine, Albus," Strange's voice said from right behind McGonagall's left ear. Instead of jumping or shrieking, or both, however, she simply revolved on the spot and gave the former Sorcerer Supreme a look that could have withered the life from small animals.

"That trick does not work on me, Stephen," she said frostily. "It has never worked, and you of all people should know that it will _never_ work."

Strange just smiled. "Never say never," he said cheerfully.

McGonagall's lips thinned. "I thought you were supposed to be dead," she said.

"As many people did, and as many were supposed to think," Strange said calmly. "All is well, then?"

"I would imagine that you know the answer to that rather better than we do, Stephen," Dumbledore said.

"True, but it is considered more polite to ask," Strange said, shrugging.

"As it is considered polite not to fake one's death," Dumbledore replied evenly. "I'm sure you had your reasons, you always do…"

"I had many," Strange said, casually. "For the two most basic ones, I needed to drop off the map for a few days, and Wanda needed to prove herself to the world, to show very clearly why she is worthy to be Sorceress Supreme, and why I chose her as my successor. It should save her some trouble when I do ultimately pass on." He sighed. "And you can bet that there'll be trouble. The mantle of Sorcerer Supreme coming up for grabs for the first time in centuries? It won't be pretty." He waved a hand. "She succeeded in style, very effectively and very publicly thwarting a terribly dangerous ascension attempt by some of the most infamous Dark Lords and Ladies alive, while, with aid, defeating one of the most infamous Dark Ladies in history and forcing two others to flee. Anyone challenging her right to the mantle will have a hard time arguing against _that_ , among other achievements."

"And the fact that it left you with several days when most at least half-believed you were dead, days you could use and extend as you wished, to act largely without restraint is, I am sure, entirely coincidental," McGonagall said tartly.

Strange's smile widened into a grin, but he didn't respond directly. "I am just dropping in to let you know that I will be able to continue to teach," he said, and his appearance shifted to his disguise, his accent with it. "As Professor Bach."

"That would be entirely acceptable," Dumbledore said. "On two conditions: first, you reveal who put Harry's name in the Goblet of Fire and how. Second, you explain why he did it and why you let him."

"Voldemort, at the Ministry," Strange said calmly. "Because he wants to get at Harry, he will try anyway, and if carefully managed, it is the scenario most likely to have all your students emerge alive at the end of this school year." He raised a finger. "Oh, and before either of you asks, directly or in a round-about fashion, why I have not killed Voldemort or otherwise disposed of him, it is because – among other things – if I do it, it will drastically reduce the universe's chances of surving the next few years." He smiled, this time with a sudden flare of wicked mischief, one that both Dumbledore and McGonagall, with decades of experience of a) pranksters, b) Strange himself, knew to dread. "Isn't the butterfly effect a wonderful thing? Now, I am off to arrange a reunion."

And with that, he vanished.

"Albus?" McGonagall asked after a moment.

"Yes, Minerva?"

"Do you have a certain sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach?"

"Combined with a certain sense of resignation, yes. Why do you ask?"

"I just wanted to be sure that it wasn't just me."

OoOoO

Ron and Hermione, however, were more preoccupied with the fact that Harry had vanished, (again), that that vanishing had been accompanied by signs of spectacular violence (again), and that he had then dropped off the face of the Earth. _Again_. They had been discussing this after lunch, along with the Daily Prophet's reports of supernatural turmoil in New York, a small section on the losses the White Council had taken in their latest battle with the Red Court that only seemed to be included because of Thor and Loki's involvement, and on the front page, the blaring headline, ' _DEAD OR ALIVE? What has happened to Doctor Strange?'_

Or rather, they had been, until tall, lean figure appeared in front of them.

Ron yelped. Hermione stifled a scream.

"Good afternoon," Doctor Strange said cheerfully.

"You're supposed to be dead!" Hermione managed, in a squeak that would have deafened any nearby bats.

"And you were supposed to believe it," Strange said. "As did many others. Disappointment, I am sure, will abound. Mister Weasley, I am not a ghost, so there is no need to poke me to test it."

Ron, looking guilty, hurriedly withdrew his finger, having been about to do exactly that.

"Besides," Strange added. "It wouldn't necessarily help. Today is a very gloomy day, so even outside of such a sanctum as Hogwarts, sunlight would not be a problem, and ghosts can take physical form… though they usually need to be rather powerful to do so." He paused, then as an afterthought, added, "Oh, and insane. That helps." He waved a hand. "And then there's the fact that I'm a time traveller, but that's another matter."

Ron, going pale at the thought of an insane ghost, let alone an insane ghost of Doctor Strange (who was widely and reasonably reputed to be insane anyway), took half a step back, before mustering up his courage. "If you're not dead, and you want people to think you're dead, what are you doing here?" he asked.

"And what does it have to do with Harry?" Hermione asked shrewdly.

"A very pertinent question," Strange said. "Two very pertinent questions, in fact. Twenty points to Gryffindor."

Hermione folded her arms. "Are we going to get pertinent answers?" she asked sharply.

Strange gave her an odd, wistful smile. "At times, you remind me very much of your mother," he said mildly, leaving Hermione rather non-plussed and wondering what possible interest Strange could have with a dentist. "And yes, you are." He turned to Ron. "Firstly, I have achieved what I wanted to while people believed I was dead – among other things, the disposal of a troublesome Black Court vampire by the name of Mavra, an exchange of services with the Winter Queen, and a few other… _precautionary_ measures. This allows me to move on to other, more pleasant activities." His smile widened, and Ron looked wary, as most wise beings did when they saw Strange smile, even if as right now, it appeared to be benign. While it could be said quite reasonably that he smiled quite a lot of the time, it could also be quite reasonably said that it was best to be wary around Strange _all_ of the time. "And as for what it has to do with Harry, well, what doesn't these days? But more specifically…"

He placed a long fingered hand on one of each of their shoulders. Before they could even blink, there was a strange twisting sensation, and Ron and Hermione stumbled as they found their surroundings change from the cool stone of the castle's corridors to the carpeted floors of the upper floor of Avengers Mansion.

"… I thought it would be nice for the three of you to catch up," Strange finished cheerfully, and nodded to the door nearest to them. "He's in that room, and up and about, so you can go right in." There was indeed a murmur of voices and a sound of movement and rustling cloth from within. "By all means, take as long as you like – I will happily abuse my abilities as a time traveller to make sure you get back in time for your afternoon classes."

Hermione eyed Strange suspiciously. Her suspicion was partly at this unusual openness and generosity, partly because she knew that Doctor Strange always did things for a reason, and partly because of Strange's smile, which was perhaps a little too benign to be true. She then opened her mouth to ask another doubtless pertinent question, doubtless starting with either 'why are you doing this?' or 'what are you up to?', that would doubtless remind Strange even more of her mother.

She didn't get the chance, however, because Ron, lacking her patience/paranoia, had strode over to the door and flung it open.

"Hey, Harry, you'll never believe what – _BLOODY HELL!_ "

OoOoO

Steve glanced up at the loud crash, followed by a thump and a muffled cacophony of yells, shrieks, and swearing. He was not the only one. However, since none of those noises sounded like those of genuine distress, which the Avengers were well-used to identifying, and JARVIS had not seen fit to notify them, Steve's tone when he spoke next was one of mild curiosity rather than serious worry. "What's going on?" he asked, taking a gulp of coffee.

"I brought Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger on a surprise visit," Strange said casually as he strolled in, looking somewhat incongruous in a shirt and jeans rather than his usual cloak draped ensemble. His expression was a combination of wickedly amused and insufferably smug. "They walked in on Harry and Carol in bed."

Steve, unlike the last time someone - Natasha - had used ambiguous phrasing for the two sharing a bed, calmly finished his mouthful. "Ah," he said, acting if this explained everything, and men believed to be dead ambling in, sitting down at the breakfast table, and stealing a slice of toast was perfectly normal. Which, after several years with the Avengers, it more or less was. Like with most who spent any significant length of time around the Avengers, Steve had learned to adjust to many strange things… though as would be demonstrated, that ability had its limits.

"You're more comfortable with that idea than I thought you'd be, dad," Alison remarked.

"They're behaving sensibly, I'm sure," Steve said. "And I've had time to get used to the idea." He shrugged. "I'm not exactly surprised, either. Carol's had a rough few days, and Harry's the only one she can't, and won't, try to hide it from. There's nothing sexual in it, necessarily – we used to bunk down together all the time in the army." His lips twitched. "We didn't have this new-fangled thing called 'central heating'."

"'Bunking down', eh?" Alison said, in ironic tones. "That wasn't what mum called it."

Steve went pink, and hurriedly went to swallow some more coffee, to the backdrop of a round of laughter.

"And besides," Alison continued blithely. "While they are behaving sensibly, I'm surprised you trust them to continue to do so, considering their track record of reckless decisions." She shrugged, paused for a moment for perfect timing, then added airily, "Especially considering that only their good judgement and about two thin layers of cotton stand between us and an unplanned pregnancy."

The limit was reached. And Steve, once again caught mid-mouthful, once again performed a spectacular spit-take. And once again, it was straight into Tony's face.

"Nicely done," Natasha said, impressed, raising her mug in salute.

"Thank you very much, Natasha," Alison said, matching the gesture.

Pepper, meanwhile, sighed as she passed Tony some of her never-ending supply of wet wipes with her free hand, while baby Ada watched proceedings with wide, fascinated eyes. "At least now I know where you get it from," she said.

Tony's reply, such as it was, was unprintable.

OoOoO

Soon enough, however, the elephant in the room was addressed.

"What were you doing, Stephen?" Thor asked. "Whilst pretending to be dead." He regarded Strange shrewdly. "It would have been the perfect cover to act without being observed, and while you are a master of concealment, no such mastery is perfect."

"It was, and you are entirely correct, Thor," Strange said calmly, as he selected an apple from the fruit bowl. "As for what I did, I arranged a few matters. For instance, so long as he is sensible, Mister Dresden no longer needs to fear the Winter Queen – I did her a service, involving the cure of a very senior vassal of hers from a… contagion of sorts from outside this universe, and demanded the debt he owed her as part of my price." He took a bite out of the apple and smiled smugly. "Since I was no longer Sorcerer Supreme, she could not claim that I was acting out of the obligations of my position." He examined the apple. "It also means that he will be entering his new position as Sorcerer Supreme in Waiting with no outstanding supernatural obligations."

"Only part of the price?" Loki asked, eyebrow raised. "I was under the impression that Mab was set on making Mister Dresden her new Winter Knight. She would consider her leverage on him to be a very valuable asset."

"Very set, and very valuable, from what I remember," Pepper said, frowning. "She was pretty eager to get him, in the long run, if not immediately." Her frown deepened. "And while I get it's a bad thing, or at least something he wanted to avoid, what's so bad about it? I mean, when Harry, our Harry, was in the hands of the Red Room this Mab woman tried to trick Dresden into taking this Winter Knight job. I pointed out where she was being a bit disingenuous, which he exploited, and that was literally it. But afterwards he acted like I'd saved his life."

Thor, Loki, and Strange exchanged looks, before Strange inclined his head to Loki, who turned to explain.

"There are two major Courts of Faerie, Pepper," he said. "Winter and Summer. The Wyldfae are split into a number of Courts of their own, but none matches the two main Courts for power. That power waxes and wanes according to the season – and believe me, the difference between the northern and southern hemispheres complicates things considerably. Their powers and associations tend to incline based on their respective seasons too – Winter is associated with cold, darkness, and death, while Summer is associated with heat, light, and life. While one would assume that this makes Summer good, and Winter evil, that is very much not the case." His expression turned grim. "We have seen in the recent past how powers of light, life, and fire can become something terrible when misused."

He paused, then shook his head. "And for more mundane examples, an invasive species that is not kept in check, breeds out of control and disrupts a local ecosystem, or a virus or bacterium that is not stopped and causes a terrible plague, they serve as examples of why an excess of life can be thoroughly detrimental. Death is necessary, and Winter brings death to allow for new life." He regarded Pepper. "As a general rule, Summer fae are gentler and more benevolent, while Winter fae are more savage and more merciless, so far as conventional human morality is concerned. However, there is also the logical reverse – Summer is passionate to the point of being illogical, and reasoned arguments are far less likely to sway them. Winter, by contrast, is colder and more reasonable, in the sense that they can be reasoned with. These attributes are perhaps most prominent in the respective rulers: the Queens of Faerie."

"And Mab is the Winter Queen," Pepper said.

"She is one of them," Loki corrected. "Each Court has three Queens – the Lady, the Queen, and the Mother. The Queen that Will Be, the Queen that Is, and the Queen that Was. Maiden, Mother, Crone. I half suspect that they are at the root of the triple goddess mythology – if not, they are certainly one of its earliest manifestations." He waved a hand. "In any case, Mab is the current ruling Queen of Winter. Her daughter, Maeve, is the Winter Lady and will be the Winter Queen in time – a day all sentient beings on Earth should dread."

"That is something I will second," Thor said grimly.

"Indeed," Loki said. "Mab's mother was the Queen in her day, and is now Mother Winter, a being you should all hope never to meet. Even I…" He trailed off and shook his head sharply. "She is to be avoided," he said flatly. "The current Queens of Summer, meanwhile, are Lady Lily, who shares a name with my late sister-in-law, Queen Titania, and Mother Summer. They, or rather their mantles of power, each epitomise various aspects of their Court." He shrugged. "In truth, aside from a few personal touches, the person bearing the mantle is unimportant – after a settling in period of perhaps a decade or two, at most, the new bearer becomes more or less identical to the previous one. Lady Lily of Summer, for instance, replaced Lady Aurora, after Harry Dresden thwarted the latter's insane scheme to upset the balance of the Earth, killing her in the process."

"Leading to Titania having a particular hatred for him," Strange supplied. "Aurora was insane – or had been driven insane, rather, by the same contagion that I dealt with for Mab – and needed to be stopped. Death was the only way. Titania recognises this, but… Aurora was still her daughter."

Loki nodded. "Aurora died only a few years ago, but in a decade or so more, for all practical intents and purposes it will be as if she had never died. The mantle will rewrite Lady Lily, and has already begun doing so," he said. "Which leads to the matter of the Knights. Both Courts have one mortal Knight each, to act as their agent. Each Knight is imbued with their Court's power, but is able to do what the Queens cannot. Broadly speaking, the Summer Knight protects, and their mantle is constructed to encourage those traits. The Winter Knight, on the other hand, is meant to be a hunter, a predator, that finds and destroys the enemies of the Winter Court." His gaze shifted to Bucky for a moment, who smiled sourly in recognition. "The mantle also encourages those traits."

"You mean…"

"I mean, Pepper, that it is no coincidence that a list of former Winter Knights would correlate very closely with a list of some of history's most infamous serial killers," Loki said grimly. "Some were vile to begin with. Others, though, were no worse than your average person before they took the mantle. It encourages and exacerbates inner darkness, bringing forth the most predatory and animalistic traits. Over time, good becomes bad, and bad… becomes worse. Only one, Tam Lin, was ever able to free himself of it. That is why the very prospect of being the new Winter Knight would scare Dresden out of his wits. It is also why his willingness to accept it as the price of saving my nephew speaks so well of his character." He met Pepper's gaze. "And above all, Pepper, it is why he was so incredibly grateful to you for helping him avoid that fate."

"I see," Pepper said, looking troubled.

"It is a fate that he is now entirely free of," Strange added. "I persuaded Mab that she could now look elsewhere for a new Knight, as one particular reason for her wanting him to be the new Knight was taken care of by his new position as the right-hand of the Sorceress Supreme." He flicked his hand idly. "Due to the circumstances of his birth, his magic harms Outsiders. They are monsters from outside reality like Chthon which are normally very resistant to the magic of all but the most powerful and experienced practitioners, and even the lesser ones, as you saw in your recent assistance of the White Council, are nightmarish. For Dresden, however, they present no such problems – no more so than the next horrifying monster, anyway. Since Winter's power, nature, and purpose are all bound up in protecting some particularly vulnerable borders of reality from their incursions – as Summer's are bound up in protecting the mortal world from Winter – it is inevitable that Mab would be _very_ interested in recruiting him. But now, he'll be doing that job anyway."

"Even still, I would imagine that she wasn't particularly happy that I'd effectively poached a potential prize asset, one she'd gone to a great deal of trouble to recruit," Loki remarked.

"As the old saying goes, 'you snooze, you lose'," Strange said calmly, shrugging and examining his fingernails. "Mab and I understand each other. She knows better, much better, than to get in my way." He cocked his head. The cacophony from upstairs had since settled down. "By the sounds of things, matters have calmed down."

"For now," Alison said dryly.

"Well, I think we could do with a little calm," Steve said firmly, and gave Strange a pointed look. "Even if it is only just for now."

Strange, as was his wont, merely smiled.

OoOoO

Upstairs, before Strange had had an attack of mischief, things had been pleasantly relaxed. Harry and Carol, still not dressed, had been comfortably ensconced in Carol's bed for a good couple of hours, and hadn't showed any particular inclination to move. Indeed, they had intended to have something of a lazy morning.

Needless to say, Ron bursting in had rather ruined that. For one thing Harry's reflexes were such that his instinctive response to someone barging in without warning and shouting was to unleash a punitive energy blast. In this case, telekinetic energy. As it was, he barely managed to redirect it in-time, and ended up blasting it down into the bed, and thus himself up into the wooden ceiling, which he hit with a resounding crash, before dropping straight back onto the bed, somewhat stunned.

Carol, meanwhile, had let out a shrieking yell of surprise, both at the unexpected entry and the fact that being loosely entwined with Harry as he shot straight up sent her spinning through the air, off the bed, and onto the floor. A split second later, she sprang up like a rubber ball, and pinned a stunned Ron to the wall by his throat.

"Carol, stop!" Hermione shrieked.

Carol blinked. "Hermione?" she said, puzzled. "What are you doing? And who's this?" She turned to Ron, who was slowly going purple, legs kicking fruitlessly in mid-air, and dropped him. "Tall, ginger, magic… Oh. I'm guessing you're Ron, right?"

Ron wheezed, but managed a nod as Hermione was at his side in an instant, anxiously checking his throat, which was currently pale and covered in red finger-marks. Carol winced.

"Sorry about that," she said, a little embarrassed.

"'m fine," Ron mumbled, staring up at her, at first in disbelief, before his eyes registered that he was seeing a very tall, very pretty and sleep tousled girl, wearing a t-shirt and a pair of boxers, and that said girl had been in Harry's bed.

It was at this point that the gazes of all three were drawn to the bed, where Harry was sprawled face down. A background of muted grumbling was coming from the bundled duvet.

"Is he all right?" Hermione asked, worried.

"He's fine," Carol said casually.

Hermione shot her a disbelieving look. "He went flying into the _ceiling_ ," she said, emphasising the last point.

"He's always fine, 'Mione," Ron rasped, before shooting Carol a half-stunned, half-admiring look. "By the way, you're bloody strong."

"I work out," Carol said, with a shrug that did things to her chest that Ron suddenly found very interesting.

Hermione rolled her eyes, shook her head, then said, raising her voice slightly, "Um, Harry? Are you all right?"

"You know," Harry said, muffled somewhat by the duvet. "I was hoping to get through a morning _without_ bruises. More fool me, clearly."

"He's complaining, in full sentences," Carol said, ignoring Ron, who to his credit was trying not to stare. "Trust me, he's fine."

Harry pushed himself up and glowered ineffectually at her, before blinking in surprise at Ron and Hermione. "Hey," he said. "I… wasn't expecting you."

Hermione, her composure somewhat restored by the fact that Harry seemed completely fine, swept her gaze around the room. It took in the shared bed with the crumpled sheets and duvet, the carelessly dropped towel, the relatively bare décor with none of Harry's things in it, before finally settling on the pair in question and their lack of clothes, who were slowly beginning to blush. Ron, having recovered enough from the shock of being almost strangled and of seeing Carol to remember what he'd seen when he'd burst in, and register what he was seeing now, was gaping in a mixture of utter astonishment, deep envy, and profound disbelief.

"Clearly," she said dryly.

"This… is not what it looks like," Harry said, after a long moment. "Uh. I'm not actually sure what it looks like, but it probably isn't that. Whatever that is."

Carol, who by this point had crossed her arms firmly over her breasts, nodded. "Definitely," she said, slipping around the bed and bending over to grab discarded clothes from the floor – Ron's gaze followed her a little intently at this point before Hermione firmly stepped on his foot – as well as fresh underwear from the chest of drawers. "Well, it's nice to see you, Hermione, and nice to meet you, Ron," she said, with slightly manic cheer. "Why don't you and Harry catch up?"

Then, before a response could be made, she beat a swift retreat into the bathroom, shutting the door with a very pointed bang. Harry glowered after her, entirely aware that he'd now been left alone to answer all of the no doubt numerous questions his friends had.

"Bloody hell," Ron repeated in a disbelieving mumble.

"Harry…" Hermione began.

Harry raised a hand, as he wiped the other one down his face. "Okay, stop for a moment," he said with a sigh. "I'm not doing this until I've got some clothes on." And with that, he strode out of the room, towards his own, a couple of doors down. Ron and Hermione, both still reeling somewhat, were drawn along in his wake. Thankfully for them, their curiosity did not have to wait long to be assuaged, as Harry's concept of dressed at this point mostly consisted of summoning a pair of jeans, shimmying into them, changing one plain t-shirt for a less rumpled one, and grabbing a Thor themed blue hoodie from a chair.

"All right," he said, sitting down on the bed. "You're here. How?"

"Doctor Strange," Ron said. "He's… well, he's not dead."

"And you're not surprised," Hermione said, somewhat bemused and faintly annoyed by this. Harry was indeed not at all surprised. Instead, he'd simply rolled his eyes.

"Not remotely," he said. "When Strange does something, he does it for a reason."

"Yes, Harry, but _dying_ –"

"Hermione, he's a Seer. He is _the_ Seer," Harry said impatiently. "He's not as omniscient as he pretends to be, and he's got blindspots, but I've seen the world the way he sees it, and believe me, he's close enough. I'm willing to bet that he knows exactly when he's going to die and he's got the way it'll happened planned down to the last detail." He smiled wryly. "Also, I'm cynical enough to think that if he's vanished, presumed dead, with no witnesses, then he's probably up to something."

Hermione looked doubtful, Ron, a little less so.

"Right, so Strange turned up," Harry said. "And let me guess, he grabbed you, dropped you outside Carol's bedroom door, told you it was mine and to go right in."

"More or less," Ron said. "Why…"

"Strange does everything for a reason," Harry said sourly. "Sometimes that reason is because he thinks it's funny."

There was a long, awkward silence, before Harry rolled his eyes again.

"All right," he said. "You've got questions. Ask away."

"Well," Hermione said. "We'd like to know –"

"How you ended up _in bed_ with a _girl_ ," Ron interrupted, voice half amazed, half deeply envious. "And not just any girl, either, she's bloody gorgeous. Seriously, mate, how? And why didn't you tell me that you two were…" He trailed off, unsure of what words would follow. The hand gestures that did, however, were perfectly serviceable.

Hermione glared at Ron, both for interrupting her and his monumental tactlessness. It was a fair approximation of the glare that Professor McGonagall had delivered to Doctor Strange. Ron didn't notice, however, because Harry was giving him a look that was if not outright icy, then definitely rather frosty. It was not even close to as threatening as the look that had preceded Harry's almost incinerating Seamus Finnegan, but it was not a particularly friendly one either.

"I sensed that she was upset, opened the door, and asked if she was okay," he said in a deceptively mild voice. "She's been through a lot recently, and the sort of thing that leaves a mark on you. She wanted someone to be there. That someone was me. She's my friend, Ron."

"Right," Ron said, looking a little contrite. Harry, recognising the unspoken apology, nodded. "But seriously," Ron continued after another moment, curiosity and envy overriding caution and contrition. "Are the two of you… well, I mean, it's not the sort of thing you do with me or Hermione."

Hermione, remembering a previous discussion with Harry on his feelings about Carol in which in attempting to deny he had feelings for her, he'd accidentally implied he had feelings for Ron, and promptly tied himself in a verbal knot, snickered. Harry, doubtless remembering the same conversation, rolled his eyes extravagantly at her, before turning back to Ron.

"It isn't," he admitted, before smirking. "Why, Ron? You feeling jealous of Carol, now? I'm sure she won't mind if you want to join us this evening."

Ron, unsurprisingly, boggled at Harry, before shaking his head rapidly. "I'll pass, thanks," he managed.

"Harry," Hermione said, reproving and amused at the same time.

This did nothing to dampen Harry's sense of mischief, however, as the smirk widened into a wicked grin and dancing emerald eyes flicked between Ron and Hermione. "Ah, staking your own claim, Hermione?" he asked. "Entirely reasonable. Tell you what, I'll nip down to grab some breakfast and catch up with you two… _later_." He stood up and cheerfully clapped the two of them on the shoulder, waggling his eyebrows suggestively. "I'll leave you to it. Don't worry, it'll be fine: I've got a spare set of bedsheets, there's a private bathroom, Darcy's made sure I'm well-stocked with birth-control just in case, and the rooms are soundproofed."

Ron looked like someone had flicked his brain's off-switch in the middle of a nightmare, while Hermione, red as one of Wanda's coats, was giving Harry a look that, if looks could kill, would have reduced him to his component sub-atomic particles. Harry noticed this expression (he could hardly have failed to), but careless of his own safety as usual, simply chuckled.

"And _that_ expression, the one like you're planning to blast me into chunks and feed me to Crookshanks, is why I haven't made any jokes like that before," he said.

"Make any more and I might actually do it," Hermione said ominously.

Ron, not for the first time this morning, looked like he was in shock.

Harry shrugged. "You ask me difficult and embarrassing questions, expect to get some back," he said. "Now, to get the rest of the answers on me, Carol, and the bedroom out of the way – or at least, the ones I'm willing to give… like I told Ron. She's been through a lot recently, particularly with what happened on Halloween, which I will explain in a minute. She, we, barely escaped with our lives, but she had it particularly badly. Nightmares are one of the results."

"Curse Shock," Ron said, managing to bring his brain back to the here and now. Harry arched an eyebrow at him.

"It's the Wizarding World's name for PTSD," Hermione supplied.

"Ah," Harry said, nodding. "Right. Yes, exactly Ron. She was having trouble dealing with it. For one thing, her younger brothers are having a hard time too – one of them is about Ginny's age, maybe a little younger. He was caught up in it. He had no way of defending himself, and no experience with that kind of thing, not the way me, Carol, or you two do. As a result, it's hit him much harder. And Carol's father is… away for work, so their mother is naturally focused on the younger child who's more obviously screwed up by what happened."

"The Avengers," Hermione began.

"Were mostly worried about me," Harry said. "Carol healed up physically relatively quickly, but I was out for a good couple of days after what happened on Halloween. I only woke up yesterday. I'm fine now." He winced as his left shoulder ached a little when he made a dismissive wave. "Mostly." He shook his head. "Me being around helped her."

Hermione, an only child, accepted this. Ron, though, looked a bit sceptical.

"Mate," he said. "I don't want to push, but…" He paused. "I saw how Ginny was, over the summer after second year. After what that Diary did to her. She slept with mum and dad a few times." He met Harry's gaze with surprising steadiness. "It was a bit different to the way that you and Carol were."

Harry met his steady gaze for a long moment, before glancing at Hermione, who was wearing a similar expression, and sighed, looking down at his clasped hands. "Carol and me are complicated," he said. "We're very close friends. Just friends." He raised a hand to forestall interruptions. "But maybe, at some point, we'll be a bit more," he continued. "Not right now, though."

"Why not?" Ron asked, somewhat puzzled. "I mean, you like her, she seems to like you, what's the problem?"

"Carol's had issues in the past," Harry said. "Some more recent, because of what's just happened. And as for me…" He sighed. "I'm not exactly sane." He waved a hand to forestall them. "I'm not saying I'm going to suddenly go crazy or anything like that, because I'm not." He glanced at Hermione. "But the fact is that after all that's happened to me, I'm like a broken mirror. I'm putting myself back together again, being put back together again, and I'm definitely better than I was. But I'm still not in one piece." He shook his head. "Neither of us is ready yet, Ron."

"We understand, Harry," Hermione said gently.

"Yeah," Ron said. "We get it, mate."

Harry looked up at them and smiled. "Thank you," he said quietly. "Keep this quiet, please? Neither of us particularly likes talking about it, and while dad and the others know when to stop teasing… the fine details are a bit private. I'd rather it didn't become the next item of gossip at Hogwarts." He looked a bit sour. "Though I think our classmates will have enough to talk about with me being the fourth Triwizard Champion. The inquisition on _that_ should be fun."

"The betting's already started," Ron said.

"On whether I'll win?"

"On how much you'll win by," Ron corrected. "Everyone reckons it'll be a walkover, that you'll flatten Krum, Diggory, and the French girl. And, well…" He looked a little embarrassed.

"What is it?" Harry asked with a sigh.

"The biggest bets are on how you long they'll last against you and what you'll do to them," Hermione said. At Harry's stony expression, she gave him a look that combined sympathy with a sense of 'are-you-really-surprised', and said, "It's not exactly surprising, Harry. You've got a reputation, these days, even just for things that have happened at Hogwarts."

"Like what, exactly?" Harry asked, in a sour tone that suggested he knew very well what was meant, but wanted clarification.

"You took out the entire Ravenclaw team with the Dangerous Dai Decoy because they pissed you off, you blew up half the school at the end of last year, and you spent most of last month stomping around looking you wanted to kill everyone," Ron said bluntly.

"I only blew up the Entrance Hall," Harry said. "And that part technically wasn't even me."

"It's gossip, Harry, no one cares about the details, even if they knew them," Hermione said impatiently. "The Hufflepuffs aren't happy, either."

"Because they think I'm going to kill Cedric?"

"Because they think you stole his – their – glory," Hermione said.

"And because they think you're going to kill him," Ron added helpfully. "She's right, though, Harry. Hufflepuff never win anything, and everyone says that Hufflepuff is the House the Hat puts you in if you're not good enough for any of the others."

"Even though the _actual_ Hogwarts champion is a Hufflepuff," Hermione said pointedly.

"Well, Diggory's the exception, isn't he?"

"Really, Ron? Former Hufflepuffs have been the backbone of the magical world, including _serious_ magical research…"

"Cedric's a good bloke," Harry said quietly. "He's decent, he's kind, and he's brave. He doesn't come off as being an idiot, either. He's a worthy Champion." His lips quirked into a half-smile. "Maybe even Worthy." He shot a look at them both. "Speaking of Champions, have they come out and said anything about me taking part?"

"Apart from the fact that you're a Champion? No," Hermione said.

"They're probably waiting to tell you when you get back," Ron said wisely, and Harry dipped his head in acknowledgement. "What we'd really like to know, though… what happened on Halloween?"

Harry sighed. "Okay. But I suggest you sit down. It'll take a while."

OoOoO

It did.

"So," Ron said eventually. "That's the sort of thing you deal with these days. Vampire Kings, battles for the fate of the world, almost getting killed every few months..."

"More or less," Harry said, then smiled wryly. "If you throw in actually getting killed occasionally in there too."

That would have ended it, had Hermione not been watching Harry with a very careful expression. "Harry," she said. "I've got a question. About happened on Halloween, with Dracula."

Harry raised an eyebrow. "Go ahead," he said.

"Why was Dracula so interested in Carol?" Hermione asked. "Objectively, there's no reason to pick her over any other ordinary human, and plenty of reasons not to, even without considering your psychic connection." She eyed Harry. "There's something else, isn't there? Something you're not saying."

Ron blinked, and turned a similarly thoughtful look on Harry.

"There are a lot of things I don't say," Harry said mildly, and as Hermione's eyes narrowed, added pointedly, "Because they're not for me to talk about. But…" His gaze suddenly lost focus for a few moments, and he cocked his head as if he was listening to someone. After a few moments, he nodded and refocused on two of his oldest friends. "Normally, it wouldn't be a matter of you being trustworthy or not – which you both are. I would trust you both with my life. I have, as a matter of fact. Normally, I'd say it's too dangerous to know, it'd make you a target. And it's not for me to say."

"But?" Ron asked impatiently.

"But some serious bad guys know this secret too, probably because Voldemort ransacked the brains of a lot of the people who knew anyway and dad's pretty sure he used it to get Dracula to act on Halloween and play distraction," Harry said. "And, well, Carol says I can tell you. So does her grandmother, Alison."

He looked up at Ron and Hermione, gaze deadly serious. "You can't tell anyone this. And I mean _anyone_ , not your parents, not your families. This is a secret that people have _killed_ for, and not just simple murders, I mean mass slaughter, by the likes of HYDRA and the Red Room – thousands and thousands of people have died. Only a few people know it – the Avengers, and a few others, mostly people who were around when Carol figured it out over the summer. She didn't even know until then." His gaze locked onto Ron. "I really mean it. Carol's extending a lot of trust here, not because she knows you, but because I know you, I trust you, and she trusts my judgement. You can't breathe a whisper of this. Understood?"

He got two very serious nods.

"Okay," Harry said. "Carol's related to Agent Peggy Carter. _The_ Peggy Carter is her great-aunt. Carol's grandmother is Alison Carter – you'll probably meet her later, she's downstairs."

"She was Peggy Carter's little sister, then," Hermione said.

"Yes," Harry said, tone becoming meaningful. "Peggy Carter's younger sister. Her much younger, blonde, blue eyed sister."

There was a moment. Then, Ron's eyes widened to comical extents. "No _way_ ," he whispered in awe.

Hermione was only a moment behind, gasping. "Oh my god," she managed. "She's – they really – she's actually –"

Harry smiled slightly. "Yes to all of the above," he said, before his smile faded. "Steve and Peggy had a moment shortly before he went down in the Red Skull's jet and got frozen. Peggy had a daughter nine months later, with blonde hair, blue eyes, and as it turned out, all the super soldier abilities her dad had had. They pretended that Alison was her sister –"

"Why not a niece?" Hermione interrupted.

"Peggy's only sibling was an older brother who'd died several years earlier."

"Oh."

"Right," Harry said. "Alison is, now, Deputy Director of SHIELD, and that was after she spent a decade or so in retirement. She's a very nice woman, very kind, very friendly, and usually seems totally harmless, sort of like Dumbledore."

"You mean she's a bit barmy?" Ron asked, eyebrow raised.

"I mean that if you see the non-harmless side, you'd better hope to any god listening that you're not in her way. She used to go up against Natasha when she was one of the bad guys, and that is not something many people did more than once," Harry said. "She had all the super soldier abilities, but kept them hidden. Neither of her children had them, not really, and none of the grandchildren seemed to either. Then Easter happened, and the mountain we were on…"

"Enhanced you all to the peak of your adult potential," Hermione said promptly.

"More or less," Harry said. "Though we didn't have a bloody clue how to use it, let me tell you. If we had, if _I_ had, HYDRA's killer robot would not have been a problem. I could probably turn that thing into scrap now, let alone how strong I was then." He shrugged. "Anyway, Carol became an adult super soldier. At first, people thought that since the serum is an all round enhancement of a human to peak potential, that's just what the mountain did. But since the change stuck, it didn't. She had the super soldier potential, it woke up, and it stuck. She's every bit the super soldier her grandma is, and accounting for age and size, every bit the super soldier Steve is." He sighed. "After that, we're not sure what happened, but Dracula got wind of it. Like I said, Voldemort probably tipped him off. And Dracula wanted Carol's blood for some kind of blood magic rite – when Grey Court vampires drink the blood of someone who's more than just human, it gives them a boost." He smirked. "Or in my case, terminal indigestion."

"Hang on, you're poisonous to vampires?" Ron asked.

"Not the word I'd use," Harry said. "Short version: Phoenix fire is in my blood, thanks to Mum. The Phoenix really Does Not Like vampires. Or dark magic and the undead in general, actually, which gets them both coming and going. They try to drink my blood…" He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a faded vampire bite mark. "And they go up like torches."

"You were _bitten?_ " Hermione asked, horrified.

"I might be capable of flattening a reasonably sized mountain, but physically, I'm still only a little more than human," Harry said calmly. "He got past my guard, and he very briefly regretted it." He sighed. "Anyway, when Grey Court vampires want to add power permanently, to them and those they sire or have sired, there's an ancient blood magic ritual, surrounding that spiked chair thing I mentioned. It's how they have most of their weirder powers, like turning to mist and weather manipulation." He grimaced. "And since Carol's got the formula that essentially perfects the human body, removing all basic flaws, in her blood, Dracula got the idea that if he used her in the ritual then he could become immune to daylight, and so could any vampire he sired, and maybe any vampire he'd already sired. In one fell swoop, one of the Grey Court's biggest weaknesses would be gone."

"So that's why you went up against him, then," Ron said. He looked Harry up and down, expression a little dubious. "You _look_ fine."

"So I'm told," Harry said dryly.

"And Carol, she looks fine too," Ron said. "I mean, she's all right." At Harry's expression, he amended it. "Well, physically, at least. I mean, last person I saw move _that_ fast was Sergeant Barnes!"

"Bucky's faster than she is," Harry said, though in tones of addition rather than correction. "He's got quicker reflexes than Steve, too, though Steve can outrun him in a straight line."

Ron's expression tightened a little, and he nodded. "Yeah," he said. "And you said that those other friends of yours, Uhtred and Diana, and another friend, Jean-Paul, were involved too. And someone called Gamble."

"Gambit," Harry said evenly. He didn't need telepathy to read Ron, and see where this conversation was going.

"Right," Ron said, and now there was a definite and ominous harmonic in his voice. "You got them involved."

"Ron," Hermione sighed.

Harry, for his part, simply regarded Ron steadily. Then, he raised a single finger. "First," he said. "I did not get Uhtred, Diana, and Gambit involved. Doctor Strange did that." He raised another finger. "Yes, I got Jean-Paul involved."

"What can he do that I can't?" Ron demanded angrily.

"Cruise at Mach 4," Harry said calmly. "About seven times faster than my Loki-improved Firebolt, and ten times faster than any normal Firebolt. His normal top speed is Mach 10, and even that is holding back, a lot." His expression turned deadly serious. "Ron, I'd rather go another round with Dracula than fight Jean-Paul, and _not_ because he's my friend."

Hermione raised a sceptical eyebrow, which Harry noticed.

"It's not just a matter of what he can do that you can't, Ron," he said. "Because he can do a lot. Honestly, at full strength, he's one of the most powerful people I know. There's something more important than that: what he will do that you won't."

"What do you mean?" Ron asked, anger derailed by confusion.

"Imagine Natasha," Harry said. "Not just her looks, but her attitude. Now imagine her male, with super-speed. That's Jean-Paul."

Hermione's eyes widened in understanding, while Ron still looked puzzled, so Harry elaborated.

"Along with the Winter Soldier, Natasha was the best agent ever produced by the Red Room, the people who make HYDRA and the Death Eaters wet themselves. And like my uncle after he regained his sanity, she didn't lose any of the nastier skills she learned when she became one of the good guys. Or a willingness to use them when required."

"Oh."

"Yes. Oh," Harry said. "And," he added, raising another finger. "As for the others, I'd still pick them over you in a fight. They have enough in the way of combat skills, while as Bucky demonstrated, you don't. That's nothing to be ashamed of. Uhtred and Diana have been trained to one extent or another since they could walk, by Asgard and Olympus' respective Goddesses of War. And I'm not just talking hand to hand. You're both stronger than average, magically speaking, a good deal stronger than average, and Hermione knows a decent amount of wandless magic." He smiled wryly and glanced at Hermione. "Fire magic excepted, you actually probably known more than I do. And if you don't, it's only because of Doctor Strange." The smile faded. "You don't, either of you, know serious combat magic. Not just spells – I'm pretty sure that Hermione has memorised every spell up to your level, and probably a few supposedly beyond."

"I could believe that," Ron muttered, smirking, as Hermione blushed and glowered at both of them.

"Knowing complex, 'powerful', spells isn't important," Harry continued, as if Ron hadn't spoken. "A jelly legs jinx is more or less harmless, but it can immobilise a stronger and faster opponent, buying you time to escape or prepare something more effective. A full body-bind is first year level, and would work even better. Put enough power behind them, and you could bring down some pretty powerful things. And if they're armed? The disarming charm is one of the simplest spells possible." He grinned at Ron. "And as we all know, a good levitation charm can do all kinds of damage, used properly. Strong spells do more damage, but most bad guys expect a frontal assault. Doing something different and unexpected, can give you an edge."

"So what do you mean by 'serious combat magic', if not spells?" Hermione asked frowning.

"Technique. Strategy. Tactics. And above all, preparation, because power is useless if you don't know how to use it properly," Harry said bluntly. "That's how, despite having enough psychic power to level a city, and enough magical power to set what's left on fire, the one person who actually succeeded in killing me wasn't a God, a Dark Lord, or even a Vampire King. It was a man with healing abilities and a set of sharp claws. In fact, he might as well have had a single knife, it wouldn't really have made a difference. Because I was stupid, and I didn't think, and I didn't use my power effectively."

"And what, we're stupid?" Ron demanded, firing up again.

"Ignorant," Harry corrected him. "Untrained. And inexperienced. Against Daken, I should have known better. If you were making the same mistake, on the other hand, it's because you simply didn't know. There's no crime in it, but it still ends up with the same result: you. Dead." He raised a fourth and final finger. "Because physically, you're still human. Physically, against creatures like that, you can't survive your mistakes." He met both their gazes, expression deadly serious. "And before you protest, Ron, I'd like to tell you something. Uhtred. He's stronger and tougher than Hagrid and most of Tony's suits, he's set to be one of the most powerful Asgardians outside the royal family, and he's Sif's protégé to boot. When I told him about Aragog and his children, he wanted to go giant spider hunting, and the only reason I told him no was because it would upset Hagrid."

"Yeah, I've met him," Ron said, puzzled. "So what?"

"He was with me on Halloween," Harry said, tone now one of measured calm. "He lost an eye and a lot of blood, after a particularly powerful vampire ripped several chunks out of him. If he hadn't been taken to hospital almost immediately, and he didn't have his healing abilities, he'd be dead. Thanks to the wonders of Asgardian medicine and healing abilities, he's going to be fine – even the eyepatch is temporary. But he very nearly wasn't."

"Blimey, mate," Ron said. "But –"

"Diana was thrown through the arc reactor under this house, which is still being repaired, and got some pretty serious burns," Harry continued. "Professor Lupin was there too. He had several fingers splinched off by a dark anti-apparition ward, then wound up with several broken ribs and injuries all down one side because he was clipped, just _clipped_ , by a chair that a vampire threw at him. If it had hit him full on, he'd be _dead_. Bucky narrowly escaped being turned to ash by a lightning bolt from Dracula. Thankfully, a lightning conductor got in the way. And for my part, Dracula beat me to a pulp, stabbed with my own sword, and hit me with enough lightning that I am honestly surprised I'm not giving everyone I touch electric shocks. The only reason I survived my first fight with him was because he didn't want a war with Asgard and the Avengers. The only reason I survived my second fight with him was because dad, the Hulk, and uncle Loki arrived before he could seriously try and murder me."

There was a long silence.

"I know because I'm up, about, and everything seems cheerful and normal – or as normal as my life gets, anyway – that Halloween was quick and easy," Harry said, tone not having wavered once. "It was quick, but it wasn't easy. Aside from the people I've listed, Carol was nearly drained dry and her little brother was nearly turned into a vampire snack, then almost knee-capped. An American fighter pilot actually was turned into a vampire snack, despite Carol's best efforts to save his life."

"Knee-capped?" Ron asked.

"Imagine a blasting curse to the knee."

Ron went pale and nodded.

"What I'm saying," Harry said eventually. "Is that if you had come, you would have died. You have the power, but you don't have the training or experience to make it count, or the durability to survive your mistakes. And even if you did, it might not matter: lot of much more skilled and experienced people than either you or me barely survived that night."

He looked at Ron. "Yes, I've kept you out of this side of my life," he said. "Both of you. Not because I want to exclude you, but because I want to keep you alive. It's not a safe side of my life."

He looked around the room, and quirked a brief, but happy half smile. "It definitely has its upsides. Overall, I'm happier than I was last year. But it has its downsides too. If I got you involved in this side of my life, then there is a very good chance that you wouldn't survive the experience." He folded his arms. "You would be put in the line of fire of some of the most evil and most powerful groups and beings in the world, in the universe even. They would kill you, just because you're there, because you were in their way, or to get to me." His mouth twisted into a mirthless smile. "Voldemort in particular likes doing that." The smile vanished.

"That's what you'd be letting yourself in for. Or part of it, anyway," he said. "If you did survive, if you weren't killed, tortured, or transformed in some kind of horrific way, then you wouldn't be the same: you could say goodbye to your innocence, your peace of mind, and a lot of the time, to your ability to properly relate to anyone who's not taking the same path." Harry sighed, closing his eyes briefly. "You'd end up with blood on your hands. You'd end up with more scars, mental and physical, than you can count. Odds are, you'd go through hell. And you'd always be walking on the outside. And..."

"Harry," Ron said. "Mate. We want to help. Even with all that."

"I know!" Harry snapped, voice cracking like a whip. "Sorry," he said, sighed, and rubbed a hand over his face. "You want to help. You want to support me. I appreciate that, I really do - more than that, I need it. If it wasn't for my friends, for you guys, I would quite literally have gone completely insane. And I need different things from different friends: Jean's basically the big sister I never had and never knew I needed and helps on being a super psychic, Diana sympathises on the whole psychic demigod thing, Uhtred helps with the... warrior side of me, I suppose, Jean-Paul usually provides blunt and scarily sharp personal insights, Maddie..." He paused, and looked away. "Well. The two of us share certain things that others don't."

"And Carol?" Hermione asked, quietly.

Harry grinned suddenly, like a ray of sunlight on a cloudy day. "She tells me when I'm being an idiot," he said. "And..." The grin faded into something more solemn. "She's there. I'm not alone. Never alone." He smiled a wry smile, and shrugged. Neither gesture was half as nonchalant as he intended it to be. "Accidental psychic connection. What can you do?"

"What about us?" Ron asked, a touch resentful. "What do we do?"

"You're normal," Harry said simply. "In the good way, not the fucking awful Dursley way. Honestly, you two are just about the only normal thing in my life. You help keep me grounded. You help remind me of the world outside of my insane life of super-spies, evil villains and their plans, and cosmic whatsits. The normal world - more or less - that I walk through fire to protect. That makes it worth it." He shrugged. "Also, get the lot of us in a group and we tend to think broadly the same way. You both provide an outside perspective. Perspectives."

He leaned back and sighed.

"I don't need more soldiers in my life," he said. "More warriors in the battle between good and evil, or whatever. And I don't need you dragged into this side of my life. And this isn't just me being selfish, overprotective, or 'indulging my guilt complex', either: Jean mostly stays out of it too, and she's scarily powerful. Jean-Paul too, and not only is he scarily powerful, he's just plain scary when he wants to be. They'll come if and when I call, but it's not their scene, for the most part. It isn't even just me thinking this – it's your friendly neighbourhood magical chauffeur too."

"Doctor Strange?" Hermione said, puzzled.

"The man who's been arranging my life, and everyone else's, down to the last detail since basically forever? Yes," Harry said. "He's purposefully kept you two on the outside of my life too. Think about it - he whisked you two here today, but he never did it before."

"Actually," Hermione began.

"He got you, and the Twins, involved in putting uncle Loki back together for the Battle of London," Harry said, nodding. "I know. And you notice how even when he did that, you were kept far from the fight, not even involved after you were finished? There was plenty of fight to go around. And he even kept you both away when he was gathering everyone up to talk me down after the Red Room, when I was the Dark Phoenix. Why?"

His gaze swept over both of them, lingering on Ron for a half moment too long. "I don't know, exactly. But the message was clear: he didn't want you involved. He wanted you on the outside; not throwing you aside, but as a tie to a normal life, to the person I was before. Because I need you to be who you are: two of my oldest friends who've stuck by me through thick and thin. Who've tried to help even when I've thrown it back in their faces. Who can show me, remind me, how to be normal." He smiled slightly. "Well. Relatively speaking." He met their gazes one last time, green eyes soulful, serious, and pleading. "I realise it's a bit selfish. But can you do that for me? Please?"

The two shared a look, then both nodded seriously.

"Of course," they said in unison.

Harry smiled another of those warm, sunlight smiles. "Thank you," he said.

OoOoO

Carol, having changed and washed, re-emerged onto the landing hoping – perhaps a little unkindly – that Harry had taken the brunt of the embarrassing questions from his friends. Of course, there was every chance that that the Avengers would take up that particular baton, but that couldn't be helped.

As she descended the stairs, she paused as she caught the tail-end of a conversation.

"How in Merlin's name can you be so bloody casual about what happened?" the red-head, Ron – the Twins' little brother – said in disbelief. "Dracula skewered you with your own bloody sword, he nearly drained your girlfriend -"

A very familiar exasperated sigh. "She's _not_ my girlfriend, Ron."

"Your friend," Ron amended, albeit somewhat sceptically. Considering the position he'd caught them in, clothed or not, Carol grudgingly had to admit that she could understand his scepticism. "He nearly drained her like, like, a squeezed orange or something like that. And you nearly died beating him. Again!" Another thought seemed to strike him. "You're a Triwizard Champion too! And you're just... you're just _standing_ here, like nothing happened! How?!"

Harry sat and thought about this for a while. "I suppose that's about scale, partly," he said eventually. "I mean, Ron, this wasn't the end of the world compared to some of the things that I've been through this last year and a bit. Actually, it was more about average..." He smiled lopsidedly. "Anyway. Dracula was beaten. And in the process no one died, no one was permanently maimed, even if we did come very close to both. As a result, the psychological trauma should be limited to a few nightmares here and there. It wasn't a walk in the park, but I've had much worse. So has Carol."

"And," Hermione began, in the careful, cautious tones that Carol would have expected from her, at least from their brief acquaintance.

"I'm not angry?" Harry finished mildly. "You're wondering if I'm even angry at Dracula, who turned a boy to use as a scout simply for sheer convenience? Whose minions threatened my goddaughter? Who nearly squeezed one of my dearest friends dry like, as Ron says, an orange, almost killing her in the process?"

"And stabbed you," Ron reminded him carefully, as if he thought Harry might have forgotten.

Harry waved this away as if it didn't matter. "I'm angry," he said, answering the rhetorical question. "But one of the things I've been learning is perhaps best summed up in a lesson that a man called Erik was taught a long time ago and recently passed on to me: 'anger makes a good servant, but a poor master.'" He smiled wryly. "So yes, I'm angry. But I'm learning to use it, not let it use me." The smile sharpened slightly. "Plus, there's the fact that considering where I left him, Dracula didn't exactly get off scott-free. At the very least, he must be absolutely humiliated."

There were two expressions of surprise, ones met with a smirk unnervingly reminiscent of Doctor Strange. Carol recognised the smirk – it was the one Harry whipped out when he was anticipating something thoroughly unpleasant happening to someone who thoroughly deserved it.

"Think about it," he said. "Dracula, son of the Dragon, the God-Slayer, King of the Grey Court, out-smarted by a couple of teenagers, a couple of muggles, and a mortal mage in a glorified tin can? That'll sting. That'll sting even more than dad hitting him in the face."

"And the Tournament?" Ron ventured. "What about that? You, uh, you didn't seem too happy about it."

Carol snorted faintly, a noise that Harry could not possibly have heard, but one he acknowledged with a brief flicker of the eyes up to where she was and a wry smile. While she had not seen the fall-out of that particular incident, Harry having been otherwise occupied, then having had a couple of days to cool down, she knew him well enough to know that Ron's remark was an understatement of _epic_ proportions.

"I'm not," Harry said, then shrugged. "But considering what Dracula just tried to pull, it's in perspective as a minor annoyance. I can put up with it. And besides - Voldemort wanted me in the Tournament, which means that he's going to try something in it. Which, at least, means that I have some idea of when he's next going to try and pull something on me." He grinned. "And who knows? Maybe the tasks will even be fun."

Carol rolled her eyes slightly in amusement, before stepping out to join them. "Before or after you carve a trail of burning rubble and utter chaos through them?" she asked.

"I was thinking more during," Harry said cheerfully.

Carol rolled her eyes again, this time more extravagantly. "Of course you were," she said. "It's not a real Harry party unless there's a smoking crater of some kind."

"I can do stealthy," Harry said, offended.

"You can," Carol acknowledged. "Until you either get found or you lose your temper and everything explodes."

Harry sulked, but did not disagree.

"Was he always like this?" Carol asked, appealing to Ron and Hermione. "Because I'm saying it right now, this is not my fault."

Ron and Hermione exchanged a look. "The sulking, or the explosions?" Hermione asked, with a hint of amusement.

"Either? Both?"

Another exchanged look.

"Yeah, pretty much," Ron said, after a moment, and as Harry shot him glare with little real heat, shrugged. "Sorry, mate, but you do tend to make a mess."

"And be moody," Hermione sighed. "Though, granted, you do tend to have better reason than most."

"I think this is what they call being damned with faint praise," Harry said sourly. "Maybe I should be moody instead."

"Do that and I'll set Pepper on you. And Wanda. And Sirius. And Jane and Darcy and your dad and whoever else is needed," Carol said. "I will even get Steve to do his 'Captain-America-is-disappointed-in-you-yes-you' look, and the only people that doesn't work on are grandma, Nick Fury, and Bucky."

Harry stuck his tongue out at her, which Carol took to mean that she'd won. It was also at that point that she noticed two different expressions from Ron and Hermione. Hermione's was part fond, part thoughtful, part faintly wistful. Ron's, meanwhile, was a good deal more complicated and hard to read.

"Harry, do you and Hermione mind heading into breakfast without us?" she asked, nodding at Ron. "I want a quick word with Ron about a coupla things."

Ron looked bemused, as did Hermione – though her bemusement was touched slightly with worry – while Harry raised an eyebrow briefly, before nodding. "I'll save you some coffee," he said.

Carol nodded, and with that, adroitly piloted Ron off to one side. Ron, unsurprisingly, wanted to know why, and expressed it in no uncertain terms.

"What's this about?" he demanded.

"My finely honed super senses detect that you aren't entirely happy with Harry's explanation/fobbing off," Carol said bluntly.

Ron glowered, but didn't disagree, which Carol took as encouragement to continue.

"Lemme guess," she said. "You wanted to be involved in the vampire thing on Halloween. He shut you down then, and he shut you down again now. Probably a bit more nicely now, but it still comes to the same thing."

Ron nodded, glower fading. "It's like… it's like he thinks I don't know," he said. "What sort of thing he's facing – what you're facing with him. I mean, I know there are things that I don't know, that I can't know. But I want to know, and he won't let me." He looked up at Carol. "He lets you, though."

There was an unspoken question there, several. "I could say that he lets me because I don't let him stop me," Carol said. "And that would be true. However, looking back on all the scrapes we've got into, there's only one where he could theoretically have had the chance to tell me no. All the other times, we generally didn't know what we were getting into, so there was no chance for him to say no, if you follow me. As a result, he's got used to having me along." She shrugged. "Also, he knows I'd reach down his throat and rip his guts out if he tried to leave me behind."

"What was the one time?" Ron asked.

"The Battle of London," Carol said. "And there were a couple of reasons why he didn't. First, we'd just found out about my connection to Steve, so he couldn't just tell me no – it was family. Second, he wasn't even really thinking about that. His focus was wreaking as much havoc on HYDRA as he could. And he did." She shifted her gaze back to Ron, and now it was shrewd. "Which is kind of what you want to do, isn't it? You're not along just to support Harry. You're after HYDRA, I remember Harry mentioning it. There's something personal…"

"My dad," Ron said shortly. "The Winter Soldier killed him."

Carol froze for a moment, then said carefully, "The Winter Soldier? You're sure?"

Ron shot her a look that spoke volumes.

"Okay, you're sure," Carol said, a little apologetically. "Sorry – it's just that from what I've heard since, stories of the Winter Soldier popped up in every shadow that was a little too dark for comfort. Even more so once people knew he was real."

"He snapped my dad's neck," Ron said in a flat voice. "Probably on Malfoy's orders. Him and dad always hated each other."

"I'm sorry," Carol said quietly, while questions ran frantically through her head: was Bucky responsible for this? If so, did the Avengers know? Did _Harry_ know? She shook her head and hauled herself back to the present. "So. Since the Winter Soldier is gone, you want the person who was giving the orders," she said.

Ron nodded. "Harry's my best mate," he said, and Carol did not miss the brief glance he shot at her, nor his attendant worry that she was usurping that status. Carol couldn't honestly have said yea or nay to that, as even having a backdoor into Harry's head didn't always make it that much easier to figure out what he was thinking. "I'll back him through whatever he needs, whenever he needs it. But he's also the most likely person to run into HYDRA. He finds trouble."

"Ain't that the truth," Carol muttered, and sighed, trying to ignore the part of her brain that was persistently reminding her that the Winter Soldier – or to be more accurate, the man who had been the Winter Soldier – was not only alive and well, but in this house, and more than that, a regular resident of Hogwarts these days. "Okay, so you're not going to take no for an answer on this, and I honestly can't blame you. But my advice would not be to keep pushing at Harry: he can and will out-stubborn you. Also, HYDRA's not his top priority right now, and considering what Harry's shown himself to be capable of, I think that HYDRA will be going out of their way to avoid him. But."

She paused and eyed Ron.

"You're really determined to do this, huh?" she said. "I figure you are, but like Harry's probably told you, this kind of hunt does not take you happy places. And it does not do happy things to you. What it does to you…" She sighed. "Everyone deals with it differently. "Harry gets grumpy and snarky or chirpy and snarky by turns, I get plain snarky, Steve destroys a dozen punch-bags and then puts his everything-is-fine mask on, Clint generally seems chirpy or professionally detached, I can never read Bucky or Natasha, Thor and Loki have millennia of experience to call on... Even still, though. We might deal with it in different ways, but we're all covering up the same kind of thing. And it's not the kind of thing you want."

"I do," Ron said flatly.

"Yeah, I figured you'd say that," Carol muttered. "Fine. Like I said, you can't out-stubborn Harry. Best you can do to convince him would be to learn from someone else. Harry's not someone you want teaching you, anyway. He's a good teacher, when he wants to be, but even if he wasn't busy half the time mastering what he's already got, it wouldn't work. The skill-sets you have overlap, but they don't overlap enough. Harry's super-soldier fast and super-soldier strong, and he's getting faster and stronger all the time. He uses every bit of that speed and strength in combat, and he can and does jack it up with his telekinesis, as long as he's concentrating. He save his wand for precision work and special-occasions. It's not so much that you can't learn what he can do, it's more that a lot of what he does is going to be physically impossible for you."

Ron frowned, but it was thoughtful frown. "Who'd you suggest, then?" he asked.

"Sirius Black," she said instantly. "Harry's godfather. He's 'just' magical, aside from being able to turn into a fucking huge dog, and from what I hear, he's a very, very good magical fighter. Him, or Harry Dresden. Dresden's magic is different to yours, sorta, but he's got the same problems as you – more or less human physique, for starters. Thor could probably teach you the same stuff, but he probably wouldn't if Harry asked him not to – I can't say for sure that Harry would ask him not to, but it's a risk. Sirius and Dresden are probably your best bets, and Sirius is the one who's in the Mansion right now, with the most free time."

She paused. "Though I think he can't go back to Britain for some reason." She met Ron's gaze. "Also, get some hand to hand. Harry mentioned that that Sean Cassidy guy's around, and that he knows his stuff." She paused then, hating herself a little bit, added, "And Bucky's an expert. Though, again, he'll probably be busy with Harry." After a moment she shook herself and moved on. "After that, I'd look up SHIELD rather than just waiting for something to happen to Harry. They're the ones who hunt HYDRA professionally, and while I can't say for sure, I'm pretty certain that they'd snap up a powerful and already semi-trained wizard in an instant. If not, my grandma helps run their superhuman stuff, and I can put in a good word. Though, knowing grandma, she probably knows everything about you down to your shoe size already."

Ron nodded. "Thanks, Carol," he said. "I appreciate it."

Carol smiled wryly. "Yeah well, keep your eyes off my boobs, and I'll call it even," she said.

Ron, predictably, went red as a tomato.

OoOoO

Breakfast, afterwards, went pretty much as expected – copious amounts of teasing took place, even more copious amounts of breakfast were eaten, in between many rude gestures made in lieu of rude responses to the latest teasing gag. These were not too belaboured, save by Tony, to the occasionally pained expression of Steve. Harry, for his part, soon retreated into spoiling his goddaughter, and Tony changed tack to complaining about how Harry was seducing his daughter away from him. This merited a response.

"It's not my fault, Tony," Harry said, expression studiously innocent. "I'm just prettier than you are."

Tony gaped for a moment as the entire table collapsed with laughter, before faux-sulking.

In truth, he didn't really mind that Harry was getting a moment or two with Ada, having moved – barely – past the stage where the only things that could separate him from his daughter were Pepper or a carefully applied Infinity Stone. Now, so long as she was within eyeshot, and preferably arm's reach, he was more or less happy. He had also attempted to reward Sirius, Remus, and Bucky with, respectively; open return tickets to Las Vegas with offers to introduce him to all the great, good, and bad but fun people there; lifetime memberships of every library and museum the Stark family had ever donated to; and a laptop entirely devoid of tracking devices or taps of any kind combined with an apparently almost infinite line of credit, apparently so Bucky could book a holiday for himself and Natasha somewhere entirely discreet but also entirely luxurious.

This, Harry was informed, was apparently the more reasonable version.

In any case, breakfast passed peacefully enough, with only one minor hiccup.

Part way through, there was the sound of doors opening, and everyone glanced upwards, as was now the habit when communicating with JARVIS. Equally, he had learned to respond to non-verbal cues. Even more equally, Tony rarely let a silence pass when he could contribute to it.

"JARVIS, who's our unexpected morning moocher?"

"It is Ms Maximoff, sir," JARVIS replied. "She was apparently invited."

Every head turned as one to Doctor Strange, who once again, simply smiled.

"You know, it's generally considered good form to tell the host before you invite someone along," Tony said, more for form's sake than anything else.

"I believe that she has already eaten," Strange said casually. "And here is as good a place as any to announce my return to her – and that she is taking up more former duties full time." His expression turned sober. "I shall also, I expect, have a discussion with her and some of the rest of you about why this is coming about."

Wanda opened the door, gaze sweeping the room, before freezing. Not, though, as most would have expected, on Strange. Instead, it froze on Hermione. It was only brief, and since Hermione had wound up sat next to Strange, a fine distinction. Most observers would have missed it. But more than a few round the table knew to look for such fine distinctions, and they were given a whacking great clue by the way that Wanda then turned on Strange – who was looking smugger than usual – a look that would have killed anyone else where they sat. Most would simply have taken this for Wanda's dismay/anger at her former teacher's antics, which was technically true. Which set of antics this was, though, was one that evaded most.

"Good morning, Wanda," Strange said. "Apple?"

Wanda shot him another look that said 'I would reduce you to a puddle of goo but it would ruin my friend's perfectly nice carpet', then pointedly ignored him and went over to greet Harry, Thor, and her other friends, Clint, her ex, included. And, of course, to coo over little Ada. In doing so, a careful observer might have noticed how she passed over Ron and Hermione, particularly the latter, save for politely cursory greetings. They were technically fitting for her godson's schoolfriends, but even still, that observer would remark... they were a little distant.

Finally, after greeting everyone, she took her seat opposite Strange, and the rest of the table's inhabitants subtly shifted away. This allowed them both to get out of the firing line, and enjoy a better view. Carol, for her part, had already acquired popcorn, from an unknown source that on most days, probably answered to Loki.

"So, Stephen," she said, tone frosty. "Rumours of your death are, once more, gravely exaggerated."

"As I intended them to be."

"As you very thoroughly intended them to be," Wanda said coldly. "Receiving the mantle, the Cloak, and the Eye was something of a shock. I expect you'll be wanting them back."

"I will not, as a matter of fact," Strange said mildly. "Rather than you being _my_ successor, Wanda, I am now _your_ predecessor. My time as Sorcerer Supreme is done. My dispatch of the mantle to you under circumstances that made it appear as if I was dead, while you were facing a terrible threat – an ascension rite of Kemmler's making, no less, with the greatest of Kemmler's disciples, the Warlock known as Cowl, and both Selene Gallio and Tom Riddle. This both gave you an additional edge in the fight to come, and very clearly demonstrated to many mortal and immortal observers that you are a more than adequate successor."

Wanda was stunned for a moment, before rallying, anger clearly sparking within her. Then, she sighed. "I suppose I shouldn't be surprised," she said. "So. I am now the Sorceress Supreme for good."

"For so long as you live and continue to wield the mantle," Strange said, nodding. "I can't pretend that you won't have people who challenge your claim to the position, but I equally think that you are more than capable of demonstrating that you deserve it for reasons beyond simply being 'Doctor Strange's choice'. For one thing, I chose you to be my successor because you are the best. You are not the best because I chose you to be my successor. Remember that distinction, because it is a very important one, and people will try to convince you that it is the reverse."

"I… thank you, Stephen," Wanda managed, momentarily knocked a little off-balance.

"My pleasure," Strange said briskly. He picked up a piece of toast and set about buttering it. "As you know, I have recently been teaching at Hogwarts, partly to tutor Harry – the younger Harry, I should say – and partly for other purposes," he said. "In doing so, and in exchanging a few notes with my learned colleague on certain students." Here he inclined his head in graceful acknowledgement to Loki, who returned the inclination in a faint, wryly amused fashion, before returning into carefully not looking at Hermione. "I have discovered that Miss Granger, here, has magic increasingly like yours – chaos magic. While it has manifested only intermittently thus far, these things tend to find their way out, as we both know. And when it does, as we _both_ know, it tends not to be pleasant at all." He shot Wanda a pointed look. "I think that both she and I would be pleased for her to have someone with experience of such things guiding her footsteps. I would, and I will, offer my assistance, as and when I can, but I will be occupied with Harry and a number of errands I now have to perform."

Wanda shot an unreadable look at Hermione, who was sitting somewhat nervously and rather awed, aware that she was caught between modern day magical legends. Harry, meanwhile, had been looking from Hermione to Wanda with a puzzled expression, which transformed into wide-eyed disbelief, before being replaced by a thoughtful and confused frown.

Finally, she glared at Strange, who remained unmoved, before nodding. "Of course," she said, and turned to Hermione with a small, slightly forced smile. "Forgive my initial attitude, Miss Granger." She eyed her teacher. "Stephen has a tendency to spring things on me unexpectedly, for various reasons of his own, including his own amusement. Additionally, in teaching you, I will be revisiting a part of my life that I had largely put behind me."

"If it makes you uncomfortable, Ms Maximoff," Hermione began nervously, before Wanda's raised hand cut her off, along with a more genuine looking smile.

"My discomfort at the resurrected memories is a passing irritation," she said. "Especially compared to the chance to prevent some other young woman going through the same kind of hell that I did. I will be happy to teach you." She shot Strange another evil look and added, through slightly gritted teeth, "Though I would have preferred to be warned first, rather than simply having it sprung on me out of the blue."

Strange, as usual, looked entirely unrepentant. Wanda shot him a smaller glare, one that suggested that there were going to be repercussions later on, before giving Hermione a slightly wan smile. "When you're done with breakfast, I'd like to have a little chat with you to see where you are, magic wise, and what signs of chaos magic you've shown – some of them, you might not even recognise," she said. "If that's all right with you?"

"Of course," Hermione said, a little starstruck. "I'd love to."

Wanda's smile became a little less wan, and for a moment, tears might have gleamed at the corner of her eyes. "I'm glad to hear it," she said.

OoOoO

After discussions pertinent to each, particularly Hermione and chaos magic, and Ron feeling a bit left out – though he was somewhat mollified when Harry pointed out that he was being left out too, and Wanda was _his_ godmother – goodbyes were said, and Ron and Hermione headed back to Hogwarts, to their long temporally delayed afternoon lessons, courtesy of Doctor Strange. Strange had then stayed to talk to Wanda, more seriously than earlier.

Harry, meanwhile, had taken this as a cue to go up and pack. This was a largely token effort, since what he'd taken to Avengers Mansion was what he'd worn, which was either portable or ruined. As a result, even considering his briefly being side-tracked by Tony who was working with Sirius – who'd just finished a long chat with the just departed Ron – on a full set of armour for Harry, and wanted to take his various sizes, while growsing that like all teenagers, Harry was growing all over the place, before Pepper rescued him, he was ready to go in fairly short order.

"If you ever need to talk about anything, call me immediately," Thor said seriously.

"And if you're asleep?"

"Then I shall wake up."

Harry arched an eyebrow and smirked. "And if you're… _occupied?_ "

Jane went pink, but rolled her eyes. "If he's 'occupied'," she said. "He probably won't notice, and he'll check back afterwards."

Darcy, predictably, let out a lewd and piercing wolf-whistle.

Thor coughed, and eyed his son, who looked cheerfully unrepentant. "This year will be harder on you," he said. "You will be even more in the public eye than usual, and many threats and problems will not be obvious to the first glance, and their solutions, even less so. If you want advice, or even your father's sympathetic ear, then I am here."

Harry gave him a hug. "Thanks," he said, with a genuine smile. "I will."

Thor grinned. "Good," he said. "Then give 'em hell."

"Literally, or figuratively?"

"Figuratively," Jane said firmly, leaning in to kiss Harry on the cheek. "But if literally is required, I can arrange it. Just say the word."

Harry grinned at his probably-soon-to-be-step-mother. "I'll hold you to that," he said, giving her a goodbye hug as well.

He said his goodbyes to the rest of the Avengers in a similar, fairly relaxed fashion – after all, he hadn't been away long, and they'd probably come to see the First Task, which was only in a couple of weeks.

Finally, he came to Carol, and the two stared at each other for a long moment. Then, they shared a wry smile and a long, tight hug, and if Carol kissed Harry on the cheek, no one commented on it. Even if, in Tony's case, this lack of comment was achieved by Pepper's hand being firmly applied to his mouth.

And then, courtesy of Doctor Strange, before one could click one's heels three times and think of home, Harry found himself back at in the currently very well inhabited Gryffindor Common Room. His first thought, after noticing that Strange was nowhere to be seen, and that both he and Bucky were the subject of rapidly increasing curiosity, was both fitting and a touch incongruous.

 _Well. At least he let me keep my clothes on._

 **And that is where this particular chapter ends. It took a little finagling to round it off at Hogwarts, and a couple of scenes being chopped and/or moved, but I didn't want to risk this little ending bit dragging out over several chapters. Still, the shippy stuff should leave most of you very happy.**

 **Anyhow, the next chapter or so will be a rapid acceleration towards the First Task, which I have left remarkably poorly attended. I have Plans for it, don't you worry, Plans fully deserving the capital letter, oh yes… *cackles***


	38. Chapter 38: One Equivocal Evening

**Well, this was an unexpectedly quick new chapter. Granted, I had a fair chunk of it written up already, but even still… well, as usual, fic serves as a good rest from writing my dissertation. And said dissertation is very nearly done, a prospect I regard with both joy and trepidation.**

 **Anyhow, this chapter turned out a little more serious than I intended, with a lot of discussions on the line of moral ambiguity. It also fills in a little bit of Alison's past, while kicking on Harry's character development, and showing the already present differences from his canon self. So, read on, enjoy, and please review.**

A couple of days after Harry departed for Hogwarts, Carol found herself mulling over something that had been bothering her ever since she'd had a certain chat with Ron Weasley. Specifically, the fact that Bucky used to be the Winter Soldier. Well, that hadn't bothered her _per se_ – after all, her best friend who was very firmly not (yet) anything more had been turned into his successor. What did bother her, though, was the fact that he'd been picked as Harry's bodyguard, when as the Winter Soldier, he'd snapped the neck of Arthur Weasley, late father of Ron Weasley, best school-friend of Harry.

She considered the options and dismissed each in turn.

Steve tended to overlook, if not ignore, Bucky's Winter Soldier days. Natasha had a lot of complicated history with the Winter Soldier, probably wouldn't give a very helpful answer, and in any case, was kind of terrifying. Clint, fantastic arms aside, was someone she didn't know very well – also, she was pretty sure that he was Bucky's grandson by Harry's transfiguration teacher, so yeah, that was a hornet's nest she didn't want to poke.

Thor, she suspected, would probably be unhappy about it, but ultimately consider it an unfortunate side-effect of protecting his son. As for Loki, ditto with knobs on, swapping 'son' for 'nephew' – while he wasn't evil anymore, she knew enough of what he was capable of in pursuit of protecting family that she severely doubted a few lies would really register as a moral consideration. Bruce probably wouldn't be happy if it was brought to his attention, and making Bruce unhappy was a Bad Thing. Tony, meanwhile, deemed Bucky responsible for saving his daughter's life, which meant a) he'd probably do anything for him at this point in time, b) he probably wouldn't be all that objective.

As for the civilians, Jane generally deferred to Thor when it came to Harry related things. Darcy might be helpful, but a semi-sober discussion on deontological vs teleological ethics was not what Carol was looking for at the moment. Sirius, like Thor, would focus more or less entirely on the fact that Bucky was protecting his godson and doing what he couldn't. Remus, again, she didn't know so well, but she suspected he'd probably defer to Thor, who was one of his oldest friends from another life.

Who she should talk to was, in the end, fairly obvious. Even if they weren't immediately that helpful.

"It's complicated, darling," Alison said.

"Why do I feel like that's adult code for 'I don't want to talk about it'?" Carol wondered aloud.

"Your feeling is wrong," Alison said dryly. "It normally is, granted, but in this context, it's code for 'this is not easy to explain and a fair bit of it is speculation'."

"Oh."

"Indeed," Alison said. "The short version is that your young man is at heart, a very sweet, very kind, and very decent person. However, he has not been in the best of mental states recently. In fact, he's been borderline insane. It was only a couple of months ago that the Red Room were trying to torture him into their new prize killing machine, their heir to the Winter Soldier. And while they only partly succeeded, they did horrible damage to him. You know that better than most. He's been preoccupied with his own pain and his own problems, which is quite reasonable under the circumstances. Goodness knows many teenagers are like that anyway, and unlike them, he actually has good reason. Accordingly, when Bucky was appointed his guardian, no one really spared it much thought, much less considered its implications for people other than Harry. That is the first part."

"Okay, with you so far," Carol said.

"Good," Alison said. "The second part is that Harry's experience as the Red Son and Bucky's as the Winter Soldier are, while superficially similar, as different as chalk and cheese. While Harry was set to be turned into, essentially, the Winter Soldier Mk II, his mind was removed from his body before that could happen. It was locked away, safe and sound, while his empty husk was reprogrammed. Bucky, by contrast, was reprogrammed, parts of him overwritten. Moreoever, he was the Winter Soldier for decades, over half a century. And he wasn't just a guided missile or a kill sat, the way the Red Son was. He was used for more sophisticated missions as well, ones that sometimes required at least a semblance of humanity."

"So he lived," Carol said softly.

"Yes," Alison said. "Despite the best efforts of handlers and programmers alike, and in large part thanks to Natasha, he formed an identity of his own. It was part James Buchanan Barnes, part programming, part the experiences he'd had since, all jumbled up. That's why the Soldier had quirks, like never hurting children if he could possibly avoid it, when the Red Son didn't. Harry and the Red Son were two very different people. Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier, on the other hand, were not. Are not. They are different sides of a coin, but they are still the same coin."

"Okay," Carol said slowly.

"Harry doesn't get that," Alison said. "Or to be more accurate, he probably knows it, but prefers to think of Bucky and the Soldier being different people. With that logic in mind, especially in the mind of someone so familiar with possessions, body swapping, mind control, and telepathy in general, he feels Bucky is not responsible for what the Soldier did. He can distinguish between the two personalities in a way a non-psychic can't possibly understand."

"Okay, but –"

"This also assumes that he even knows what the Winter Soldier did to Arthur Weasley," Alison said. "I think he does, but it's possible that he doesn't. As I've said, he's been very busy these last few months, and now… Bucky is his bodyguard. It's the way things are."

"But Bucky, the Soldier, he still," Carol began.

"He snapped Ron's father's neck with his bare hands," Alison said calmly. "I know. It would have been far from the first widow he made that way. I've killed more than my share, a few that same way. Clint, Natasha, Thor, Loki even before he went mad, Bruce as the Hulk, and even my father. We've all killed, and all like that too." She sighed at Carol's expression. "I know. It doesn't make it any better. It doesn't help me to live with it, in truth. The fact that each of them was necessary does that." She paused. "And though I'm speculating here, I'm pretty sure that the Soldier did it for the same reason."

"How the hell was it _necessary?_ " Carol demanded, suddenly furious.

"Can't you think why, Carol?" Alison asked mildly. "You know better than most who and what HYDRA had in that base of theirs. They didn't invent the concept of a 'fate worse than death', but they certainly took it to new depths, and they would have _loved_ to experiment on someone like Arthur Weasley. And that's even before you consider that HYDRA's leader, Lucius Malfoy, had a well-known grudge against Arthur." She sighed again, and looked sad. "As for the Soldier, well. It was around the time when he was showing signs of his own personality beneath the programming. Only a couple of months before, he saved your life."

"I know," Carol said quietly. "And that's part of why I don't get it. I mean, from what I heard, he – the Soldier – killed one of those giant psycho HYDRA werewolves, with his _bare fucking hands_ , and then carried me all the way down a giant fucking mountain in the middle of the night in the middle of a colossal fucking blizzard."

"And you're wondering why he didn't do the same for Arthur," Alison said, nodding. "You'd have to ask Bucky for the real answer about that."

"But you have a theory," Carol predicted.

"I have several," Alison said. "Firstly, you were a child." She raised a hand as Carol looked indignant. "By the Soldier's reckoning, you were. You might have proven yourself capable of bearing a grown woman's burden, but that was how he would have seen you. And the one moral principle the Soldier consistently held was that he would never intentionally harm a child. No one's entirely sure why – I don't think even Bucky knows for certain." She shook her head. "In any case, you were a child, and Arthur Weasley was not. Accordingly, he might not have been able to defy his orders enough."

Carol frowned. "And your other theories?"

"Secondly, around this time he was working to undermine HYDRA from within. Natasha stated that she offered him the chance to come in from the cold at Easter, shortly after he was sure you were safe, and he refused on the grounds that he could do more damage as a double agent. In that capacity, he managed to save Mr Pietrovitch's life," Alison said. "He might well have had to sacrifice Arthur Weasley to protect his cover."

Carol frowned.

"I know," Alison said. "It's dirty business. But often necessary."

Carol didn't disagree, but she didn't agree, either. "You got a third theory?"

"I do," Alison said. "That he had no other choice. And that it was the best he could do."

Carol frowned again.

"There isn't always another option, darling," Alison said gently. "You know that. I wish you didn't, but you do. And whatever the reason, Carol, considering the likely alternatives, and how it was done… I honestly think it was the closest that the Soldier could manage to mercy."

Carol absorbed this as best she could – which meant that she didn't fall off her seat, though she was chilled to the bone. Intellectually, she knew that Bucky had been the Winter Soldier, but hearing this, having met the son of one of his victims (the son of one of his victims who was particularly focused on revenge, that is)… it brought it home. Her grandmother rubbed her back, steadying her, but said nothing.

"Okay, let's stop asking why he did it. Why did the Avengers pick him?" she asked eventually. "They _knew_."

"Necessity," Alison said. "Bucky is quite simply the best at what he does, nasty though it is. He is also unyieldingly loyal, he has full knowledge of what Harry has been through thanks to a degree of shared experience that leaves him well placed to manage Harry's recovery, along with the skills and judgement to teach Harry what he needs to know to watch his back."

She stood up and folded her arms.

"Most crucially of all," she said. "He is also one of a very short list of people outside the Avengers, and an even shorter list of combatants, who can make that young man behave when he's wobbling, to pull him back when he's right on the edge. Of that very, very short list, he is more or less the only one who could pass mostly unremarked as Harry's bodyguard." She regarded her granddaughter steadily. "And you would know better than most, darling, how close to the edge Harry's been recently."

"He's getting better," Carol said indignantly.

"So he is," Alison agreed. "But when Bucky was assigned, he most definitely needed someone to rein him in. Posting him to Harry's side was the lesser evil."

Carol, again, didn't respond directly. "Why didn't I think about it – the implications, I mean?" she asked quietly. "I mean, what the Winter Soldier did… it's not exactly secret. In our circle, anyway."

"Oh darling," Alison said, voice a whole mix of emotions as she slipped an arm around her granddaughter's waist and hugged her. "It wasn't for you to worry about. You had quite enough on your plate with your own experiences with the Red Room, and your young man's on top of that."

"Not what I meant," Carol mumbled, a little muffled by her grandmother's shoulder, which she was resting against.

"I know," Alison said. "The simple truth is that we tend to see the best in our friends, and the worst in our enemies. You didn't want to see that side of Bucky, and neither did he. Neither of you ever had to. You never had it brought home." She sighed. "Until now."

There was a long moment of silence. Then Carol broke it.

"It's still not fair," she said abruptly, standing up and out of her grandmother's reach. "I get the logic of why you guys feel that it has to be him, and maybe it does. But it's still not fair. Not on Ron, who's spending so much of his time around the man who, whatever the reason, killed his fucking father. Not on the Twins, who're in the same boat. Not on Bucky, who has to spend every day around them and other people whose parents he killed when he most definitely was not in his right mind. And not on Harry, either. He has to lie to Ron, his oldest friend, lie to his face, and do it _every single day_ , about who his bodyguard and mentor really is, because said bodyguard is the same guy who killed Ron's dad."

"I know," Alison said eventually. "And I have every sympathy for Harry's position. But we don't have any better choices."

Carol stared at her for a moment, disbelief, frustration, and anger roiling in her. "Is that _it?_ Is that _all_ you're going to say?" she demanded. "'Yeah, sucks to be them, but that's life, it's necessary, move on'?" She waved a hand irritably. "Also, 'every sympathy for Harry's position'? Do you even understand what that position _is?_ "

Alison regarded her granddaughter for a long moment, expression unreadable. "Yes," she said quietly. "Actually, Carol, I do understand it. Intimately as a matter of fact. Every day, I work with people whose friends and colleagues were killed by the Winter Soldier, and those forces he led. Every day, I lie to them, openly or by omission, by allowing them to believe that the Winter Soldier is dead. I have every sympathy for Harry's position, darling. Because I am in it. Every. Single. Day."

She closed her eyes briefly, took a deep breath, and added, "And I understand young Mr Weasley's position, too. I've had bad experiences with the Winter Soldier: him and Natasha were key parts of the incarnation of the Winter Guard that kidnapped me for the Red Room and their alien allies. They nearly killed me, they nearly killed Howard, Howard Stark, and they nearly killed my mother. The Winter Soldier nearly killed Jackie Falsworth, a speedster like Jean-Paul who went by Spitfire, and it was only her speed that saved her. And there were others, some of them dear friends, who weren't so lucky. One of them was Brian Falsworth."

"As in Montgomery Falsworth, the Howling Commando?" Carol asked.

"Yes, he was Montgomery's son," Alison said, and smiled faintly. "Well, I say Montgomery – I always just called him Uncle Monty." The smile faded. "Brian was a few years younger than me, and in many ways, he was like the little brother I never had. In his early twenties, he became a secret agent codenamed Union Jack, working for the British government. Thanks to an enchanted amulet that gave him serious superpowers, he went from secret agent to super agent, and became a counter to one of the earlier iterations of the Winter Guard, the Red Room's superpowered elite."

"What, all by himself?" Carol asked, startled.

Alison smiled wryly. "Like I said, serious superpowers," she said. "But he had a relatively normal partner, Agent Roger Aubrey a.k.a. the Destroyer." Her tone turned dry. "Originally, it was 'Dyna-Mite', and then 'Pocket Rocket', but understandably Roger preferred _not_ to focus on his height." The smile faded. "I was one of the few who knew that they were more than just professional partners. I even acted as Brian's beard a few times, while Roger made his own arrangements. They were good men, as kind and decent as the spy business let them be, and they loved each other dearly. And the Winter Soldier killed them – Brian with a vibranium jacketed bullet, Roger with an ordinary one, both through the head. The bullets were large sniper rounds, so as you might imagine…" She paused and closed her eyes. "Well. I sincerely hope you can't imagine. Suffice to say, it wasn't pretty." She sighed. "It broke Monty's heart. Brian was his only child, and his wife died of cancer a few years later. He was a shell of his former self after that, until he died of a heart attack a few months ago."

Carol stared, mouth opening and closing as she tried to find the words, before finally she shut it, blinked a few times, then shook her head sharply. "I… Oh god, grandma, I… I didn't…"

"You didn't realise," Alison said gently. "You didn't think. I know."

"I'm sorry."

"Apology accepted," Alison said. "I'm not minimising what Harry must be feeling, what Ron is feeling now, let alone what he'll feel if he ever finds out. I just want you to understand that I'm not just being a callous bitch in thinking it's the right option. I understand, I really do." She half smiled. "There is, I'll admit, a helping of callous bitch in there too. A lifetime as a super spy tends to leave you with a certain moral flexibility, and an inclination towards what's practical over what's right. But it's not just that. Like I said, I get it. The Winter Soldier killed people I cared about too. And he was not the only one. Often enough, Natasha helped him do it. After all, for many years the Black Widow and the Winter Soldier were all but inseparable."

Carol stared for a long moment, then nodded slowly. "That one doesn't surprise me as much," she remarked. "The Natasha thing."

"Oh?"

"She's awesome, but she scares the crap out of me, and…" Carol grimaced. "I never really saw the Winter Soldier up close. The only time I met him before he became Bucky again, I was unconscious, and he was saving my life anyway. Sure, I've never met an evil Natasha, either. But I have been inside the Red Room, I've seen what they do to people, and I've met an evil Black Widow, too. So imagining evil Natasha isn't as hard as it might be."

"Fair point," Alison acknowledged. "Though Yelena Belova was, and is, insane in a way that Natasha never was. Which is something that, to my mind, made Natasha a much more dangerous opponent."

"Yeah, having gone a couple of rounds with the Black Rip-Off, and sparred a couple of times with Natasha, I think I can pretty definitively say that I'd prefer _not_ to go up against Natasha, given the choice," Carol said firmly. She sighed. "Okay. Fine. But… is Bucky really the only option?"

"Not quite," Alison said eventually. "There are others. Not as trustworthy, perhaps, on deployment elsewhere, or psychologically imperfect. But those issues can be remedied. Like it or not, though, the fact is that Bucky is the best. And going by the amount of trouble he attracts, the best is exactly what Harry is going to need."

OoOoO

Harry himself, however, was not so burdened by worries. Instead, at this point in time he was relaxing in the Gryffindor Common Room.

"Um, Harry?"

Harry looked up from his latest reread of _Quidditch Through the Ages_. "Neville," he said, sitting up. "Hey. Something I can help you with?"

Neville looked nervous. Or to be more accurate, since 'nervous' was arguably Neville's ground state of being, like he was nerving himself up for something. "I wanted to ask you something," he said, then after a long, expectant moment, he shot a glance at Bucky, who stood up.

"I can…" he began.

Harry, however, cut him off, discarding his book and standing up. "No, it's all right," he said, putting an arm around Neville's shoulder. "Neville and me can have a chat in the corridor outside."

Bucky met his gaze for a moment, then nodded and settled back down, resuming his previous task of reading an extensive file in what looked like some sort of code, while Harry piloted Neville outside. After he'd done so, and at Neville's nervous glances at the portraits, moved down the corridor to find an area where the portraits were either empty, or their occupants dozing.

"Okay, Neville," he said, folding his arms. "What is it?"

Neville fidgeted for a moment, then said, "You're a legilimens, right?"

"A telepath, but that's fine detail," Harry said.

"And you're a really powerful one," Neville continued.

"Strongest mortal psychic ever born, with exactly two exceptions," Harry said, tone neutral. "Of course, I'm not exactly mortal anymore, but the psychic powers come from that side of the family tree. What are you driving at, Neville?"

Neville mumbled something.

Harry raised an eyebrow, then softened his tone a little. "Neville?" he asked, more gently this time. "What is it?" He reached over and gently took Neville's shoulder. "I'll help you, if I can, but I can't help you if I don't know what the problem is."

Neville's eyes, nervous and conflicted, flickered up at him, the message in them clear, no telepathy required.

"I could look," Harry said. "Yes, I could. Easily. But I try not to do that. I can't avoid seeing, or hearing, some things, but I try to filter as much out as possible." His tone turned dry. "Believe me, at a school like this, it's that or go mad."

Neville snorted slightly.

"You can tell me, Neville," Harry continued, more gently now. "You already did. Just a little louder, this time."

"… My parents," Neville managed. "They're… they…" He took a deep breath. "They aren't well."

Harry closed his eyes. He remembered now. His father had told him what had happened to the Longbottoms, and it had not been pretty. "And you want me to help them," he sighed.

Neville nodded, a little more confident now. "They were – "

"Tortured into insanity by the Lestranges," Harry said quietly. "I know. My father was a friend of your parents', he told me." He sighed. "And you want to know if I can fix it."

Neville nodded again. "If you can't, it's all right, I just thought you might –" he began, before stopping as Harry raised a hand.

"If I can, Neville, I will," he said. "That much I can promise. But."

"But?"

"But I don't know if I can," Harry said. "I've been on the wrong end of psychic attacks before, I've seen the damage they can do. I've got more than a few psychic scars of my own. In my experience, everyone reacts differently to long term psychic damage. There's also the problem that I don't know how the Cruciatus Curse works. Does it attack the pain centres of the brain? Or does it attack the mind directly? Are looking at physical brain damage, or spiritual damage? Or is it a mix of the two?"

"What's the difference?" Neville asked, frowning.

"If it's physical brain damage, then I probably couldn't help, no matter how much I wanted to," Harry said bluntly. "I can do basic healing magic, but only a fraction of what someone at St Mungos would know. I could do it another way: I'm a very powerful and, frankly, a pretty talented telekinetic. However, I know very little about how human brains are wired up, and if I tried to rewire one, a damaged one…" He shuddered. "Let's just say that I wouldn't want to risk it."

"And if it's spiritual?" Neville asked.

"Depends what form it takes," Harry said. "If it's like psychic wounds, or scars, then maybe I can help, but there's only so much I could do, after all this time. If their minds have just fled to somewhere deep in their subconscious', then I can find them and bring them back." He gave Neville a serious look. "But the thing is, Neville, messing around with minds is not something you should try lightly."

Neville, to Harry's surprise, looked up and glared, squaring up to him in spite of the differences in height, build, and raw power. "I know," the other boy said, in a hard, quiet voice. "I _know_ it's not something you should try lightly, I _know_ it's risky and it's dangerous, and I _know_ that mind magic is dangerous – it's the reason my parents can barely recognise me in the first place! If you won't help, just tell me!"

Harry blinked a couple of times as the echoes faded, then sighed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean… what I was _trying_ to say is that psychic repair-work is difficult, dangerous, and can have a lot of unforeseen side-effects. I'm a very strong psychic, yes, and I can do the telepathic basics pretty well. But I've only tried psychic healing on someone once before, someone who was just a bit traumatised, who had nowhere _near_ the trauma your parents have, and it ended up forging a permanent psychic connection. Just for one, relatively simple thing. Gods alone know what could happen to your parents, whose minds are probably in a much more fragile state – I could break them with one wrong move, and believe me, I really, really, _really_ do not want to do that."

"So, you can't, then," Neville said.

"I don't know how, I don't want to risk making it worse, and I don't want to risk making it worse," Harry said simply.

"Worse?" Neville asked, voice suddenly edged.

"Your parents recognise you. They are, to some degree, functional," Harry said evenly. "I'm guessing from the fact that you haven't said otherwise that they aren't unhappy, probably because they aren't really aware of what they've lost. If I went in and screwed up, I could reduce them to mindless vegetables, do seriously painful psychic damage that would leave them at best miserable and even less functional, or in agony and actively dangerous. I could even kill them. So yes. I know it's hard to imagine, but it could get worse, Neville."

He shook his head. "Anyway, I thought you should at least know why I probably can't help. But I'll ask a couple of people, a couple of the best psychics I know, if there's anything that they can do. And Doctor Strange too – odds are, if it's possible, he knows how." He put a hand on Neville's shoulder and met his gaze. "I can't promise anything, Neville, other than that I'll try. But I will definitely try."

Neville offered him a slightly shaky smile. "Thanks," he said, before pausing, and rummaging around in his robes and producing a letter. "Oh, I forgot: Professor Dumbledore gave me this to give you."

"Thanks," Harry echoed, taking the letter and ripping it open, whilst wondering vaguely why Dumbledore would pass a message to him through Hogwarts' most forgetful student. As he glanced back up at Neville, though, he realised that this was unfair on Neville. Most people dismissed him as not merely clumsy and forgetful, but useless and frankly, stupid.

He wasn't either of the latter two things, though. Forgetful, yes, but not stupid or useless. He was excellent at Herbology, for one thing, and he was brave as anyone in Gryffindor: he'd stood up to all three of Harry, Ron, and Hermione back in First Year, having previously gone hand to hand with Crabbe and Goyle, and just now, he'd squared up to Harry himself, which was no small thing these days.

Back in First Year, Harry had just been a fairly ordinary student, no different to Ron or Hermione, to all intents and purposes. Now, as Harry knew very well, that was not the case, being aware that he commanded a reputation as a force of nature with a short temper and a significant capacity for holding grudges (a description that, Harry had to admit, wasn't exactly inaccurate).

No, Harry could definitely say that Neville was not stupid, not useless, and most definitely was not a coward. And going by what Harry could sense of him, he was actually a fairly powerful wizard, if a thoroughly accident prone one. Perhaps, he mused as he opened the letter, this was a side of Neville that Dumbledore saw more of than he did.

"What is it?" Neville asked, sounding curious.

Harry scanned the letter, and sighed. "I have a detention with him tomorrow," he said. "It's about something that happened on Halloween. You know, I'd actually forgotten about that." He paused, and looked at it again. "Oh, and he wants to discuss my participation in the Triwizard Tournament, probably to make sure I don't accidentally kill anyone…"

"You really don't want to take part, then?" Neville asked, a little puzzled.

"Not really," Harry said, pocketing the note. "I have all the fame and glory I want, I don't need the money, and I get enough thrills in my spare time without having them at school too." He eyed Neville. "But you'd have liked to, I'm guessing."

Neville nodded. "It would have been a chance to prove to my grandmother that I'm like my parents," he said. "Like my dad."

Harry frowned. "She goes on about that a lot?" he asked.

"A bit, yeah," Neville said. "Not as much recently, though."

"Well, she should be proud of you for who you are," Harry said firmly. "Rather than going on about who you're not."

Neville flushed, and said nothing, which was quite all right. He didn't really need to.

OoOoO

The next day, Harry duly arrived at the door to Professor Dumbledore's office, knocking, then entering as he was bade to.

"Harry," Dumbledore said quietly, before inclining his head to Harry's ever present bodyguard. "Bucky. Please, sit down."

Harry sat, while Bucky took up position by the door.

"Tea?" Dumbledore asked. "Hot chocolate, perhaps? Or maybe coffee - I hear that your uncle has a certain talent for making it."

Harry, looking as puzzled as he felt, said, "Hot chocolate, please, Professor." This was not how he'd expected the detention to go.

Dumbledore nodded and waved his wand, making the requested drink appear. As Harry sipped, he spoke.

"First of all, I should inform you that your participation in the Triwizard Tournament will come with conditions," Dumbledore said. "Your psychic abilities will be restrained, though not completely deactivated, as on discussion it was deemed that this struck the best balance between maintaining a competitive balance and your own safety. Should something go critically wrong, you will be able to deactivate the restraints and use your abilities freely. This will, of course, lead to your disqualification from the Task." As Harry brightened, he added, "And in case you were tempted to deactivate your restraints as soon as the task begins, I am afraid that the Goblet requires you to at least make some effort to participate. It was a measure added to the enchantment to minimise interference in the Tournament and prevent coercion of the Champions into throwing the match, as it were."

Harry privately thought that this was a flawed rule at best – one that only worked if it was known about by those who would otherwise interfere. Then again, it might be that it had once been better known. After all, the Tournament hadn't been properly performed for centuries.

"Now, as to the detention itself, you are probably wondering where the lines to drill home your wrongdoing are, the speeches sternly reprimanding you for your behaviour, followed some back-breaking task assisting Mister Filch in his duties," Dumbledore said. "For most students, those would be sufficient. However, you are not most students,."

He steepled his fingers and regarded Harry with unblinking focus.

"All such speeches and duties would do is reinforce your stubbornness, make you feel justified in your defiance. Contrary to what you may believe, the purpose of school discipline is to help you, to make you realise the consequences of your actions, that they have consequences, not merely to browbeat you into submission," Dumbledore said. "I do not believe in punishment for the sake of punishment. You have made it abundantly clear that mere detentions are not likely to faze you, and why would they? After all, you have been through things a thousand times worse than the most severe punishment I would ever sanction. I could force you to apologise to Professor Snape and Mr Crouch, but I doubt that would achieve anything – as you demonstrated on Halloween, you are sufficiently eloquent as to convey a complete lack of remorse with the most contrite of words."

Harry tried not to look pleased. Going by Dumbledore's expression, he failed.

"So, what now, Professor?" Harry asked.

"Now, I am going to ask you to do something much harder than simply clean every trophy in the trophy room, or sorting potions ingredients for Professor Snape," Dumbledore said. "Something that will, hopefully, achieve the same end. Since punishment is insufficient to discourage you from misdeeds, I intend to find the root of your misdeeds instead, and hopefully deal with the matter that way."

"So…"

"I want you to talk, Harry," Dumbledore said calmly. "About how you are, and what has been bothering you."

"I thought I made that fairly clear after my name came out of the Goblet, Professor," Harry said bluntly.

"You made it very clear what was bothering you at that moment in time," Dumbledore agreed. "After you hit a breaking point. However, that was not quite the issue I am concerned with. That is an issue I think you are coming to terms with."

"Is it about me and Snape, Professor?"

"Professor Snape, Harry," Dumbledore said reprovingly, before sighing. "And no. While we will discuss that subject, I know where both of your respective feelings on the subject come from." He shook his head. "No. My specific concern is more general. You have been, if you will forgive me for saying this, not quite yourself ever since you returned to Hogwarts."

"And you know why that is, Professor," Harry said.

"I do," Dumbledore acknowledged. "I also know that you have been improving, in part thanks to a discussion with Cedric Diggory."

Harry nodded.

"I also hear that you have reached something of an epiphany," Dumbledore said. "About the nature of the life, the universe, and everything."

Harry nodded again. "I realised that life isn't fair," he said. "I mean, I knew it before, but not really seriously. I realised that there wasn't any fundamental justice in the universe," he said. "So, I decided that I should try and make some, try and make it fairer."

"A noble goal," Dumbledore said quietly. "On preliminary evidence, I must say, you do seem to be doing better. This is encouraging."

"But you want to know if I'm likely to revert," Harry said flatly.

"I am," Dumbledore said. "Before, you were curt, surly, and prone to avoiding your friends, usually by disappearing into the Forest. That last I allowed at the time because we all need our moments of privacy, you more so than most with your ever-increasing telepathic abilities, and because you are more than capable of looking after yourself." His gaze flickered up to Bucky. "And even if you were not, Sergeant Barnes most certainly is."

"You're worried about me being grumpy, Professor?" Harry asked, eyebrow raised.

"Not particularly," Dumbledore said calmly. "I would begrudge no one the right to a bad day. After all, we all have them. I myself have had several." He looked at Harry over his glasses. "And I think that you have had a great many these last few months. One in particular I believe started this build-up of pain and anger, the one that exploded earlier in the week, after you were selected for the Triwizard Tournament and Mr Crouch unwittingly made the worst possible choice of words. That 'bad day' was a night. Specifically, the night Luna Lovegood died. The night that you died."

Harry flinched slightly, but said nothing.

"A part of you blames yourself for her death," Dumbledore continued quietly. "And a part of you always will. You feel that you have protected her. Believe it or not, I know exactly how it feels."

"You do?" Harry asked, then frowned. "Of course, you do. You're the headmaster."

"Luna's death does weigh heavily on my conscience," Dumbledore said quietly. "However, I am speaking more personally, about someone close to me that I failed to protect, many years ago."

Harry gave him a surprised look.

"What I am about to tell you is variously not widely known, or known only to a couple of other living souls, neither of whom is likely to say anything about it," Dumbledore said. "However, considering that you are keeping Sergeant Barnes' secret, along with that of Captain Rogers' family, and I am sure you are keeping many others, I believe I can trust you with it."

Harry blinked in surprise, then nodded. "I won't tell anyone, Professor," he said.

"Good," Dumbledore said. "It is not widely known that I have a younger brother, Aberforth. He owns the Hogshead down in Hogsmeade. We have always been rather different and have often not seen eye to eye. In truth, he does not think much of me, and for good reason. That was because of our sister, Ariana."

Harry sat, attentive, and increasingly horrified, as Dumbledore's past rolled out before him – not the legendary wizard, the wise old mentor, or the twinkly-eyed, grandfatherly headmaster. Someone fallible, someone flawed, someone no more immune to the temptations of power than anyone else.

Finally, Dumbledore looked at the stunned Harry. "Of course, our situations are not the same," he said. "Whether or not it was my curse that killed her, it was my fault that Ariana died. Luna's death was not in your hands. But you blamed yourself as if it was. It haunted you, and I think it continues to haunt you. It also exacerbates the other trauma from that night. Your death. The events that have followed have partly helped, but also partly compounded that trauma."

"I'd say more replaced it," Harry said, with a touch of gallows humour about his voice. "The Red Son thing in particular."

Dumbledore inclined his head. "While I cannot claim to have died, or to have faced what you did at the hands of the Red Room, I have fought in wars both magical and mundane, been wounded and suffered losses," he said. "I have experienced what was once called 'shell-shock', what the Wizarding world still calls 'curse-shock', and what modern muggle science calls 'Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder', as well as Survivor's Guilt and similar mental afflictions. I see them in you, as do Sergeant Barnes, Professor McGonagall, and, I believe, Draco Malfoy."

"You also know that I'm getting better," Harry said defiantly, eyes narrowed. "I'm not a ticking time-bomb, Professor."

"I know," Dumbledore said calmly. "If you were, if I thought you were a genuine danger to your fellow students, then while I would have done everything that I could to help you, I would also not have allowed you to return to Hogwarts."

Harry was silent for a long moment, dealing with the strange combination of the brief stab of hurt at that blunt statement, as well as the burst of happiness at Dumbledore's implicit faith in him. That said, he thought, 'not being too dangerous to your fellow students' was a fairly low bar to clear.

"So, what do you want me to say, Professor?" he asked eventually. "You know what I've been through. You know what made me react the way I did. And you know that I'm recovering, and getting therapy for it. What do you want me to talk about?"

Dumbledore looked him in the eye and said two words. "Professor Snape."

"Oh," Harry said sourly. "So, it is about him."

"Yes, Harry," Dumbledore said sharply. "It is about him. Your comments on Halloween greatly upset and angered Professor Snape."

"With all due respect, Professor, they were meant to," Harry said coldly.

"I noticed. And so did he. He wanted to have you put in detention for the rest of the year and be made to give a public apology," Dumbledore said. "Among other things. I declined, partly because you were provoked, partly because your feud with him is at best an inauspicious thing to focus on when the Triwizard tournament is about promoting international co-operation, and partly because it would achieve nothing. As I have said, punishment does not faze you."

The words 'also because your apology would be about as sincere as a promise from Peeves to behave, and you find a way to publicly humiliate him' hung in the air.

"I'm completely fine with international co-operation, Professor," Harry said. "I was thinking of talking to the other champions, setting up a sharing of information principle. You know, so none of us die." He paused. "Well, none of them, anyway."

Dumbledore looked at Harry over his glasses. "While I applaud your generous impulse, Harry, there is an old muggle saying: 'charity begins at home'," he said. "As does co-operation."

"Professor, why would I co-operate with Snape? He hates me for existing," Harry said. "He takes out his hatred of my father and Sirius on every Gryffindor he teaches. He bullies Neville horribly, and last year, he tested a probably poisonous potion on Trevor, Neville's toad, out of sheer spite. And believe me when I say that I know that Neville has more than enough to worry about as it is."

Dumbledore sighed. "Professor Snape, Harry," he said. "And while he does lack social graces, Professor Snape has done a great deal for this school. The vast majority of his students pass the OWLs and those who are accepted into his NEWT class often do well and find success in later life. He also, despite their past enmity, uncomplainingly brewed the Wolfsbane potion every month for Professor Lupin last year."

"He also forced Professor Lupin to resign out of petty spite," Harry said coldly. "Sir, I'm sure he's a potions genius and that's probably why you hired him – I somehow doubt it was for his personality. But he's a horrible person and considering the way he bullies Neville, a terrible teacher too. I'm fine with sticking out the hand of friendship – I've done it to assassins, psychopaths, and brainwashed living weapons. I'm all for appealing to someone's better nature. But that only works if there's actually a better nature to appeal to."

Dumbledore sighed. "Professor Snape is not evil, Harry," he said.

"I know, Professor," Harry said. "I used to think he was, but I know better now. What I mean is…" He paused for a long moment. "I believe that people can change," he said. "But they have to actually _want_ to change. He doesn't." He folded his arms. "I'm not going to try and upset him - not any more than I do by existing, anyway. He leaves me alone, I leave him alone. I'm not going to pick a fight with him, because frankly, I have far better things to do with my time. If he snipes at me, I'll even ignore it." He met Dumbledore's gaze. "But if he tries to pick on my friends, then I'm not just going to sit back and watch."

"Harry, Professor Snape is your teacher."

"Tell him that."

Dumbledore gave him a look which said that the glib mark was very much not approved of.

"Sorry," Harry said, grudgingly. "But Professor, can I speak freely?"

Dumbledore nodded.

"If he acts like a bully, then I don't _care_ who or what he is," Harry said. "I will make him regret it and nothing you say or do will change that."

Dumbledore nodded. "I will take that into account," he said quietly. "For the time being, at least, I shall accept a lack of overt hostility from the both of you." He gave Harry a serious look. "But remember that I am your headmaster, Harry, and I will _not_ accept the public continuation of your feud, something which requires you to treat Professor Snape with at least superficial respect."

"And what about Snape, sir?" Harry asked.

"I have already spoken to Professor Snape about this matter," Dumbledore said coolly. "He is willing to live and let live."

Harry arched an eyebrow.

"Which is not to say he is pleased about it," Dumbledore added. "Now, I will tell you this, as I told him: I will be watching you both, and if I see _any_ signs of your feud recurring, there _will_ be consequences. Conventional punishments do not faze you, but there are privileges you possess that I can revoke. Is that clear?"

Harry weighed this up, then frowned. "What about Neville, sir?"

"I will speak to Professor Snape about Mr Longbottom," Dumbledore said firmly. "And I will make it clear that bullying is not tolerated at Hogwarts, no matter who performs it. Now: are we clear?"

Harry considered for another moment, then nodded. "Clear, Professor," he said.

"Good. And Harry?"

"Yes, Professor?"

"You have shown that you are not a child anymore," Dumbledore said. "Your actions on Halloween were in the finest traditions of Gryffindor House. And that is far from the first time you have put yourself to the test in such a fashion. Though of course, such deeds come with a price, and that price is clear to see in the scars they have left on you. You have proved that you are a young man, and a very brave one at that. I know what you went through with the Red Room, and the effects it had on you, and I therefore understand entirely why you lashed out at Mr Crouch. However."

Harry looked up.

"I have limited your punishment, in light of the circumstances," Dumbledore said. "But I will not exempt from any further punishment either. I understand why you lashed out, but I will not tolerate it any longer. You have proved yourself worthy of being treated as a young man, so now you must act the part, and accept the responsibilities that come with it."

Harry nodded, looking somewhat shame-faced.

"Equally, I am ending your visits to the Forbidden Forest. We will also have weekly meetings to keep track of your progress.," Dumbledore said. "Furthermore, I will expect you to write letters of apology to Mister Bagman, Professor McGonagall, Madame Maxime, and Professor Karkaroff, for your behaviour. In the case of Mister Crouch, considering the root of your reaction, I will settle for you at least restraining yourself from overt hostility when he is at the school."

Harry grimaced, then grudgingly nodded. "I will, Professor," he said.

Dumbledore nodded. "Good," he said. "Then the matter is closed." He raised an eyebrow as Harry paused. "Unless there was something further you wished to discuss?"

"Yes," Harry said. "It's about Snape." He raised a hand. "And not about the fact that we don't like each other. It's practical."

"Ah," Dumbledore said. "You are referring to the Dark Mark on his arm, the remains of his time as a Death Eater. Specifically, the possibility that Voldemort might control him through it as he did those unfortunate former Death Eaters at the Quidditch World Cup."

Harry blinked and nodded.

"And you assumed that I hadn't considered it, or even that it wasn't among Director Wisdom's first questions?" Dumbledore asked with a raised eyebrow, tone mild, but pointed.

"I try not to assume anything these days, sir," Harry said. "It tends to get me beaten up."

Bucky snorted quietly, but said nothing.

Dumbledore, for his part, smiled faintly, and said, "I feel, as I have felt for many years, that Professor Snape is safer at Hogwarts."

"The wards block Voldemort from controlling him?" Bucky asked quietly.

"The school herself does," Dumbledore corrected him. "While Professor Snape has formidable abilities in Occlumency and Legilimency, Voldemort is every bit as skilled, and these days, considerably more powerful. Additionally, keeping Professor Snape on site also prevents him falling to Voldemort's vengeance, or having his mind ransacked for the vast number of secrets he possesses. Such secrets would be invaluable to Voldemort, either for his own use, or for barter – I believe that he was the one who informed Dracula of Miss Danvers' heritage and her abilities."

"That would make sense," Harry muttered, thinking back to the World Cup.

"Excellent," Dumbledore said, then he glanced at the clock. "Goodness me, it is rather late, isn't it?" he remarked. "You had best get back to Gryffindor Tower."

OoOoO

Elsewhere, at the Xavier Institute, night had also fallen. All its inhabitants were sound asleep, dreaming dreams of peace, quiet, and hopefully not having their school blown up. Again.

Or at least, so the intruder assumed. Small, skinny, with long, clever fingers, hairless beige skin, and bulbous eyes that most resembled those of certain kinds of chameleon, he would have attracted comment in most parts of the mundane world. In the magical world, they saw stranger every day, and in Madripoor, they saw stranger every minute. Nevertheless, he blended into the shadows with preternatural ease, slipping unnoticed past security measure after security measure.

Or so he thought, right up until he heard a very distinctive sound: _snikt_.

"Ah," he said quietly. "I am found, it would seem."

"You got that right, bub," Logan growled, grabbing him by the scruff of the neck. "The Professor wants a word."

"How fortunate," the intruder said mildly. "I wish one with him as well."

Indeed, despite carrying a long wooden stave inlaid with metal, he made no resistance as Logan half dragged him into Xavier's office, to come face to face with a stern-faced dressing gown clad Charles Xavier.

"Our intruder, I presume," Xavier said. "You have a name?"

"I am most commonly called Smith," the intruder said. "Blacksmith, by some." He inclined his head in something just short of a bow. "You are Professor Charles Xavier."

Xavier narrowed his eyes, taking in Smith's stave and simple clothes. "What are you doing here, Brother Smith?" he asked. As Smith started, he smiled thinly. "I am many things, Brother Smith, but I am not a fool. While I have not had dealings with your Order for many years, I still know an Askani Adept when I see one. Or sense one, as the case may be - I detected your presence before you breached the grounds."

Smith blinked, but didn't seem too rattled. If anything, he actually seemed somewhat pleased. "I see that the tales of your abilities are not exaggerated," he said. "Though simply being in your presence is proof of that. Your power is impossible to miss." He cocked his head. "But if you detected my presence, why did you allow me entry?"

"Logan wished to see how you would fare against his new defences," Xavier said evenly. "It seemed a reasonable way to test them."

"Ah..." Smith said, nodding, before smiling faintly. "How did I do?"

"Better than you should have done," Logan growled. "Who the hell are you, bub?"

"I have already told you my name," Smith said mildly.

"Brother Smith is an Askani Adept," Xavier said evenly. "A rather senior one, if I am not mistaken. And to forestall your next question, Logan, the Askani are a quasi-religious order of psychics. Some call them an Order, others, a Clan. In truth, they carry elements of both. Those feeling less generous might call them a cult, and with good reason."

Logan grunted. "Sounds like the Brotherhood in the old days," he remarked.

"Not quite," Xavier said. "Though there are a few similarities." He regarded the silently patient Smith. "They are, primarily, mutants, though they have psychically inclined wandless mages and part-humans in their ranks. However, they are more like magical communities in that they have little interest in the rest of the world, save when it affects them. They are centuries old - in my own private researches, I have found evidence for their presence in Anatolia, what is now Turkey, in the 7th century, when they were assumed to be a heretical Christian sect. There were also hints that they are a good deal older even than that. As it is, when I encountered them, they were almost monastic, with a whole mixture of beliefs and doctrines, drawn from sources as diverse Christianity, Buddhism, certain schools of Hellenic philosophy, and others related to Hinduism, and a group of psychics known as the Golden Council. Other concepts were apparently developed independently. Unlike most monastic orders, however, they were rather enthusiastic about the prospect of ensuring a next generation."

He sat back in his chair, not taking his eyes off Smith. "Seniority is dictated by mastery of the psychic arts – usually skill, though power also plays a key part. They have a number of ranks; Brother Smith, as indicated by his staff, is an Adept, one of the missionaries of the Order - they wander the world, find young psychics and bring them into the Order. They also serve as the Order's warriors, opposing groups and entities that might threaten the Order. Accordingly, they are among its most skilled, most powerful, and above all, most dangerous members."

"You've met 'em before?" Logan asked.

"Professor Xavier was the Order's prize student," Smith said. "The most powerful mortal psychic ever known." He directed his next words at Xavier. "Some even believed you were the Askani'son."

"I encountered some of Brother Smith's predecessors on my travels as a young man, and they guided me to the greater Clan," Xavier said. "I spent a long time with them, in which they taught me much about my powers." His eyes narrowed. "Eventually, however, my ideals and theirs were impossible to reconcile. I wished to find and help all of mutantkind, or as much as I could, and to protect humanity. The Askani, however, only care about the world when it either threatens or benefits them. I also objected to some of their methods. I chose to depart, and I made it very clear to the Mother Askani and the Elders that I wished to have nothing to do with them."

He leaned forward, with no sign of his usual warm amiability.

"So. I will repeat my question, Brother Smith, for the first and last time. What are you doing here?"

Brother Smith met his gaze for several long moments, before nodding slightly. "You are aware of our interest in maintaining bloodlines," he said. "And your experiences, and researches into the so-called 'X-Gene', have supported our reasoning: superhuman abilities, magical and non-magical, are hereditary, even down to specific sets of abilities. Psychics, for example, tend to produce psychics."

Xavier's eyes narrowed. "My researches have proven only that the X-Gene is often inherited," he said coldly. "They do not, and I do not, support the eugenicist Askani dogma of selectively breeding humans like animals to bring forth desired traits, keeping them and their ancestry listed in vast stock books, all in pursuit of creating the so-called 'Askani'son'. All this unnatural selection achieves, in the medium and long term, is to create a genetic bottle-neck."

Brother Smith inclined his head slightly. "I am told that you made this argument to the former Mother Askani," he said. "And some among us have come to agree with you, using you as an example. You have no Askani ancestry, no evidence of psychic abilities in your family tree, and yet… your powers were, and are, breathtaking. Unrivalled. Others have also been cited – Lady Elizabeth Braddock, for instance, your former student, stronger than all but the very strongest of the Askani, and growing stronger still. Some believe that she has some degree of Faerie ancestry, which confuses matters of course…" His expression took on a hint of a grimace. "And others, other… non-psychics… have also been used as examples. Magneto, for instance." He regarded Xavier with a pointed look. "It was part of why your input, your fresh blood, was so desired."

"Brother Smith, my patience is waning," Xavier said.

"This background is necessary, Professor Xavier," Smith replied calmly. "Most of the Askani are what you might call Beta Class, some stronger, some weaker. Alpha class psychics, on the lower end of that scale, are very rare, and celebrated when they appear. I can say without ego that I am one of those, and one of the strongest members of the Clan. I can also say that even in the families when they appear most regularly, they never appear more than once in a generation."

"What are you getting at, bub?" Logan asked suspiciously.

The question was directed at Smith. It was Xavier, however, who answered.

"What Brother Smith is getting at is that there is a family that has, in one generation, produced far more than just one Alpha class psychic and a smattering of Betas," he said tightly.

Smith nodded. "Three psychics. Three psychics, of the same generation, of the same family, little more than children, and yet each alone is already more powerful than even you," he said. "You call them Omega class, and many among the clan would agree: they feel that they are the peak of psychic potential, the end of our search –"

"I would agree," Xavier said coldly. "It is the end of your search. In fact, I would say that it is none of your business."

"All psychic matters are Askani business, Professor Xavier," Smith said flatly. "This one more than most. Until now, the Mother and the Elders have been inclined to allow you to find and teach non-Askani psychics as you wish and as you will. Now, that policy has changed."

"On what grounds?" Xavier asked, eyes narrowing at the 'allow'.

"When one of the three wields their powers to the fullest, they cause not ripples, but waves, in the Astral Plane," Smith said. "When at least one of them engaged in psychic combat a matter of months ago, members of the Clan all over the world were brought to their knees, some effectively crippled."

Xavier regarded him through narrowed eyes. "Given the circumstances, I can understand why the Clan would have concerns," he said evenly. "Though I would remind you, Brother Smith, and your superiors that I am not, have not be, and will _never_ be answerable to them. I have demonstrated that before, and though I would rather avoid doing so, I _will_ demonstrate it again, if I must. So there will be less of the 'allow', if you please."

Smith regarded him with an unblinking gaze, then suddenly changed tack.

"The X-Gene is often inherited," he said. "But 'often' is not 'always'. As the X-Gene often emerges without warning in bloodlines that have shown no previous evidence of it, our genealogies show many instances through the ages of bloodlines, or branches of bloodlines, that seem to run dry of potential. As the magical world has its 'squibs', we have our own equivalents."

"And historically, they were often excluded and treated as second class citizens, if not outright shunned, to the point where they left," Xavier said, voice growing even colder. "Removed like branches pruned from a tree. If you are attempting to make me more sympathetic to your aims, you are not succeeding, Brother Smith. All you are doing is reminding me why I repudiated the Askani in the first place."

"Sound more and more like the old Brotherhood every minute," Logan grunted.

Smith ignored him, focusing on Xavier. "As you say, Professor Xavier, they often left," he said. "Carving out lives in the mundane world, usually vanishing into obscurity. Now, with increased knowledge of genetics and heredity, and of course the X-Gene, thanks to your work, we encourage them not to. Psychic traits usually resurface, after all, even without being partnered with a psychic. Some take as few as one generation, some many more." He paused. "You say that they are as pruned branches. I would disagree, but let us use your metaphor. Cuttings, taken from the tree, they are planted in new soil. Given time, they blossom once more. And sometimes, they flourish on a scale that the tree they were taken from only dream of."

There was a long moment of silence.

"What are you getting at, bub?" Logan asked, tone suspicious.

"I would like to know that too, Brother Smith," Xavier said, in the guarded tone of a professional poker player who thinks he's about to get a nasty surprise.

"I think you know exactly what I am getting at, Professor Xavier," Smith said, tapping a portion of his staff and withdrawing a small memory stick, which he slid over to Xavier. "The relevant details are on there, should you want them. DNA samples can be supplied, for tests of your own, should you desire it. For confirmation, should you need it. The short version, however, is that Jean and Madelyn Grey, and Harry Thorson, are descended from a formerly defunct Askani bloodline."

There was a long moment of silence, before Logan broke it.

"Bullshit," he snarled.

"That is for Professor Xavier to decide," Smith said calmly.

Xavier examined the memory stick for several long moments. Finally, he looked up again. "Let me assume that your information is accurate," he said. "For now." As Smith seemed to relax slightly, he smiled thinly. "I believe that you, in turn, have made an incorrect assumption."

"And what is that, Professor Xavier?"

"That I would care," Xavier said bluntly. "While this information is no doubt fascinating from a historical and genealogical point of view, I fail to see its relevance."

"Their ancestry –"

"Their ancestry, paternal and maternal respectively, will not dictate their future," Xavier said in a voice of steel. "I will teach them about the Askani in due time. In the meantime, you – and the rest of the Askani – will leave them, their families, and their friends, alone. If they seek you out, it will be because they wish to."

Smith regarded him for a long moment. "You truly trust us so little?" he asked.

"My first responsibility, Brother Smith, is to my students," Xavier said. "Students who have been particularly targeted for their heritage and potential." His eyes narrowed. "Most recently by a man who was, among other things, a psychic. A psychic with the power and skills of an Askani Adept."

"And you think that his actions were sanctioned by the Mother Askani?" Smith asked. "We have our renegades, Professor Xavier, as much as any other group."

"That is true," Xavier acknowledged. "But that does not change these simple facts: I have precious little reason to trust the Askani, and I have every reason to suspect a threat to my students. My answer is no, Brother Smith. You may not see them. Please convey that to the Mother Askani, as well as this warning: if the Askani make any move to contact any of the three, I will know. And I will _not_ be pleased."

Smith was silent for a long moment, then nodded and stood up. "Your decision grieves me," he said. "But I can understand it, and I can respect it."

"You do not seem particularly surprised," Xavier observed.

"It is well known among us that you departed the Askani on poor terms," Smith said. "And your protectiveness of your students and associates is also well known among us." He shrugged. "Besides. We can wait." He paused, then said, "So far, I have spoken on behalf of the Clan. But now, I have something of my own to speak of, if I may."

"You may," Xavier said.

"The Clan is troubled," Smith said. "Not by the psychic storms that have rippled through the world in this last year – we can weather those. We are troubled by what they have stirred up. Entities are emerging from the depths of the Astral Plane. Some we know; lesser, manageable, but still dangerous. Others… we do not." He met Xavier's gaze. "We sense beings, vast and terrible, whose mere passage sends the astral plane into turmoil. And if that were not enough…" He trailed off. "A shadow is falling over the world, over all of creation. Seven of our most skilled and experienced seers sought to follow it back to its source, to discern what it was. They took every precaution. And when they finally managed to reach its leading edge, six of them were consumed. Nothing of them survived. Mind, body, and soul. They were burned from within."

"Burned?" Xavier asked carefully.

"Only shells of ash remained," Brother Smith said quietly. "Shells filled with the echoes of screams."

"You said there were seven," Logan remarked, breaking his silence.

Smith nodded. "The seventh was seemingly isolated by the other six. They took the brunt of it," he said. "She suffered the same fate, but survived long enough to share with us what she saw. I was one of those present. It is not pleasant, but I think you should see." He held out a hand, palm up. "If you will permit me?"

Xavier met his gaze for a long moment, then took his hand.

OoOoO

Several hours passed. Brother Smith had long since departed, and after he was assured that his help was not needed, Logan had returned to bed, pausing only to reset the defences. Xavier, for his part, could not sleep. Instead, he found himself staring at the lamp on his desk, a warm light surrounded by a thin, fragile shell, the sole light in a room bathed in a darkness that seemed to go beyond the physical.

And as he did, he found himself dwelling on the message that, even third-hand, had seared itself into his mind. It was not a complicated message, but it registered on many levels, as words, as scent, and as intent. After a moment, Xavier paused, then frowned. No, he decided, 'intent' was the wrong word, as was message. What had been communicated was not a promise or an intention, and was not, in fact, a message at all.

Words like 'promise' and 'intention' implied that it was possible that it might not happen, and message implied a desire to communicate. This was something far more fundamental, an inexorable sense derived from contact with something truly vast, something that most probably had not even noticed the circle of Askani seers brushing against it. And that 'sense', such as it was, could be summed up in the two words that now echoed in the mind of Charles Xavier.

 _ **EVERYTHING BURNS.**_

 **And on THAT cheerful note, we come to the end of this particular instalment, with secrets, moral ambiguity, and foreshadowing aplenty. All in a day's work. Well, a number of days, but howsoever. Next chapter should be a bit lighter, with more Ron and Hermione, and it'll be leading into the First Task, because seriously, I have put that off long enough.**


	39. Chapter 39: Weighing Things Up

**Hey guys. Sorry this one took a while – Dissertation is done, I've been on holiday, and now I'm revving up for job-hunting. You can probably feel my palpable lack of enthusiasm through your computer screens.**

 **Anyhow, updates will probably slow down for a bit, since I'll be looking to be constructively employed, and even if I'm not, as I am reminded, 'looking for a job is a full time job'.**

 **But on the bright side, we have a new chapter here, which is the last one before the First Task, wrapping up things like the Wand Weighing. It's a fairly dialogue heavy chapter, heavily featuring Betsy, among others, and it's mostly focused on working things out, and setting one or two things up.**

 **Enjoy. :)**

The next couple of weeks passed largely without incident. The Hogwarts population mostly accepted that Harry really was not interested in being a Triwizard Champion, and was only going along with it because he had no choice. His previous vocal and creative threats about what he would do to anyone who entered him into the competition in question, along with having previously not really wanted to have anything to do with anyone, supported this.

It helped that most of those who didn't believe him opted to keep it to themselves. While Harry was now a positively pleasant person to be around, most of the time, no one wanted to be the person to accidentally set him off again, and the subject of the Tournament seemed to be the one most likely to do it. Another helping factor was that a significant chunk of the students, outside of Hufflepuff and a large section of Slytherin, were looking forward to seeing him wreak havoc and show Beauxbatons and Durmstrang just how powerful Hogwart's strongest student was.

On other matters, it was noticed that Snape was somewhat subdued, and speculation was rampant as to why that was. That speculation, inevitably, turned to Harry, with the justifiable suspicion that he had something to do with it. Technically, he did, but only indirectly. Harry was not the only one who Dumbledore had told to grow up. And since Snape had neither of Harry's excuses (being a teenager and an immensely traumatised one at that), Dumbledore's little discussion with him had been a good deal blunter and harsher.

In any case, he tended to pretend that Harry did not exist, an attitude that Harry, to general relief, reciprocrated.

Now, it was a long, dark winter evening in the Common Room, which by this point, was largely empty. The only exceptions were Harry, who was reading a textbook assigned by Doctor Strange with an increasingly deep frown, Bucky, who was doing his world-renowned shadow impression, and Ron, who was supposedly doing some belated DADA homework, and actually staring off into the crackling fire with a glazed over expression.

Harry eventually sighed explosively, lowered his book, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Ron," he said, in tones of frayed patience.

Ron started out of his reverie.

"Could you please stop having your... thoughts when I'm around?"

"What thoughts?" Ron asked, bemused.

Harry let out another sigh. "About Carol. Or Hermione, Betsy, Natasha, Professor Zatara, or any physically unlikely combination of the above."

Ron went scarlet. "I'm not -"

"Ron," Harry said flatly. "I'm a telepath. You're projecting. For the love of whatever gods I really hope aren't listening, _please_ stop, so we never have to talk about this ever again."

Ron opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, shut it once more, then fled upstairs.

"That was little unfair, don't you think?" Bucky said reprovingly. When Harry glowered at him, he added, "He has a right to what goes on in his own head. It's not like he wants you to know about it. Or anyone else."

"That right ends when it starts going on in my head too," Harry said sourly, rubbing his temples.

Bucky levelled a pointed look at him.

Harry sighed for a third time. "I know, I know, you're right," he said wearily. "I'll apologise to him. It wasn't too bad." He waved a hand at the empty Common Room. "It's not like anyone else was even around."

"Would you not have said it if they had been?"

"No. Yes," Harry said, before frowning. "I would have said it. But psychically, so no one would have heard."

"But I did," Bucky said mildly.

Harry waved a hand. "You're you."

"Yes. I'm me. Another person. An adult, and something of an authority figure," Bucky said calmly. "Someone who Ron most definitely would not want knowing about his sexual fantasies."

Harry frowned, but nodded. "You're right," he said.

Bucky merely shrugged slightly. "Why did you snap like that, anyway?" he asked. "You haven't before."

"Because it's different to before," Harry said. "I've been getting stuff leaking through, even when my psychic senses are at their most passive." He shuddered. "It's not like I want to know about it, either."

"You haven't complained about this happening before," Bucky remarked, concerned.

"My senses have got stronger... no, sharper," Harry said. "Since I did the astral projection thing with Carol on Halloween." He glowered, and added grumpily, "Besides, with magical teenagers, it's worse. They've all got some very basic psychic abilities – not conscious unless they train them, but it means that they broadcast more. It's harder to shut out."

He shook his head. "Thankfully, Ron's one of only three boys at school who relax around me enough to drift off like that, outside of History of Magic." He smiled wryly. "The unforeseen upside of half the school being scared of me."

"That's an exaggeration."

Harry shrugged. "Fine," he said. "They're wary of me, a little on their guard. And frankly, I can't really blame them – I'm only surprised it isn't worse. I've given them every reason to be terrified of me, after all."

"And the other two?" Bucky asked, ignoring Harry's grim remark.

Harry sighed. "Cedric's mostly got a reason to talk to me, so he's usually thinking about that when we talk. The worst that happens is that he daydreams a little about Cho Chang, his girlfriend. And Draco's mental defences are good enough that the most I get without actively looking is a vague idea that he's around."

"What about girls?" Bucky asked, eyebrow raised.

Harry's expression shifted to one more appropriate to someone who had just hang-glided over Hell, and he shuddered. "Don't even ask."

"Fine," Bucky said, a hint of amusement in his voice. "And you've got mental defences for when you're asleep, so that covers that."

"Exactly," Harry said, then stood up.

"So what do you plan to do now?" Bucky asked.

"Go to bed," Harry said. "Then, tomorrow, I'm going to talk to Diana, for sympathy and advice, Carol -"

"Who will spend the next ten minutes laughing at you."

"True, but afterwards, she'll be sympathetic. Probably."

"And then?"

"And then I'm going to have a chat with Jean -"

"Who will spend the next twenty minutes laughing at you."

"- and probably Maddie too; ask them how they dealt with this sort of crap without lobotomising everyone around them."

"There is another option, you know. Someone else you could ask. Someone you should have asked as soon as this started becoming a problem."

"Who?"

Bucky raised an eyebrow.

"Oh? _Oooh._ "

OoOoO

"Nearly three weeks. Nearly three weeks, and not a word. Not even a psychic hello."

Harry coughed and shuffled his feet. "I've been busy?" he offered.

Betsy Braddock put her hands on her hips and looked stern. This lasted for about five seconds, before she chuckled and gave him a quick hug and a chaste kiss on the cheek. "So I hear," she said, amused. "Getting caught up in a historically lethal magical tournament, probably because someone's out to get you again, telekinetically swinging a giant magical battleship around like an action figure, without even line of sight to help you, trans-Atlantic telepathic communication, then astral projection and combat against a Grey Court Master, and _then_ going twelve rounds, _twice_ , with Dracula himself. And that's just in the last couple of weeks."

"In my defence, that was all in one night," Harry said.

Betsy shot him an amused look. "I'm not sure how much that's helping the case for the defence, love," she said. "You and Trouble, with a capital T, are like a couple who're terrible for each other, but just can't stay apart." The amused looked turned into a knowing smirk. "Though from what I hear, Trouble might not get much of a look in, in days to come. Apparently, there's one very lucky young lady who's staking a claim of her own."

"How do you," Harry began, before narrowing his eyes and changing tack. "Who says there's anyone?"

Bucky snorted.

Betsy, meanwhile, gave him a fond look and patted him on the cheek. "You did, love," she said. "It's written all over your face in giant, glowing letters. Or it might as well be." She waved a hand. "Also, Natasha and I have a standing brunch whenever we're in each other's town."

"And you gossip about me," Harry said flatly. "Really?"

"We talk about many things," Betsy said. "For various reasons, some personal – because I happen to like you and considering all you've been through, I worry a bit about you too – and professional – because you make my boss twitchy – you, young man, are one of them."

Harry frowned, and glanced at Bucky. "Did you know about this?" he asked, before pausing, and sighing. "Oh, who am I kidding, of course you did."

"It was part of the fine detail of the agreement with Director Wisdom to allow you to return to Hogwarts," Bucky said quietly. "He wanted updates on your mental stability. Natasha was felt to be the best person to do it."

Harry's expression darkened, his eyes literally flashing with rage as he opened his mouth to unleash a tirade. Then, he stopped, closed his eyes and exhaled slowly. When he opened them again, he looked more resigned and tired than angry. "Why?" he asked.

Bucky and Betsy shared an awkward look.

"Not 'why does he want updates on my sanity'," Harry said irritably, without looking up. "I know why he wants them, and pissed off as I am, I can't exactly blame him for it – I'm perfectly aware that I'm not exactly a shining picture of sanity. Why Natasha?"

"Of those people close to you, she's best able to assess you fairly and objectively," Bucky said evenly. "She also has the most experience, personal and observational, of Red Room brainwashing techniques and their aftereffects."

"Right. So what do the updates consist of?" Harry asked sourly. "A long report on exactly how crazy I am? Or just a short weekly update of 'nope, not crazy'?" He eyed Bucky. "And aren't you every bit as qualified?"

Bucky's expression hardened. "Wisdom believed that I would not be objective," he said.

"And though he's a complete prick, when it comes to espionage, he's rarely wrong," Betsy added candidly. "Your uncle also advised against it. You need to trust Bucky if he's going to look after you. I also got the impression that Natasha's used to not being trusted by people she works with." Her voice softened. "Even people she cares about."

Harry grunted. "And where do girls come into it?" he asked.

"Relationships, particularly romantic ones, are powerful influences," Bucky said. "Either for stabilisation or destabilisation." He met Harry's gaze. "I can guarantee that Wisdom's interest in your romantic life, such as it is, extends to the influence he estimates that the person – in this case, Carol – has on your mental state. Aside from that, he couldn't care less."

"I suppose it would be useless to explain, once again, that the two of us aren't actually dating?" Harry said irritably.

"Probably," Betsy said, sounding half amused, half sympathetic.

"Wisdom won't care about how you define your relationship," Bucky said, with an air of experience. "All he'll care about is how it actually works. As he will all your other close relationships, familial and friendly."

"He's right, love," Betsy said. "Natasha only even mentioned your lucky young lady when I asked, on my boss' behalf – and even that was in passing, in the context that she was a good influence on you. She refused to go into any further detail." When she caught Harry and Bucky's simultaneously raised eyebrows, she chuckled. "You know that you two look practically identical when you do that, right?"

At Harry's startled look, and Bucky's suddenly unreadable one, she added, "Anyway, love, it's not exactly a secret who you're fond of, and who's fond of you. Also, when I say that Natasha refused to go into further detail, I mean refused point blank. It was part of her side of the deal between your family and Wisdom. Her exact words were, I believe, 'you want to use my experience and my judgement? Fine. Then you will have to trust that judgement, and trust that I will tell you what you need to know.'"

Harry let out a low whistle. Despite himself, he was a little impressed. "I'm guessing that Wisdom didn't like that," he said.

Betsy let out a wicked little laugh. "Oh, believe me, he didn't," she said. "Not in the slightest. But your father backed her up, and eventually he accepted it."

"Couldn't he have just banned me from Hogwarts?" Harry asked, raising an eyebrow again. "I mean, he was holding all the cards."

"Almost all," Bucky remarked. "But Natasha and your father had enough for a winning hand: Wisdom is a control freak. He'd much rather have you where he can see you and have some influence over what happens to you, than release you into – from his perspective – the wild, where anything could happen."

Harry snorted. "Point taken," he said, then glanced at Betsy. "He sounds like an absolutely lovely person to work for, by the way."

"He's actually not that bad a boss," Betsy said. "Surprisingly enough." She waved a hand. "Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying he's a lovely bloke and a candidate for sainthood, because he's really not. He's blunt, unpleasant, and deeply paranoid. In fact, I'd say that he's a control freak and a borderline sociopath with all the morals of a particularly ethically challenged weasel. In many ways, he's an absolutely awful person. But he's got a few redeeming features: he genuinely puts his country, and his people, ahead of himself. He trusts us to do our jobs, and lets us do them more or less however we choose, so long as we get things done. He won't send anyone anywhere that he wouldn't go himself. And he has absolutely no illusions about what he is."

"Which is what makes him so dangerous," Bucky said darkly.

"That too," Betsy agreed. "To be frank, though, more than a few of us are at MI13 at least partly to keep an eye on him. Sean, Agent Cassidy, certainly is – he trusts Wisdom a good deal less far than he can throw him."

"Again, he sounds like an absolutely lovely person to work for," Harry said.

Betsy shrugged. "He has his moments," she said wryly. "Now that that's done, I would love to do some catching up. And…" She paused as Harry looked like he was about to ask a question. "Yes?"

"Well, actually, I was hoping to ask about getting a little help about something," Harry said. "A psychic something."

"Of course, love. What would this psychic thing be?" Betsy asked, and glanced up at Bucky. "Or would you prefer to ask me psychically, so your very handsome shadow can't hear?"

"No, he knows," Harry said. "He suggested I ask you, actually. It's… well."

He explained.

Contrary to expectations, Betsy only laughed for about for three minutes. Afterwards, she'd reached up – and that was one big difference from when she'd previously taught him, he was now definitely taller than she was – and ruffled his hair affectionately.

"Oh you poor boy," she said, sympathy and amusement mixing in her voice, the former winning out. "Well you, or rather, your shadow, was right. I have been exactly where you are, and I know how to help you deal with it. You probably won't be able to shut everything out, though. Not without these – which, as it happens, are one of the main reasons I'm up here."

She pulled out a small box and opened it. Inside were two bracelets, silvery-white and embossed with a golden simplified phoenix.

"Psychic suppressors," Betsy said, regarding them with a guarded expression. "Prettier than I thought they would be, but surprisingly enough, Tony Stark can do pretty as well as effective. You'll have to wear them during the Tournament's tasks. They work by –"

Harry picked one up. "I'm pretty sure I know how they work," he said grimly. "They contain my psychic abilities, mean that I can only use them through physical contact." He smiled thinly at Betsy's surprised expression. "I had a set of braces, before, when my powers were flaring out of control – they used to belong to Jean. I've also got a gauntlet, which these look a lot like, though that's more for channelling my powers than containing them."

His expression darkened. "And more recently, the Red Room put me in a suit that did the same thing, then threw me into a pit against their pet monster. They wanted to see how I'd do, which was better than they expected. It turns out that if you channel telekinesis through your own body, you can simulate super-strength, and durability too." His smile grew teeth. "The monster found that one out the hard way."

"I… I'm sorry, I didn't know," Betsy said, disoriented and horrified. "I'm sure there'll be another way."

"No, it's all right," Harry said, shrugging. "The bad things happened after I got out of the suit. Anyway, it's just a pair of bracelets. Tony made them?"

Betsy nodded. "He insisted," she said.

"You mean that he didn't trust Wisdom not to try and use them to study Harry's powers," Bucky said quietly.

Betsy nodded again. "Probably," she said. "Like I said – not a nice man."

"If Tony made them, then I severely doubt that they're just a pair of psychic suppressing bracelets," Harry mused.

"So did that Professor Karkaroff and Madame Maxime," Betsy said. "But our best technicians looked over it, and confirmed that it was 'just' a pair of psychic suppressing bracelets. The only other thing they do is broadcast that they're on, so the judges will know if you take them off." She smiled wryly. "Of course, this is Tony Stark we're talking about, working with the help of the likes of Bruce Banner and Jane Foster. I'm pretty sure that there's something more to it that they've missed."

"You don't sound too bothered."

"Love, I don't give a flying fuck about this tournament, so long as everyone comes out in one piece," Betsy said frankly.

Harry chuckled grimly. "Snap," he said, slipping the bracelets on, then looking at Betsy. "You're meant to make sure that they actually work and I'm not faking it, I'm guessing."

"Pretty much," Betsy said. "They worked on me in tests, but you, luv, are an entirely different kettle of fish. You're one of the strongest psychics I've ever heard of, and you've got magic too. And god only knows what being part Asgardian would do." Her eyes flared a violet-purple as she cocked her head. "All right, let's run you through your paces."

The tests took a little more than fifteen minutes, and mostly boiled down to making sure that Harry's powers were limited. Betsy also took care to ensure that the bracelets didn't pinch, and to show him how easily they could be removed, her usually relaxed and amused expression watchful, ready to stop at the slightest sign of discomfort.

As it was, there wasn't one. "I don't like them very much," Harry explained. "But they're more annoying than anything else."

Betsy shrugged, though sympathetically. "There probably isn't much to be done about that, I'm afraid," she said. "You'll just have to get used to them."

"I'll ask Tony for another pair, then," Harry said, before removing the bracelets and eyeing them suspiciously. "And ask him what else they do in the process…"

OoOoO

After the test run of the bracelets, Harry and Betsy got some time to walk around the frosty grounds and talk about more immediate problems. Betsy was thoroughly sympathetic.

"Unlike most, love, I was in your position," she reminded him, in response to his surprise. "And not that long ago, either. Oh, it sounds bloody hilarious, and there is a funny side to it, but experiencing it, non-stop? That's an absolute bugger." She gave him a speculative look, and once again, Harry noted that she was now looking up at him. She wasn't looking up that far, but it was noticeable. Only a few months before, they'd been more or less of a height – and she'd had the edge. "You know, if anything, I was expecting something like this to happen earlier. It happened for me more or less just as I entered puberty."

"My powers came in very suddenly," Harry said. "Not all at once, but near enough. Maybe that has something to do with it?"

"Maybe," Betsy said reflectively. "But again, that just means I'd expect it to be a problem sooner – and I mean a problem, not just an annoyance, like it was before." Then, she snapped her fingers. "Got it." She turned to Harry. "This new sensitivity, when did it start?"

Harry thought for a few moments. "After Russia," he said. "Though it's got much worse since Halloween."

"Good," Betsy said. "I think I know what this is. Your psychic powers, they've always leaned telekinetic. Mine have always leaned telepathic, so that's part of it. But there's more. See, with the Red Room…" She trailed off and paused.

"My telepathic powers got a lot more use," Harry said flatly. "And the Red Son spent six relative months using them far more than I normally ever would."

Betsy gave him a sympathetic look and shook her head sadly. "You have been through hell these last few months, haven't you, love?" she said.

Harry shrugged, drawing another sympathetic look and a sigh.

"Anyhow, on Halloween, you spent most of the night using your telepathy at full blast," Betsy said, and smiled slightly. "Including, from what I hear, a _very_ convincing psychic illusion."

"Dracula was scared enough that it didn't have to be totally convincing to do the job," Harry said, before smirking at the memory of pulling a fast one on Dracula. "Even though it definitely was."

Betsy laughed in a way that made Harry go a little bit pink, acutely reminding him that it wasn't so long ago that he'd had quite a crush on the beautiful purple-haired psychic. In truth, he observed inwardly, that crush wasn't entirely gone.

"I'm sure it was," she said. "I'm also sure that doing that, and first communicating trans-Atlantic – which even through an existing a pre-existing psychic connection, I couldn't do without using Cerebro. I'm not sure if even the Professor could do it, actually, I've never heard of anything like it…"

"I've done it before," Harry said, after a moment, then paused. "Well, it wasn't me that initiated it. It was Maddie, and she made it look easy."

"Jean's twin sister?" Betsy said, and when Harry nodded, let out a low whistle. "Well, I suppose it makes sense that if you could do it, she could too. Any particular reason why?"

Harry was silent for a moment. "She's… adjusting," he said, after a moment. "Afraid of being compared to Jean and falling short. She needed someone to talk to, someone not Jean, because…" He weighed his words for a long moment. "Jean is lovely, kind, friendly, and all-round amazing. She's like the big sister I never had, and she's acting more or less the same way to Maddie." His lips twitched into a wry smile. "If what I've heard is true, she actually threatened to declare war on SHIELD, by herself, if they even blinked the wrong way towards either me or Maddie."

Betsy chuckled. "That sounds like the Jean Grey I've met," she said. "And let me guess – she's loving and supportive and all that, as much as you could want, but she comes off as Miss Perfect and through no fault of her own, doesn't really _get_ a lot of things. Things that Maddie's dealing with. Things that you've dealt with."

"More or less," Harry said quietly. "She's…" He sighed. "Honestly, it's almost ridiculous – other than Magneto, Wanda, and maybe Doctor Strange, she's the most powerful mortal I've ever met. And I'm not sure what Strange's limits are, or even if he's exactly mortal. Jean's her match for power, and Jean-Paul's up there too, I suppose, but he can't use all his power, but…"

"She can fight," Betsy said. "I know."

Harry's expression suddenly went wan and shame-faced. "You felt it," he said. It wasn't a question.

"You could say that, love," Betsy said wryly. "A bit of warning next time would be appreciated."

"Of course," Harry said.

"Anyway, she can fight, but emotions, guilt, insecurity… they're a whole different battle, one she's completely unready for," Betsy said. "One you, on the other hand, know something about."

Harry nodded. "A little something," he agreed. "So, back to the telepathy – you're saying it's because I stretched myself so much?"

Betsy nodded. "Exactly so, love," she said. "Like exercising, really. You push yourself until you can't push yourself any more, then after that, you can do a little more than you could before. Hence your senses sharpening up. Which, yes, is permanent."

Harry sighed.

"No need to get glum," Betsy said cheerfully. "You and me can have a sit down and I'll teach you how to improve your passive shielding. You won't be able to block out everything, but it should help."

"Believe me, even a little bit would help."

"Well, let's get started then, shall we?"

And so they did. As before, when Betsy had cut the link to Voldemort, they sat on the ground, with Betsy sitting cross-legged behind Harry, her hands on his temples. There were a few differences, of course.

Back then, it had been a matter of vital importance - Voldemort had been siphoning off so much power from Harry himself that he'd managed to steal and reshape the body of Peter Pettigrew to fit his own preference. To do so, he'd been artificially stimulating Harry's powers and sending them spiralling out of control, nearly getting Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Sean Cassidy killed in the infamous Pensieve Incident. Now, it was merely a matter of convenience and peace of mind.

Another difference was that, simply put, Harry was older, both mentally and physically. Seven months had passed in the physical world, but thanks to his experiences in the Nevernever at the hands of the Red Room, Harry's body had aged a further six months. When last he and Betsy had had a substantive conversation, he'd been a couple of months from turning 14, skinny, and on the shorter end of average height. Now, his body at least was closer to 15, and a better fed 15 that had already done a lot of the adolescent growing at that.

There was also, as Betsy would note a little sadly, a good deal less innocence about him. Not so much the grim mood and bitter anger that had haunted him these last couple of months, that having been replaced by a more thoughtful outlook. But even still, though more mature than most to begin with, Harry had done a lot of growing up in the intervening few months.

His fundamental nature was the same, it was true. But all that he had been through had left him battle-hardened, with a watchful air about him, and a sense of pride, one that challenged the world, saying, 'Some of the biggest and the baddest have taken their shot, and I'm still here. So if you think you can do better, then by all means: step on up.' few to no scraps of innocence had survived. In short, Betsy thought, a sense that even if his wounds were healing, his scars were here to stay.

These changes, though, came with advantages. For one thing, Harry was both comfortable enough to talk, and psychically skilled enough to multi-task, while Betsy went to work, helping him shape better passive defences.

These conversations were of various things, some lighter, and some more serious.

In the more serious category, Harry broached the subject of the Longbottoms. Betsy, unfortunately, was not hopeful.

"The Cruciatus Curse is seriously nasty," she said grimly. "And going by what I know about it and the damage you describe… well, I'd help you fix it if I could, love, but honestly? I'm not sure if there's enough left to fix." Seeing his expression she sighed. "I'll ask around, drop the Professor a line too, but if you should ask anyone, it's Doctor Strange. Odds are that he'll know if it's possible or not."

"But you think not."

"I do, I'm afraid."

Sensing Harry's brooding disquiet, she shifted the subject to a lighter one. For example, Ginny.

"Speaking of fixing things," she said. "I've been having a few conversations with Ginny Weasley." Her tone turned amused. "Who, unlike you, hasn't forgotten that I'm practically right next door these days."

"Oh yeah?"

"Oh yeah," Betsy said. "And funny thing. She's mentioned you, in the context of you lending her your phone to talk to that distant cousin of yours, Diana." The tone got pointed. "Who she seems to like. A lot, unless I miss my guess."

"Diana doesn't have too many friends," Harry said innocently. "And Ginny has a few, but not many who understand about psychic trauma."

"You do," Betsy pointed out.

"I'm not always the most approachable person in the world," Harry said flatly. "Especially not recently." He shrugged, tone turning lighter. "Besides, they're about the same age, they hit it off, and I decided to help them keep in contact."

"The school has a plentiful supply of owls," Betsy said, and Harry got the feeling he was being guided to a point.

"Flying across the Atlantic is tiring," he said. "Hedwig did it a couple of times and she needed days to recover."

"That's true enough," Betsy said. "So. You're just doing this out of the goodness of your heart, to help encourage a friendship."

"Exactly."

Betsy snorted. "Pull the other one, love, it's got bells on," she said.

"Um. What?"

"Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match. That's what you're doing, love, I can spot it a mile off," Betsy said, amused. Then, her tone got serious. "You're more or less on the money about Ginny, at least – it was very, very obvious how she felt about Diana when the subject came up. You're certain Diana feels the same way?"

"Dead certain," Harry said.

There was a moment of silence.

"You don't approve?"

There was another silence, this one more measured. Then, Betsy replied. "I think I know what you're trying to do," she said. "Ginny's got more psychic scars than anyone at this school, save you – and it's a close call. Your scars are also more healed than hers are." Her tone turned grim. "And that psi-wave your fight unleashed a couple of months back did _not_ help."

Harry's eyes widened in panic. "Is she –"

"She's fine," Betsy said. "But it affected her worse than it did most young witches and wizards, because thanks to what happened to her, she's more sensitive." She sighed. "She's fine," she repeated. "But I think it reopened a couple of old wounds. They're healing again, but even still."

"Yeah," Harry said guiltily. "I'm sorry about that."

"I know you are, love," Betsy said gently. "But that just underlines my point: a little more warning, next time, eh?"

"Personally, I'm hoping there'll never be a next time," Harry said flatly.

"Likewise," Betsy said. "But if wishes were horses…" She shook her head. "Anyway. You're setting her up with Diana, because you spotted something between them, and if I remember correctly, Diana's a fairly sensitive empath. You think that putting them together will help heal Ginny."

"And you don't think that's a good idea?"

"I think it's a sweet one," Betsy said. "But you're overlooking a few things. Like, for instance, the fact that this community is not the most tolerant one to people who're different. Now, I know that your instant response is probably to, as and when you spotted some kind of harassment, threaten to roast and/or clobber witless anyone who even dared blink the wrong way at Ginny. That wouldn't help. All it would do is make them even more resentful, even nastier in some ways, and subtler in their nastiness. You can't be everywhere, and you can't make people be polite."

"Can't I?" Harry asked sharply, hackles rising.

"No," Betsy said, just as sharply. "You can't. And you know damn well why."

Harry closed his eyes briefly and nodded. "Yes," he said quietly. "I suppose I do. And I suppose there's more?"

"There is. Finding your way through your sexuality is a complicated and difficult process at the best of times," Betsy said, and a hint of amusement entered her voice. "You've been finding that out for yourself."

Harry just sighed.

"And that," Betsy continued, serious once more. "Is when you conform to society's expectations in regards to the people you're attracted to – though I'd imagine the fact that you're possibly going to be dating a 'muggle' sooner rather than later would raise a few eyebrows, though I doubt that they'd dare say anything to your face or in your hearing. But Ginny might not be so lucky. For one thing, witches and wizards having relationships with non-magical people is pretty well precedented, accepted even if it is sneered at by some. As far as I can tell – and while I could be wrong, I don't think I am – the whole LGBT thing? It either passed the magical world by, or those who aren't straight? They're pretty well closeted."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that if Ginny and Diana started publicly dating, it could make Ginny's life a good deal harder," Betsy said. "You've got family and social networks outside of the magical world. You can just walk away from it, if you ever felt like it. Ginny doesn't, and she can't. And even if they don't end up dating, even if it just ends up as an entirely chaste and adorable friendship, it will probably mean that Ginny's going to have difficulty coming to terms with the fact that she likes girls too."

"So I should have just left well alone?" Harry half-demanded.

Betsy sighed. "Maybe," she said bluntly. "Love, you did, you've been doing, a good thing. You're trying to make a couple of people happy. People who, frankly, need it. But you have to be aware that it's not just your super-powers that have consequences when you use them – you've got status, brains, and resources to spare. This is going to have consequences, even if they're just personal to Ginny and Diana. Consequences that you can't just terrify into going away. Be aware of that, okay?"

Harry nodded slowly. "Okay," he said.

After that, in attempt to lighten things again, the conversation turned to one of Harry's new teachers.

"So, you're being taught how to use that pretty knife of yours, then?"

Harry nodded slightly, careful not to dislodge Betsy's hands. While physical contact, let alone on his temples, wasn't strictly necessary, it did help. "By an Asgardian," he said. "It's more of a sabre than a longsword or a broadsword, and while Bucky's good with most things, swords aren't his area of expertise."

"So, you got a specialist, eh? All the way from Asgard?"

"Astonishingly, being a Prince has its upsides," Harry said dryly.

Betsy chuckled behind him, her breath brushing the back of his neck. "I'm sure it does," she said. "Who's this specialist, then?"

Harry didn't reply immediately, having closed his eyes and, in a private part of his mind that he'd learned to shut off, he was cursing the fact that there were a couple of other things the passage of time had changed.

One, his libido, which though he now understood it better, was more active than it had been before, and hardly more discriminating. While Harry wasn't disposed to angst over this, he did find it rather annoying. Seriously, he thought irritably, wouldn't make much more sense if you were really, properly attracted to a single person at a time – i.e. Carol, someone he was more than attracted to, someone whom, indeed, he loved? But no, apparently his libido preferred to hedge its bets.

Two, the former was aggravated by the fact that thanks to a combination of Magneto, the Red Room, and the passage of time, his senses – both mundane and less-mundane – had sharpened and he'd become much more aware of his surroundings. This was very useful for combat situations, or even just looking cool. However, when in close physical proximity to an admittedly gorgeous teacher, who while she couldn't read this sectioned off portion of his mind, probably had a very good idea of what he was thinking/feeling from the rest of it…

Harry sighed inwardly. Though he'd already apologised to Ron, he was beginning to feel that he owed his friend another one.

"Harry?"

"Hmm?" Harry asked, before frantically rerunning the conversation in his head. "Oh, right. It's a guy called Fandral, Asgard's best swordsman, who happens to wield a sabre a bit like me. Actually, I think you might know him…"

He could feel Betsy's smirk. "You would be thinking correctly, love," she said. "I do indeed know Fandral the Dashing, and I am very familiar with his… swordsmanship."

"Yes, I'm sure he gave you a personal demonstration," Harry said dryly, drawing another chuckle from Betsy.

"That he did, love," she said. "A few, even, but enough for the time being."

"Oh?"

"He's a nice enough bloke," Betsy explained. "Someone I'd like to catch a few drinks with. But neither of us intended for it to be anything more than a, ah, _demonstration_. A one-off."

"I see," Harry said. "And Betsy?"

"Yes, love?"

"You know I'm not squeamish. You can ditch the euphemisms."

"I know," Betsy said, after a moment. "But maybe I am, a little bit."

At this point, Harry actually twisted round to look at Betsy in surprise. In return, he got a small smile.

"You're an absolute sweetie, love," she said. "And in a lot of ways, you're older than your years – you've had to be. You've changed so much in the last few months, so much that it's easy to forget that you're still just fourteen." The smile turned wry as Harry made a face. "Yes, yes, I know. I found it annoying when people used that kind of line on me, and I didn't have half so much cause. You're a young man, not a little boy, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise, or talk down to you. And if you want some advising on wooing your lady-love, then I'll be happy to help." She sighed. "But there's a few things that I'm a little more reticent about discussing."

"You weren't before," Harry remarked mildly.

"I was, a bit," Betsy said. "But back then… oh, how, do I explain this?" She thought for a moment. "Back then, you were a sweet kid. More mature than most, and one who'd been through a lot more than most too. But you were still a kid, still kind of innocent. Teasing you to watch you blush was fun. Now, what with you being a young man, one who's…"

"Not so innocent?" Harry supplied, eyebrows raised. "If you're trying to preserve my innocence, that went out the window a while ago."

"I'm well aware," Betsy said, voice a mixture of wry and sad. "No, love, it's more… before, you were a kid, one who blushed adorably. Teasing you then was harmless. Now, you're not. You're a young man, and you look the part. You're also looking at the young ladies around you, one young lady in particular, with interest. Interest that you're more or less old enough to act on. I don't want to get in your way, so to speak." She half-smiled wryly. "More to the point, though I've got a reputation. And that means that, teasing you now, even if it's meant the same harmless way… it looks different."

"Like something more serious, you mean," Harry said, and when Betsy nodded, he frowned in puzzlement. "To who? I mean, I know what you mean, you know what I mean, and none of the teachers are stupid enough to think otherwise, not even Snape…" He trailed off, then let out a sour laugh. "Of course," he said. "They're not the only ones watching, are they?"

"No, no they are not," Betsy said, with a grim smile. "There's a few about who'd like to make trouble; that Professor Karkaroff has a grudge or two to work out, against you among others, and Minister Fudge would probably like to smear MI13 and paint us as corrupting magical Britain's boy hero."

"Karkaroff's keeping a low profile at the moment," Harry observed. "Also, I'm pretty sure that Fudge is terrified of Director Wisdom, and if not him, then he's definitely scared of dad and Uncle Loki." His nose wrinkled. "And frankly, he's not that bright."

Betsy chuckled softly. "Yes, he is, and no, he isn't, respectively," she said. "But there's also a journalist running around, a witch – both literally and figuratively – by the name of Rita Skeeter. She usually writes for the _Daily Prophet_ , which as we both know will print any old rubbish, and she loves nothing better than stirring up trouble and conjuring up a nice, juicy scandal. Trust me, I know the type." Her expression shifted to a frown. "And I'm almost positive that she's using some kind of surveillance that goes well beyond legal to get her information – or at least, the information that she then exaggerates, twists, and distorts. I don't think it's legilimency or anything like that, because I'm pretty sure I would have spotted it, but there's _something_ …"

Harry nodded slowly. "You want me to help look for her?" he asked.

"No, though thank you for the offer, love," Betsy said, removing her hands from Harry's temples and standing up. "All done, by the way."

Harry blinked, redirecting his thoughts inwards and examining the passive defences Betsy had helped him construct, which he'd put together almost subconsciously under her direction during the conversation. "Thanks," he said. "That's… that's much better, thank you."

"You're welcome," Betsy said. "Anyway, so far as Skeeter goes, I'd just advise keeping an eye out, and saving your more private conversations either for telepathy or undercover of a lot of noise or a good spell. And I'd forward those warnings to your bodyguard."

Harry nodded seriously. "I've got another question, by the way," he said.

"Fire away, love."

"Astral projection. I didn't just project an image across the Atlantic, I projected a construct," Harry said. "Like…"

"Like my psi weapons," Betsy said, and shook her head slowly. "It's things like that really bring home to me just how strong you are, love. The only way I could reach across continents, even to project an image, would be using Cerebro. But you didn't just do it, you made a psychic construct, kicked the arse of a Grey Court Master vamp, and you did it in your _sleep_."

Harry coughed, a little embarrassed. "Yeah, well," he said, shrugging. "Doctor Strange mentioned something about another teacher – another couple of teachers, actually, that he's going to take me to see. One of them is apparently an expert on astral stuff, projection, the Astral plane… that sort of thing."

"Then you'd be best off listening to them, love," Betsy said seriously. "I've gone up against a beastie or two from the Astral Plane, including a very nasty one called the Shadow King – though I don't think you're likely to run into him."

Harry raised an eyebrow. "You destroyed him?"

Betsy chuckled. "Hardly," she said. "I fought him, then bluffed him into running with a Cerebro uplink. You've got a lot more power than me, love, and a lot more of a reputation. If he ran from me, he'll certainly steer well clear of you." She sobered and gave him a serious look. "Aside from that, there's not too much I know about the Astral Plane, not in detail, and you've already started shaping it, or things like it, completely by accident – the Nevernever a couple of months back, and then that trouble with the Pensieve just before I started teaching you. I'll happily teach you about psi-weapons, love. But I'd take your class with this teacher of yours that Doctor Strange has found, first. They might have something better to teach you."

OoOoO

A couple of days later, another matter came up, this one relating to the Tournament – the Wand Weighing.

Harry found himself in a fairly small classroom. Most of the desks had been pushed away to the back of the room, leaving a large space in the middle; three of them, however, had been placed, end to end, in front of the blackboard, and covered with a long length of velvet. Five chairs had been set behind the velvet-covered desks, and Ludo Bagman was sitting in one of them, talking to a witch Harry had never seen before, who was wearing magenta robes.

Viktor Krum was standing moodily in a corner as usual, and not talking to anybody. Cedric and Fleur were in conversation. Fleur looked a good deal happier than Harry had seen her so far; she kept throwing back her head so that her long silvery hair caught the light. A paunchy man, holding a large black camera which was smoking slightly, was watching Fleur out of the corner of his eye. Bagman suddenly spotted Harry and Bucky, got up quickly and bounded forwards. "Ah, here he is! Champion number four! In you come, Harry, Sergeant Barnes, in you come… nothing to worry about, it's just the Wand Weighing ceremony, the rest of the judges will be here in a moment –"

"Wand Weighing?" Harry repeated, eyebrow raised.

"We have to check that your wands are fully functional, no problems, you know, as they're your most important tools in the tasks ahead," said Bagman.

Harry snorted, and Bagman caught his drift, chuckling.

"Well now, Harry, I've seen what you can do without a wand, my word yes," he said. "But remember that those bracelets won't allow you to access those… abilities. It'll be just magic all the way."

"Oh, I know, Mr Bagman," Harry said, and snapped his fingers, a ball of flames appearing in front of him. "They weren't what I meant." He waved a hand. "Besides, I found out the hard way that my most important tool isn't my wand, or anything else related to my powers: it's my brain."

Bagman blinked a couple of times, absorbing this, before chuckling again. "Of course, of course," he said, as if he was just humouring Harry. Harry, for his part, simply rolled his eyes extravagantly at Bucky, who smiled faintly. "Anyway," Bagman continued, leading them on. "The expert's upstairs now with Dumbledore. And then there's going to be a little photo shoot. This is Rita Skeeter," he added, gesturing towards a witch in magenta robes. "she's doing a small piece on the Tournament for the Daily Prophet …"

"Maybe not that small, Ludo," said Rita Skeeter, her eyes locking onto Harry. Her hair was set in elaborate and curiously rigid curls that contrasted oddly with her heavy-jawed face. She wore jewelled spectacles and a peculiarly predatory expression. The thick fingers clutching her crocodile-skin handbag ended in two-inch nails, painted crimson, left Harry thinking vaguely of blood-stained vampire claws. "I wonder if I could have a little word with Harry before we start?" she said to Bagman, but still gazing fixedly and somewhat hungrily at Harry. "The youngest champion, you know … to add a bit of colour?"

"Certainly!" cried Bagman. "That is – if Harry has no objection?"

"I do," Harry said flatly. "Even I was willing to give an interview, it would only be with the other three champions," he added, nodding at the other three, who were watching this little confrontation with poorly disguised curiosity.

"But surely," Skeeter began.

Bucky stepped up, placed a hand on Harry's shoulder, and gave Rita a very hard look. "Harry has given his answer," he said. "If you want to try and arrange an interview, I recommend you contact Harry's father and uncle." He leaned forward. "And Miss Skeeter? Prince Loki anticipated your involvement in this tournament. He has read your articles, as have I."

In a flash, Rita's quill was in her hand, as was her notebook. "Have you now?" she breathed. "Perhaps you, Sergeant Barnes, a living legend from the days of Grindelwald, would therefore care to offer a few comments?"

"I am only going to relay a message that Prince Loki asked me to pass on in such circumstances," Bucky said, tone brusque and professional. "'Comment is free, but facts are sacred. Slander, libel, or misrepresent Harry or any of his associates, and you will be hearing from our lawyers.'"

Rita's smile slid off her face, before returning in the form of a palpably false grimace that made her face look like a heavily made-up skull. "Well, that is a pity," she simpered.

"Isn't it just?" Dumbledore said amiably, having appeared from apparently out of nowhere by Skeeter's left shoulder, in a trick that Harry suspected he'd learned from Doctor Strange. "Hello, Rita. You aren't monopolising Harry and Sergeant Barnes, I hope?"

" _Dumbledore!_ " cried Rita Skeeter, with every appearance of delight – but Harry noticed that her quill and the notebook had suddenly vanished, and Rita's clawed fingers were hastily snapping shut the clasp of her crocodile-skin bag. "How are you?" she said, standing up and holding out one of her large, mannish hands to Dumbledore. "I hope you saw my piece over the summer about the International Confederation of Wizards' Conference?"

"Enchantingly nasty,' said Dumbledore, utterly deadpan, his eyes twinkling. "I particularly enjoyed your description of me as an obsolete dingbat."

Rita didn't look remotely abashed. "I was just making the point that some of your ideas are a little old-fashioned, Dumbledore, and that many wizards in the street –"

"I will be delighted to hear the reasoning behind the rudeness, Rita," said Dumbledore, with a courteous bow and a smile. "But I'm afraid we will have to discuss the matter later. The Weighing of the Wands is about to start, and it cannot take place if one of our champions is being barred from entry."

Rather glad to get away from Rita Skeeter, Harry headed into the room. The other champions were now sitting in chairs near the door, and he sat down quickly next to Cedric, exchanging nods as he did so. Then, he looked up at the velvet-covered table, where four of the five judges were now sitting – Professor Karkaroff, Madame Maxime, Mr Crouch and Ludo Bagman. Harry glowered at Crouch, who twitched, but mindful of his discussion with Dumbledore, did nothing more, pointedly ignoring him instead.

Meanwhile, Peter Wisdom, the notorious Director of MI13, was standing in a corner, watching and scowling suspiciously. Since this seemed to be his default mode, Harry wasn't too worried. Rita Skeeter, meanwhile, settled herself down in another corner, sparing a wary look at Wisdom as she did; Harry saw her slip the parchment out of her bag again, spread it on her knee, suck the end of the Quick-Quotes Quill, and place it once more on the parchment.

"May I introduce Mr Ollivander?" said Dumbledore, taking his place at the judges' table, and talking to the champions. "He will be checking your wands to ensure that they are in good condition before the Tournament."

Harry snorted inwardly as the pale eyed elderly wand-maker stepped forward. The most his wand was in danger of him being was dusty from lack of use.

He tuned out for a little while as Ollivander examined the wands, noting vaguely that Fleur had a Veela hair core, and snickering slightly when Cedric mentioned that he'd polished his wand last night. The latter got a wry snort from Krum and a disgusted noise from Fleur that, even if it was not put in words, very clearly said 'boys!'

Finally, it was his turn. "Ah, Mr Potter," Ollivander said. "Or perhaps rather, Mr Thorson." His gaze focused on Harry's only slightly dusty wand, which he ran through his fingers. "And your wand: Holly and Phoenix feather, how well I remember it…" He shot Harry a disconcertingly piercing look. "A combination with a very particular significance to you, of course."

"Of course," Harry echoed wryly. He'd rather not have his wand's connection to Voldemort, much less Phoenix related matters, brought up. Especially not in front of the press.

Ollivander, however, simply nodded and after a little more examination, produced a fountain of wine and handed the wand back.

After that, it was all over bar the pictures – the photographer wanted Fleur in front, but Skeeter wanted Harry instead. Harry, for his part, steadfastly refused to be chivvied, using a little earth-magic trick Strange had taught him to root himself, and Bucky loomed ominously whenever either Skeeter or the photographer made to try and budge Harry by physical force. Bucky's placement was another argument, as was that of Madame Maxime, who overshadowed everyone.

Eventually, Bucky was placed off to one side, though he was caught in one shot. Additionally, the rest of the Champions had individual shots, to varying pleasure and displeasure – Fleur enjoyed it, while Cedric stood upright and noble and not giving any sign of discomfort, and both Krum and Harry, who would have been thought most used to this sort of thing, tried to avoid the camera where possible.

But soon enough, it was over, and Harry beat a swift retreat. The other champions seemed to be inclined to do the same, save for Krum, as Cedric found out.

OoOoO

Cedric had, for his part, been intending to head back to his room to figure out some Defence Against the Dark Arts homework. Professor Zatara's wandless-wanded fusion was fascinating, but complicated, and while he was exempt from end of year exams, he felt that that was no excuse for slacking off. This plan, however, was stopped in its tracks when he was hailed.

"Diggory."

Cedric turned to face Krum, his natural instincts for judging people fairly at war with all the warnings he'd been given about Durmstrang's dark reputation – a reputation, he well-knew, that had roots in reality.

Of course, he thought ruefully, Hogwarts is hardly spotless. They produced Grindelwald, but we produced Voldemort, _and_ had Salazar Slytherin's basilisk slithering around in the pipes just a couple of years back, as well as at least one evil teacher.

"Krum," he replied evenly. "You wanted a word?"

Krum nodded, before looking around carefully. Cedric followed his example. Walls, after all, had ears – and that wasn't counting the portraits. Indeed, if the rumours were true, the school itself was _alive_.

As it was, though, the teachers and judges had departed, as had Director Wisdom, the other champions, along with Harry Thorson's nigh ever-present shadowy bodyguard, Sergeant Barnes. Cedric sometimes wondered about his precise purpose; he'd seen Harry in a fight, and knew that the younger boy was not only exponentially more powerful than most witches and wizards he'd encountered, but a much better fighter than most too, and thanks to those strange 'psychic' powers of his, he had extremely good senses. It couldn't be for protection… maybe it was just to have someone to keep an eye on him, keep him balanced? Or, Cedric thought uneasily, perhaps Bucky wasn't there for _Harry's_ protection…

"I vanted a vord," Krum confirmed. "About the boy."

"Harry," Cedric said. Even if there had been two other male champions apart from him and Krum, things tended to come back to Harry sooner or later.

Krum nodded again. "Vat is he like?"

Cedric blinked, a little off-guard, then shrugged. "Nice enough," he said. "A bit of a loner – he's okay with most people, but he's got a few friends he sticks with. Smart, too, and powerful." He grimaced. "Very, _very_ powerful."

Krum shrugged. "He is a… half-god, yes?"

"Demigod," Cedric corrected, nodding.

Krum inclined his head. "Demigod," he said. "Power comes with that."

Cedric had to admit he wasn't wrong, but was left with a question he voiced immediately after. "If you're not thinking about his powers, how powerful he is," he said. "What do you want to talk about, about him?"

Krum scowled, an expression that came naturally to him, but not angrily. He seemed to be thinking carefully. "Three months ago," he said. "Things happened. Around Russia."

"Including Bulgaria," Cedric guessed.

"Yes," Krum confirmed. "Including Bulgaria."

Cedric frowned, a little puzzled at this change of subject – what did the events around Russia have to do with Harry? Then, his frown deepened as he considered it. Harry had returned to school unusually late, and when he had, he'd been twitchy, unpredictable, and seemingly wary of danger around every corner. Whatever had happened to him over the summer had not been pleasant, and he'd been very much not inclined to talk about it.

It would therefore make sense if the two were related, especially considering what had happened to Russia, with water pipes producing only dust, both muggle and magical crops withering – those had been curses so unutterably vast and so carefully focused that speculation was rampant as to who or what was behind it. Some thought that the Russians had simply stirred up something they shouldn't have, trying to fuel a new Empire, and paid the price. And maybe, Cedric thought, they weren't far wrong. If they'd interfered with Harry, then Asgard could and would exact vengeance.

"What do you think that Harry has to do with Bulgaria?" he asked carefully.

Krum was silent for a long moment. "The one you call the Winter Soldier came out of Russia," he said. "Bulgaria vas in Russia's Empire. In Bulgaria, we remember the Winter Soldier. He hunted muggles, yes, but wizards too." He paused again, weighing his words. "They say the Winter Soldier is dead." He shrugged. "Perhaps. But his masters are not."

"They were behind what happened in Russia?" Cedric asked, and when Krum nodded, he looked bemused. "What does this have to do with Harry?"

Krum considered his words again. "My father vorks for our Ministry," he said eventually. "He studied the…" He frowned, and tapped his skull.

"Brains?" Cedric asked, then at a scowl and head-shake, amended it. "Thoughts?"

Krum nodded. "Thoughts," he said. "The thoughts of our fighters." His expression darkened. "The ones that survived." He met Cedric's gaze. "He showed them to me, for warning, safety, for…"

"Just in case," Cedric said soberly. It reminded him of some of the stories the older students had told back when he was a first year and they wanted to scare the ickle firsties with stories of the war with Voldemort. The sort of warnings children were given, to be careful, to know signs of danger when they saw them. It was familiar, from some of his earlier memories.

Krum, seeing his recognition, smiled sourly in acknowledgement and nodded. "A young man; tall, white, wearing glasses and…" He cursed in Bulgarian and gestured irritably at his face.

"A mask?" Cedric suggested.

"A mask," Krum said. "He was fast. Strong. Faster and stronger than human." He was silent for a moment. "He had black hair, long." He met Cedric's gaze and ran his fingers through his fringe. "With white hair here."

Cedric's heart almost stopped.

"The Winter Soldier vas dead," Krum said, glancing down the stairs towards the corridor Harry had taken. "So, a new Soldier vas needed. And…" He gestured off in the direction Harry had gone, as if to say, 'and who better than the incredibly powerful young demigod?'

Cedric, for his part, had barely managed to start breathing again, and was trying to order his thoughts. He had to admit, it lined up, timing wise at least. Harry's disappearing act tallied more or less with the events in Russia, and as Cedric was well aware, Harry was tough as nails – he'd survived some pretty insane things and come out pretty much mentally intact. Even _dying_ hadn't fazed him for long.

So when he'd come back, clearly not all there mentally, clearly traumatised in a way that as Cedric had told Harry personally, was reminiscent of the famously twitchy Mad-Eye Moody… well, in retrospect, that should have been a warning, that something very, very bad had happened to him. And if what Krum suggested was true, Harry had been forcibly turned into the second Winter Soldier – and it would have to be forcibly. Even leaving aside moral considerations, if there was one thing that Cedric knew about Harry was that he was a very independent person who absolutely loathed being told what to do, tending to regard rules as things to work around rather than work within. And being turned into a second Winter Soldier by force, which even a relative neophyte in mental magic such as Cedric knew would wreak absolutely horrible damage, would certainly consider that to be something in the category of very, very bad.

It would also, Cedric realised with a horrible sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, explain why Harry had reacted so violently to Seamus Finnegan's poorly judged joke about reading Professor Sprout's mind. While it was intended as an innocuous joke, to someone who would – according to this theory – have suffered an outright mental rewrite and enslavement, far more brutal and torturous than the Imperius Curse (which for better or for worse was meant to be quite relaxing), more like the Cruciatus, it would quite reasonably have elicited a very different reaction. A reaction like Harry's, one where he very nearly lost control.

"You think it happened," Krum said flatly, having read Cedric's expression.

"I think it might have," Cedric said carefully. "It would explain a lot of things." He eyed Krum. "I don't think you're just sharing a theory, though. What do you want to ask?" His eyes narrowed suddenly, and before Krum could answer, he folded his arms and said accusingly, "You want to know if I think he's dangerous."

Krum shrugged, not remotely abashed.

Cedric thought about it. It was, he had to reluctantly admit, a reasonable concern, even if one didn't count what may or may not have happened to Harry in Russia. Harry was powerful enough to do things like make the Durmstrang ship perform aerobatics, out of line of sight, and without any noticeable damage to the super-structure, speaking to extraordinary skill as well. Further, he had an explosive temper that could be triggered by apparently innocuous things, and when on edge, he obeyed only a very small, very select group of people. In fact, Cedric thought, at Hogwarts those people were limited to Sergeant Barnes, Professor Dumbledore, and just possibly Professor McGonagall. And he wasn't certain about that last one.

He was also acutely aware that Harry was being trained in serious combat, that he had been tried and tested in serious combat, by a variety of teachers. Even the legendary Doctor Strange was supposed to be among them. If he had training like the Winter Soldier on top of that… Cedric shuddered. There was no limit to the havoc he could unleash.

But 'could', he mused, was not 'would'.

"If he wanted to, he could be," he said eventually. "Very dangerous. But he doesn't want to. Whatever happened to him over the summer, that hasn't changed. He's still healing from what happened to him, I think, and yes, he's got a temper, yes, he doesn't like bullies, and yes, he definitely doesn't like people he cares about being hurt. Other than that, though…" He shrugged. "If you don't bother him, he won't bother you." He quirked a smile. "As far as I can tell, he actually wants to protect us."

Krum raised both eyebrows in astonishment.

"I don't think he thinks much of our ability to protect ourselves," Cedric said dryly.

"I am not helpless," Krum said, frowning.

"I know," Cedric said. "Neither am I. And neither is Fleur." He smiled again. "Harry's the sort of person who worries, though. That's the main reason I think he's not a threat. More than that, it's why I think he's a good person."

Krum nodded slowly. "Thank you, Diggory," he said. "I haf much to think about."

"Glad to help."

OoOoO

The fires in the shrine had died down somewhat, casting a faint, red glow into the dark, wet night outside. The shrine's sole current resident appeared to be a man in late middle age, with a neat white beard and flowing shoulder length hair. He was clad in simple, old, but well-kept saffron robes, seemed to be perfectly comfortable sitting and staring out into the damp darkness. At a certain point, without even moving, changing expression, or even blinking, he spoke.

"Good evening, Taliesin."

Another figure, a man who appeared to be earlier in middle age, with shorter, darker hair, and a shorter, darker beard, faded out of the shadows. He was wearing simple robes too, though in blue, rather than saffron. He also did not seem remotely surprised that he had been detected. Whether this was because he had expected it, or allowed it, was ambiguous.

"Good evening, Gorakhnath," he said, as he took a seat opposite the other figure. He was silent for a moment, regarding his companion thoughtfully. "You know," he said mildly. "Of all my many, many names, I do wonder why you insist on using that one. It's not my current name. It isn't even my first."

"Both of these are things are true," Gorakhnath said calmly.

Strange raised an eyebrow. "Then why do you use it, old friend? Because it was my name when we first met?"

"In part," Gorakhnath said. "Because it was your name when we first met. And in part because it is a reminder, old friend: for that was when you were at your best."

Strange chuckled a little bitterly. "Yes, well," he said. "A lot of things have changed since then."

Gorakhnath sighed. "Yes, a lot of things have," he said. "Including many that should not." He met Strange's gaze. "So, Taliesin. What brings you here? I doubt it is because you feel you have more to learn. And I doubt it is to resurrect old arguments."

"I do not," Strange agreed. "We both know that our philosophical disagreements will not be resolved by a single frank discussion, if they could ever be resolved at all. Our priorities are different. Furthermore, I deem what I do to be an unpleasant necessity. You disagree." He shrugged. "I've long since made my peace with that, and I don't have time to waste trying to convince you otherwise."

"As much as that grieves me, you are correct," Gorakhnath said, nodding slowly. "If you have not come for yourself, then who have you come for?"

"I have a student of my own."

Gorakhnath let out a long, slow breath, and nodded. "The boy," he said.

Strange nodded.

"You have never been one for taking students," Gorakhnath observed. "The Maximoff girl was an exception to your general rule."

"You have felt his power."

"Both his, and the power he harbours," Gorakhnath said. "So, this is why you come to me, Taliesin."

Strange inclined his head politely. "Your expertise in both exceeds even mine," he said.

Gorakhnath returned the inclination. "Which do you wish me to teach him about?"

"A little bit of both would be nice," Strange said. "But primarily the latter. I need you to teach him how to see it as more than just something that makes him unpalatable to monsters and is useful for potentially blackmailing the Council of Skyfathers."

Gorakhnath raised an eyebrow.

"There is a girl."

"Ah."

"Indeed," Strange said dryly. "Though she was also one of those who was key in talking him down after he almost... well." He smiled faintly. "You know what happened, better than most. You have experience. And you are therefore perfectly suited to teach him how to understand it on a deeper level than simply something which could trigger the end of the world. Or rather, worlds, plural. Time is limited, something not helped by the Askani once again having poked something they shouldn't have."

There was a moment of silence.

"I cannot help him with the practicalities of wielding the flames of the Phoenix. Not with matters as they are."

"I've accounted for that," Strange said serenely.

"You always do," Gorakhnath said, in a carefully neutral tone of voice.

Strange's lips twitched wryly. "There is another teacher, in another era," he said. "And practicalities are not what I'm worried about - Harry picks up practicalities quickly. Theory, less so. And this is theory he needs to understand."

Gorakhnath nodded slowly. "I understand," he said. "But one question remains, Taliesin. Why have you come to me?"

Strange raised an eyebrow. "You know this subject better even than I do," he said. "Your experience is deeper."

"But experience cannot be taught," Gorakhnath pointed out. "And your knowledge of this subject is less than mine, yes, but it is still far more than either of us could teach the boy in one, even two, lifetimes." He eyed Strange. "There is something that you want from me, something that you feel you cannot provide."

Strange smiled a crooked smile and inclined his head. "You see straight through me," he said, before sighing. "There is a saying: 'the student becomes the master'. This means that the student becomes a master in their own right. However, taken literally, it means that the student becomes like their master." He smiled briefly. "I think I picked up a couple of things from you." The smile faded. "But only a couple. I was a grown man, albeit a young one, when we first met. I had been mostly shaped already. Harry is still young, a young man, yes, but still barely more than a child in some ways. Accordingly, he is still open to influence and moulding, in a way that I wasn't."

"'Give me a child until he is seven, and he is mine for life'," Gorakhnath murmured. "The words of the Jesuits. Many were their flaws, but there is wisdom too. That is one piece of it." He regarded Strange. "You think the boy is growing in your image."

"Somewhat," Strange said. "I know we have disagreed on many things, old friend, about what I do and why I do it. But I have done it so no one else would have to. No one. I do _not_ want anyone to grow up to be me, least of all Harry." He waved a hand. "Yes, I could teach much, though not all, of what he needs to know, and teach it myself, and I am. But as you well know, old friend, there is more to teaching than just knowledge – there is also how that knowledge is imparted. And this part, I think, could do without having my philosophies bound up in it."

"You would settle for mine instead?"

"At the very least, they would make for an interesting alternative."

Another moment of silence.

"Very well."

 **Yep, Strange had a mentor. Well, actually, he had a few, one of whom (Merlin) we've actually already seen. Gorakhnath – who lives in India, but technically isn't Indian, since he's not exactly human – taught him things relating to the Astral Plane, among other things, when he was travelling the Earth before the Battle of Camlann, and before he really became Doctor Strange. Because of this, and since Gorakhnath does not approve of Strange's methods (not so much the meddling and manipulating. He's seen worse. More Strange's habit of doing it all by himself, and the related arrogance), he's prone to calling Strange by his former given name of Taliesin – as he says, it's a reminder. And yes, Gorakhnath is way old. Possibly not as old as Strange is, thanks to time travel, but he's a reasonably fair competitor.**

 **Additionally, in case anyone was wondering why I skipped the scene where Hermione had her teeth massively grown via a deflected hex (canonically, in a mini-duel between Harry and Malfoy), there's a couple of reasons. First, Harry and Malfoy aren't enemies here – they've moved past that. They also know far more destructive spells, and Harry at least is far more powerful – if he's going to get in a duel, odds are good he'll go in for the kill (or at least, the swift and brutal incapacitation).**

 **Second, while I toyed with having it between Ron and one of the other Slytherins, I was undecided on which one. In Harry's year, apart from Malfoy, only Crabbe and Goyle come off as actively malicious in the series, and they don't really have the brains/initiative at this point.**

 **Third, it could have been someone else cursing Hermione, which would have been a good way of demonstrating her chaos magic bursting out, but that could well have been lethal. Also, Harry has made it extremely clear that he takes people harming his friends extremely poorly.**

 **Fourth, Snape's 'I see no difference' line (which, incidentally, cemented my view of him as a petty arsehole – a hero, perhaps, but also an absolute prick). Even a relatively calm and centred Harry, now mindful of his need to act the part of a young adult, would be hard-pressed not to laminate him across the wall. Snape is also many things, among them resentful, but he's not stupid – he's perfectly aware that Harry could (and for a remark like that, possibly would) blast him into low Earth orbit. Dumbledore's also torn verbal strips off him and made it clear that antics like that won't be tolerated, and Snape will, grudgingly, listen.**

 **(Also, even if Harry restrained himself, Wanda would be…** _ **displeased**_ **).**


	40. Chapter 40: Into the Dark

**Hello, ladies and gents. I'm back again, though the fact that I am now job-hunting rather cuts into writing time. I know, boo, it sucks, but such is growing up. Speaking of, I am now 24. Meaning that I am officially in my mid-20s, god help me.**

 **Anyhow, since this is the big chapter 40, yes, Four Zero, I've made this a long one. It stretches right up to the start of the First Task, which, yes, has FINALLY arrived. I promise you, it is going to be a big one, oh yes… and there's also a fair bit of other stuff in here, including one scene, with Ginny and Dumbledore, that I actually wrote three whole years ago, and has remained untouched since. It held up surprisingly well. There's also other stuff, character development, the stage being set for some future conflict, all that jazz, and of course, some comedy. Buckle up, boys and girls. I'm back.**

The next morning, the Great Hall of Hogwarts was immediately captivated by copies of the _Daily Prophet_ , which led with an article on the Triwizard Champions by Rita Skeeter. The article itself, however, was rather more restrained than most had been hoping for.

 _The Weighing of the Wands is, as preparations for an event such as the Triwizard Tournament go, disappointingly mundane. The Champions were gathered, as is customary, and their wands were examined by renowned Diagon Alley wandmaker, Garrick Ollivander. He ascertained that each wand was in perfect working order, a relatively brief process, and that was it._

 _The greater significance of the event, however, was far from mundane. For one thing, this iteration of the ancient Tournament had not three Champions, but four, and one of those Champions has shown increasing evidence of not even needing his wand, or any focus at all. And it was the first time that all four of those Champions were formally presented to the press._

 _The Triwizard Tournament was revived this year after years of secret negotiations between the schools and governments involved. Considering that on the face of it, the Tournament is a simple competition between the best students from each school, it is hard to imagine why it was kept so secret. After all, the discussions about the hosting and arrangements for the Quidditch World Cup, a similarly international tournament, are hardly secret, and that is on a far grander scale, with far more glory and prestige attached. Why would the revival of a long lapsed inter-school tournament demand such secrecy?_

 _Part of it is undoubtedly the desire to avoid the loss of face that would accompany a farcical failure of negotiations. But there is another factor in play: the Triwizard Tournament is notorious for its death toll, and many of the historical victims have been underage witches and wizards. That death toll was why it was cancelled in the first place._

 _When its revival was announced, promises were made. There would be new safeguards, protecting the Champions, and preventing interference in the Tasks, controversially guaranteed not by the Ministry, but by MI13, a quasi-magical arm of the muggle government led by the notoriously ruthless Peter Wisdom, who decided to demonstrate his power on the arrival of the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang students by revealing his command of a vast flying fortress, which currently looms over Hogwarts. Moreover, anyone under the age of 17 would be barred from entry. But promises are made to be broken, as one almost immediately was._

 _While the Triwizard Tournament was intended to have three champions, one from each school, this time there are four. Rumours spread rapidly about this unprecedented event, and what could have caused it. Those rumours were fuelled by the identity of the fourth champion, who was both underage, yet quite possibly the most experienced and best qualified of the four. That anomalous champion was Harry Potter – or, as he is often referred to these days, Harry Thorson. He is many things; a Prince of Asgard, the only known survivor of the Killing Curse, and most recently, a reluctant Triwizard Champion._

 _While Harry himself has declined to make an official statement on the subject, he was reportedly furious at being named as a champion. While discussions were held in private after the champions were selected, with the details of that discussion and Harry's reaction being unclear, the latter can be extrapolated from the voluble and creative open threats he reportedly made when his candidacy was suggested._

 _This unhappiness might be somewhat surprising, considering Harry's burgeoning reputation. He is a young man of extraordinary powers and abilities, many of which were inherited from his father, Thor Odinson, Crown Prince of Asgard. Additionally, his peers all agree that he regards danger with a certain reckless disregard, facing monsters, dark wizards, and murderous muggles with a confidence and daring that borders on arrogance._

 _This last summer, he led the defenders of Hogwarts against a combined HYDRA and Death Eater attack, tearing through the attackers like a whirlwind, accompanied by Freki and Geri, the legendary wolves of Odin. The death of Luna Lovegood, a Ravenclaw second year that Harry was notably, even violently, protective of, inspired even more breath-taking displays of power, tearing apart of the ancient Great and Entrance Halls of Hogwarts and smashing centuries old enchanted stone to powder in a single blast, turning muggles and wizards alike to ash. Harry himself emerged apparently unscathed, despite wild rumours of his death and resurrection._

 _And that was not the end of it. Just days later, he was sighted at the Battle of London, alongside an unknown new wielder of the Green Lantern Ring, a number of other mysterious figures, and, of course, the Avengers. There, he battled wizards, muggle war-machines, and demons alike, and triumphed with apparent ease, remaining once more unscathed except for a lock of white in previously raven-black hair._

 _A mere couple of months later, he was rumoured to be heavily involved in the fiasco at the Quidditch World Cup, where Death Eaters ran riot, placing the Dark Mark in the skies. Exactly how he was involved was unclear, but a smashed and incinerated copse of trees near the Avengers' tent, several Death Eaters found strewn across the camp far from their fellows, and testimony from Ministry workers given in the strictest confidence that it was none other than Harry Thorson who shattered the Dark Mark, tell their own story._

 _There are other stories of events he has found himself caught up in, or involved himself in, including claims that he was involved in the Grey Court attack on New York City on Halloween, even supposedly duelling Dracula himself. These claims are made despite the fact that that invasion took place concurrently with, to mere hours after, the selection of the Triwizard Champions, when Harry should have been safely in bed. However, his mysterious absence from Hogwarts over the following few days does lend it credence._

 _Whatever his involvement at the World Cup and in other battles, witnesses described his display in London, where he was even said to be flying unaided (a feat previously believed achievable only by the very greatest of Wizards after many years of study), as 'astounding', 'terrifying' and, perhaps unsurprisingly, 'god-like'. But Harry Thorson is a god - a demigod, to be exact, one who has apparently inherited his father and uncle's powers, and learned to use them with extraordinary skill. The usual rules do not apply._

 _By this measure, he would seem to be not only the obvious choice to be a Triwizard Champion, but an eager one too. And yet he is not. The question of why is an interesting one. The other three Champions, seem to be eager enough, and they are strong choices._

 _Viktor Krum, the Durmstrang Champion, is an international Quidditch sensation, widely considered to be the best player in the game today._

 _Fleur Delacour, the Beauxbatons Champion, is a stunningly beautiful, and by her own account, part-Veela._

 _And while Hogwarts' Champion, Cedric Diggory – the son of Amos Diggory, a senior member of the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures – has a less dazzling background than his rivals, his record isn't shabby either._

 _Further adding to the questions of Harry's unease is the fact that uniquely, he has a bodyguard, Sergeant James Barnes. A storybook figure for many in the Wizarding World, Barnes was the right hand man of Captain America during the war with the Dark Lord Grindelwald, accompanying him and Albus Dumbledore on many of their missions against Grindelwald and his muggle allies, HYDRA and the Third Reich. Believed dead after disappearing during one of those missions, he was in fact captured by HYDRA, experimented on, then frozen and kept as a trophy for more than half a century, until his discovery after HYDRA's defeat during the Battle of London this summer._

 _While he was undeniably a capable fighter in his day, he is also undeniably a muggle. While he may or may not be enhanced like his old commander, Captain America, it is questionable what advantage he offers that Harry does not himself possess. So, why is he present?_

 _For the time being, it seems, he's there as a buffer between his charge and the outside world – most particularly the press. When your correspondent tried to request a brief interview with Harry, Barnes flatly turned the request down and issued a threat of legal action on behalf of Prince Loki should your correspondent's coverage of events was not to Asgard's liking. This takes on different connotations when one considers Harry's displayed outbursts of temper, which seems to have grown in step with his abilities._

 _What is his primary purpose? For the time being, it remains a mystery, one of many surrounding Harry Thorson: for instance, why did he miss the first month and a half of his school term, despite having been sighted in Diagon Alley a couple of weeks before term began, doing his school shopping in the company of Sergeant Barnes and some friends, apparently in good humour and health? Does it have anything to do with the upheavals caused by rogue Russian muggle organisation 'the Red Room', which attempted to enslave both the muggle and magical nations of Eastern Europe, spearheaded by a mysterious creature only called 'the Red Son'? Did Harry attempt to fight this monstrous being?_

 _For the time being, these questions go unanswered, and for the time being, your correspondent will have to tread lightly_

 _(For more on Harry Thorson and his history, see pages 2 and 3. For more on the Death Eaters and their master, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, see pages 4 and 5. For more on MI13, their Director Peter Wisdom, and the threat that they pose, see page 6. For more on historical examples of part magical demigods, see page 7.)_

"Lies, innuendo, and nonsense," Hermione said crossly as she finished the article. "Honestly, can't the Prophet find someone better to write for them?"

"Probably not," Harry said, shrugging.

"You're not annoyed?" Ron asked, surprised. "I mean, she kind of implied that…"

"Bucky's present to protect everyone else from me?" Harry asked lightly. "Why? I mean, she's not totally wrong." He shrugged again. "Besides, enough people are wary of me as it is. I really doubt that this article is going to make any difference."

"It probably won't," another voice agreed, and both Ron and Hermione looked up, surprised, to see Cedric Diggory standing over them. "Room for another?"

"Morning Cedric," Harry said, who had not been remotely surprised, and budged up, patting the space next to him. As Cedric sat down, smiling and greeting the Gryffindor students around them, most of whom looked rather surprised, though a few were a hostile, the somewhat grumpy Weasley twins among them. "What do you make of it?"

"More restrained than her usual stuff, actually," Cedric said, and nodded to Bucky. "Whatever you said worked."

Bucky smiled slightly. "All I did was warn her that Thor and Loki are paying attention and are willing to initiate legal action if necessary," he said mildly.

"You don't seem too bothered that you barely made a footnote," Harry added, raising an eyebrow at Cedric.

"Who says I want publicity?" Cedric replied. "Not everyone does – you certainly don't."

"And yet I get it anyway," Harry said wryly. "So, you prefer the idea of me being the Prophet's target of choice. That's nice to hear."

"Well, Harry, with you being… you, you were going to be their target of choice anyway," Hermione pointed out.

Cedric nodded. "The Prophet will sell more with your name and face on the front page than with mine," he said. "Dad won't be happy – he already thinks that you're getting the lion's share of the attention."

"I'm a Gryffindor," Harry said dryly, pointing at the rampant golden lion of the House crest. "Taking 'the lion's share' comes with the territory." He shrugged. "And please, by all means, take as much of the attention as you like, because I sure as hell don't want it."

"I won't, thanks," Cedric said. "I can't say I'm sorry that they're ignoring me." He grimaced. "Especially Skeeter."

"She's that bad?" Harry asked, eyebrow raised.

"She's that bad," Ron said. "You should hear how Percy goes on about her, how dad –" He stopped and shook his head briefly. "Dad didn't like her."

"Not many people at the Ministry do," Cedric said quietly. "A lot of other people don't, either. She doesn't just dig up information, like journalists are meant to. She finds things out, then twists them for the biggest scandal, the biggest shock value, stirring up as much trouble as she can. She's not interested in the truth, she's interested in the story, and she doesn't care how many people she hurts getting it."

"She sounds like Lockhart," Harry remarked.

Cedric bobbed his head in agreement. "I hadn't thought of that," he said. "But it makes sense."

"Well, right now, she's just mildly annoying," Harry said. "But if she tries anything like Lockhart did, she'll regret it." At Cedric's puzzled look, he added, "He tried to wipe our memories, down in the Chamber of Secrets in second year. But he used Ron's wand, which was broken, so it backfired."

"Couldn't have happened to a nicer bloke," Ron muttered.

"It was sort of fitting," Harry agreed. "Anyway. Skeeter isn't a problem. The First Task is."

Cedric raised an eyebrow. "You're worried about the First Task?"

"I said it was a problem. I didn't say it was mine."

Cedric chuckled and nodded. "Fair enough," he said, before sobering. "I don't like not knowing what's coming," he admitted after a moment. "All we know is that it'll test our courage and our wits."

"I didn't catch that part."

"You stormed out, you mean."

"Same thing."

"Well, I figure that if the Judges don't think we'll need to know, then it won't be too…"

"Dangerous?"

"I was going to say unexpected," Cedric said. "And you look sceptical."

Harry looked very sceptical. "Because I am," he said. "I'm sure they don't mean it to be too dangerous, but in my experience, this sort of thing never runs smoothly. Ever. I bet you my entire vault at Gringotts to one knut that something will go wrong, and we will be caught up in it."

Cedric's expression turned wry. "If I was talking to anyone else, I'd take that bet," he said. "But since it's you, I think I'll pass."

"A wise choice," Bucky said wryly. "And in theory, you shouldn't have anything to worry about from the Task."

Everyone paused, then turned to Bucky in stunned surprise.

"Wait," Fred said. "Are you, Sergeant James Buchanan Barnes –"

"Telling us that you know –"

"What the First Task is?"

"Of course," Bucky said calmly. "Harry is in my charge and it's my job to keep him something approximating safe. As a result, I was told what the Tasks were." He raised a hand to forestall questions. "I was also required to make a magical oath not to reveal the details of the Tasks." He met Cedric's gaze. "The Task as planned should be well within your capabilities, Mr Diggory."

"And if it doesn't go as planned?" Cedric asked, a little warily.

Bucky smiled wryly. "Then, Mr Diggory, we'll all find out how good you are at thinking on your feet."

OoOoO

This mildly ominous pronouncement was far overshadowed – though as it would turn out, not entirely unconnected – to another pronouncement that was made a few hours later.

"You are sure of this," Odin said, in tones that indicated that he was very much aware that his conversation partner was, in fact, completely sure.

 _I am, sire,_ Xavier replied. As he had the year before, he was using Cerebro to communicate with Odin in Asgard, though this time, he had projected an image of himself to talk to. _The Adept, Brother Smith, was telling the truth – or at least, he made no attempt to deceive me, and the message showed no sign of being altered. I also see no reason for him to do so. But…_

"But such things are always possible," Odin continued aloud.

 _They are._

Odin nodded slowly, then regarded Xavier's projection. "The message, the memory, that this Brother Smith shared with you," he said. "Did it seem familiar to you?"

Xavier was silent for a long moment, before he eventually said, _It was both like, and unlike, Harry, when he became the 'Dark Phoenix'._

"Unlike in what ways?"

 _I have sensed Phoenix fire before. Dark Phoenix fire, for want of a better way of putting it, is different. Corrupted. Similar enough to the difference between magic and dark magic. But this…_ Xavier looked troubled. _Harry as the Dark Phoenix was dark, yes. But mostly, he was just enraged and in pain, lashing out. This was different._

"Malice," Odin said quietly.

 _Yes. Malice. Malice, clear to me even at third hand, along with an implacable desire to destroy. This wasn't merely an entity in pain that was lashing out on reflex – this was conscious and guided._

Odin closed his eye and sighed. "Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Professor Xavier," he said.

 _You know the entity the Askani contacted._

"I do. And I think that you have your own suspicions," Odin said.

 _I do,_ Xavier admitted. _I also wish to know whether my students are in danger._

"You speak of Jean and Madelyn Grey."

 _I do. I am also concerned for Harry, thanks to his clear and present connection to the Phoenix, but I think that that matter is in hand,_ Xavier said. _It is a known risk. But Jean and Maddie both have psychic connections to Harry and, to a lesser extent, to the Phoenix. The latter connection seems to be passive, but if there is a risk that this entity could exploit it, then I need to know._

"Your concern for your students does you credit, Professor," Odin said, privately considering that two psychics of the Grey twins' vast raw power under Surtur's influence if not control was a prospect that spelled trouble, if not doom, for Midgard. "I do not think so. By your account, these Askani managed to make contact with Surtur, giving him a route through which to attack. Since he has not acted overtly since, I think that he cannot. The seals that bind him are cracked, but they hold him still – I have studied the records, and every time they have weakened in the past, he has moved to exploit that weakness as rapidly as possible. He has also required a reciprocated connection."

He regarded Xavier's projection. "My advice would be to seek the counsel of my son, Loki, and the both of you to speak to your students and warn them of Surtur, and warn them to be cautious. It may well be that Surtur will ignore Midgard even once he gains more freedom to influence realms beyond Muspelheim. Unfortunately, with the events of recent years, as well as the manifestations of my grandson's Phoenix fragment, the re-emergence of Chthon, and the appearance of the White Phoenix of the Crown herself, I think that he will be very interested indeed. And if his gaze turns to Midgard, then I am afraid that your two students will soon attract his interest."

 _I see,_ Xavier said. _Thank you, sire. I will follow your advice. And if there is any further way in which I can help, you only need ask._

"You have done Asgard a great many services; informing me of this was one of them," Odin said. "I thank you for your offer, Professor Xavier – though I hope I will not need to take you up on it."

Xavier inclined his head, both in acknowledgement and in recognition of the polite dismissal for what it was, and vanished. Odin stared at the space he had occupied, then sat down with a sigh, as the same image that had played in his mind and his nightmares for the last few months, a single image that he had managed to discern through the crack in the Seal of Muspelheim before a dark veil had fallen and he had been sharply ejected.

It was an image that both horrified and entranced in equal measure, for though it was terrible, Odin had to admit that there was a peculiar beauty about it as well – at least, that part of it which could be seen.

And that part had plenty to consider, a vast plateau of obsidian and volcanic rock, filled with forests made of iron and crystal. These forests surrounded a city constructed of gleaming metal, one that had at its heart a citadel that glowed with an eerie, pale wraith-light, a light ever reflected and distorted in the vast, ash-grey mirror of the seas below.

Mountains wreathed the plateau like a spiked crown, their tops swathed in thick, black clouds into which ash and smoke constantly poured, and through which lightning danced, while the mountains themselves glowed with a sullen, molten red light that poured forth from cracks and shafts driven deep into the bones of the world, its great smithies which in wartime poured forth weapons and armour in a constant flood. Fire giants swarmed around the mountains and the city like clouds of sparks and embers, while in the skies above, vast winged dragons circled restlessly.

It was Muspelheim, a world impossible to mistake for any other. And that was because it had one unique quality: though it was inhabited, it was dead. This might not have been obvious at first glance, not even to a Skyfather as wise as Odin, but when considered, it became clear. It had forests, of trees and grasses made of fine metal and crystal. It had seas, seas that encircled the land. And it had cities. All of these were constructed with geometrical precision and mathematical perfection.

But they were not alive. They were mere facsimiles of life, there because it was thought that they ought to be there, changeless imitations The trees and grasses did not grow or die, nor even sway in the breeze, for there was no breeze unless one was commanded. The seas did not rise and fall with the tides, for there were no tides. Though the cities were miracles of architecture and engineering, with everything neatly balanced and organised like finely faceted jewels, they were little more than a grand expanse of elaborate storage boxes for the realm's inhabitants.

And those inhabitants had no will or life of their own. For Muspelheim was a dead world, and like the rest of that realm's corpse, they were shaped by the thought and bound to the will of their master. And that master, moreover, did not share power.

This, Odin knew, was a mere glimpse of Muspelheim, and of what Surtur would do to the rest of the Nine Realms, and then the rest of the universe, given the chance. First, he would reduce everything to the very essentials of existence, burning everything until they could be reduced no more. Then, he would rebuild, creating countless lifeless worlds, engines of mathematical perfection, populated entirely by soul-bound puppets. And so would begin a new age of reality, devoid of flaws, of change, of _life_.

It was a nightmare, one that had played across his mind thousands and thousands of times, reliably following the memory of the snippet he had seen. And now, with Professor Xavier's warning, the struggle against that nightmare was edging closer. Surtur was truly awake now, not just stirring, and his bonds were breaking. Soon, they would be broken.

"'Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown'."

Odin did not even bother to look up. "Strange," he said. "I am in no mood to indulge your word games tonight."

"I am in no mood to play them," Strange said, stepping forth from the shadows. Odin did not ask how he had got there. As Strange himself had recently revealed, the former Sorcerer Supreme was ancient even by the standards of gods, and he had been weaving his way in and out of Asgard and her history for millions of years.

"Then why are you here?" Odin asked flatly.

"To offer you a little comfort," Strange said. "And render your head perhaps a little less uneasy. Surtur cannot yet reach beyond Muspelheim, not in earnest. His armies remain trapped, as do many of his greatest servants."

"But not all."

"Not all," Strange agreed. "The lesser servants that remained in this realm largely diminished, the enslaved ones being freed, the willing ones being destroyed."

"But some of the greater ones still survive, in the corners of the Nine Realms," Odin said. "I know this, Strange. I have faced Elder Wyrms and other remnants of Surtur's foul design before, as have my sons, as did our forefathers."

"And in doing so, you have steadily chipped away at Surtur's immediate strength when he ultimately breaks free," Strange said. "Long shall that continue. What I am here to tell you is less tangible, but no less important. You see, you are not the only one who looks at the Seal of Muspelheim and muses in fear of what lies beyond." His trademark smile widened wickedly. "One particular speculator looks at it from the other side. Surtur sees glimpses of the realms beyond, and he feels rage, rage at how his plans have been thwarted for so long, at the humiliation and helplessness of his imprisonment, and anticipation, for the chance to finally break free once more and complete his great work, and of course, malice, the desire to crush all who would oppose him – for, you see, his tolerance for opposition has declined even more since his imprisonment. But there's something else in there too: fear."

"Fear?" Odin asked, with a sceptical eyebrow.

"Fear," Strange confirmed. "And why would he not? He has been bound for a million years and more. After spending an age as an unstoppable force of nature, having torn power from one of the Endless themselves, being bound came as quite a shock. First, Frey popped up, swatting aside several Surtur's cosmos-slaughtering Great Captains and drove others from the battlefield, then fought Surtur himself on his home ground and his own terms. Surtur, you might imagine, was rather disorientated. Suddenly, the peerless had a peer. Suddenly, the unstoppable was stopped. Suddenly, he was trapped and at the mercy of an Alliance that had gone from being on its knees to using him as a glorified battery."

He leaned back against the wall and smiled in some satisfaction.

"And that's just the start. Because the Nine Realms have changed a lot, and he'll be wary of that. Some changes he'll be rejoicing in, such as what happened to Svartalfheim, but others, like the rise of Earth? They'll confuse, and frankly, worry him. Because through the cracks in the Nine Realms he'll have sensed the Phoenix fire on Earth, including the vast manifestation of Lily's appearance, and he won't be at all sure how to react to it. On the one hand, this is another unknown factor, another potential peer and rival, and he'll remember very well what happened the last time he ran into one of those. On another, he might well fear that this is the Phoenix making a statement of Her revisiting his affairs, a prelude to Her returning to claim the power he stole, and _that_ is something he will fear more than anything else."

"I can see your reasoning," Odin said guardedly. "And it is good to hear. Perhaps even something that can be exploited."

"Perhaps indeed, sire," Strange said. "Perhaps indeed."

Odin regarded him for a moment, then grunted. "How does my grandson?"

"Very well, as it happens," Strange said. "His little epiphany following the events of All Hallows Eve has done a great deal to help his mental state. Physically, he is likewise recovered in full, though he will keep those scars for many years to come. And in his lessons, he is an excellent student, to me at least, though I know that he has refined his more passive psychic defences under the tutelage of Lady Braddock, and as I am sure Fandral has informed you, he is showing increasing promise with the blade."

Odin nodded. "Fandral commends him," he said, a slight smile of pride playing on his lips. "He is apparently talented and exceptionally swift with blade in hand, and a quick learner too. However, he still has much to learn, and cannot devote as much time as Fandral would prefer to learning the ways of the sword." His gaze rose to meet to meet Strange's, his eye narrowing. "In part because of other lessons. Including those from you. Tell me, Strange. What magic are you teaching him?"

"Currently? I have been increasing his elemental repertoire," Strange said. "He'll always incline to fire; it comes most easily to him, and no wonder. Air comes easily to him as well, which helps his grasp of lightning – he's his father's son in that regard, though weather manipulation is rather beyond his skills. Earth and water come less easily to him, which is not exactly surprising. They, however, are mere by-products of what I am primarily trying to teach him: to hone his magical senses, to discern magic with greater precision. Magneto has been doing similar things with the telekinetic branch of his psychic senses, and the events of Halloween did the same for the telepathic branch. The magical side of things was being woefully ignored." He waved a hand. "After binding his psychic senses in the lessons and a bit of patience, he's taken to it well enough."

"An unusual area of focus," Odin remarked. "Unusually general, by your standards."

Strange shrugged. "I could spoon-feed Harry, sit him in front of my books and have him memorise curses, conjurings, and enchantments by the hundred, all perfectly fitted to the trials to come," he said. "But I would be doing him a disservice. Harry's approach to magic is an intuitive one. He works best when he is able to adapt his approach to fit the circumstances." He waved a hand. "Of course, I would not advocate total free-style. Adapting on the fly is all very well, but having a selection of spells ready to cast at a moment's notice, without having to think about the fine details, that's useful. It leaves your mind free to attend to other matters and as I think we both know, that can be the difference between life and death." His expression turned wry. "Such spells are also more precise. And while Harry's approach has become more subtle, when it comes to his spellwork, 'precision' and 'finesse' are not words that immediately come to mind."

Odin chuckled. "I think that that, Strange, is something that runs in the family," he said. "Much to my wife's despair."

"Also true," Strange said, amused.

"I do not think, however, that you are altering your method of teaching to suit Harry's inclinations," Odin continued. "As you have said before, you are going to die soon. Therefore, you wish to give my grandson lessons that will be useful in the long term, after you are gone."

Strange nodded. "The most fundamental aspect of wielding magic," he said. "Is the ability to sense it. Once it can be sensed, it can be examined and understood. From there, it can be wielded. The better a magically gifted person understands it, the more deftly they can wield it, the more they can achieve with it, and the more they can shape the world around them. Or perhaps I should say 'worlds'." He nodded at Odin. "Of course, you know all of this. A scientific understanding of magic, merging the two disciplines, that's what Asgard was built on." He leaned back. "Harry, for his part, has a very good grip on the basic mechanics of magic, the nuts and bolts of it. I am teaching him about some of the more esoteric aspects –ways in which magic extends beyond things like the ability to incinerate a vampire at fifty paces."

"And you will not simply send him here, because you feel that he does not need lessons on the science of magic and the theory," Odin said. "You intend a more intuitive approach."

"To paraphrase what I said earlier, Harry does better with things he can feel and touch – though not necessarily physically – than he does with equations and theorems," Strange said. "Practical work is his strength, and I intend to play to it." He shrugged. "And that, more or less, is it. I will be taking him to see other teachers, including a couple of mine, to teach him other things, ones that they are better placed to teach him about than I am. One, to forestall your inevitable question, is to teach about his Phoenix fragment. Do not worry – it will be in another era, unable to affect the Seal."

Odin nodded. "I would know what those other lessons are on," he said.

"I'll get you a copy of the curriculum," Strange said, turning to go.

"And Strange?"

"Yes?"

"Even with your laying down of the mantle of Sorcerer Supreme, you are a busy man. You have made it clear that your days are numbered," Odin said quietly. "So I thank you, for having taken the time to tell me these things. You did not have to."

Strange cocked his head. "How do you know that it was not merely part of my plans?" he asked.

Odin shot him an enigmatic look. "Because I am not a fool, Stephen Strange," he said. "And neither are you."

OoOoO

Other discussions were rather less opaque in their subtext. This one took place in a certain barn, on a certain farm, of an evening.

"You told him about me?" Clark asked, stunned.

"He figured it out," Jean-Paul corrected him.

"How much?"

"That you were in Kansas, specifically in Smallville, that you were a superhuman, but not a mutant – as otherwise I would have brought you to the relevant attention," Jean-Paul said. "And no, he did not read my mind."

Clark's jaw dropped, and Jean-Paul chuckled.

"Harry may not always have the most common sense in the world, _mon cher_ , but he is undeniably very clever," he said. "And he admitted that Smallville was an educated guess, going by the amount of strange things that seem to happen here, and the mysterious fashion in which those things are stopped." He smiled faintly. "He was curious about you. Much as you are about him."

"Then," Clark began, before stopping.

"Why has he not beaten a path to your door?" Jean-Paul asked perceptively, and nodded at Clark's expression. "It is simple, _mon cher_ – he is protecting you. He thinks that you are safe, and happy, where you are. He thinks that you likely have enough problems to be going on with without adding his." He grinned. "And he was most amused about your new power."

Clark went a shade of mortified red. "You _told_ him about that?" he demanded, voice cracking.

"Only because he is well-placed to sympathise," Jean-Paul said, amused.

"How do you mean?"

"He's an incredibly powerful telepath with a range of hundreds, even thousands of miles, attending a boarding school," Jean-Paul said. "Meaning that he is surrounded by hundreds of teenagers, day and night, with no respite. He also has a psychic connection to his best friend, a beautiful young woman with whom he is completely in love, much as she is in love with him, meaning that they share thoughts and feelings. And his first psychic teacher was a stunningly beautiful young woman on whom he had something of a crush. Since teaching telepathy is… _intimate_ , and since she was usually very close to him, and could read his mind during the lessons, it was also extremely embarrassing." His expression turned to wry, amused sympathy. "Believe me, _mon cher_ , he knows your pain."

Clark winced, imagining Lana, or Chloe, knowing some of his less family friendly thoughts. "And then some," he said, before frowning thoughtfully. "What's he like? Not about his powers, or who he's related to, or anything like that – I know enough of that already. What's he like as a person?"

Jean-Paul sat back, expression one of deep thought. "That, _mon cher_ , is a question that is both very simple and very complicated," he said eventually, and quirked a wry smile. "Well done."

"Sorry," Clark said, embarrassed, but Jean-Paul waved it away.

"Harry has changed a lot since I first met him," he said. "Both physically, and mentally. Physically, he is nearly a foot taller than he was, more muscular, and his glasses have been replaced by a white streak in his fringe. That, however, is of comparatively little importance. Mentally… when I first met him, Harry was a little shy. He was relatively quiet, but once he opened up, he was a happy conversationalist. He was also very willing to stand up to a drunken oaf – for we were at a Stark Industries holiday party – twice his size who decided to grab Carol's behind. Carol, by the way, was someone else he met for the first time that night." He looked thoughtful. "Of course, having magical abilities probably helped his confidence in that regard, though the question of what would happen was rendered moot when Prince, now King, T'Challa of Wakanda stepped in." He waved that away as well. "He was less confident, more shy, and…" He sighed. "He was much more innocent. Not completely; he certainly had a far better grasp than most of how cruel the world could be."

Clark nodded slowly. He'd done his own research on Harry Thorson, and the details of how his guardians, his aunt and uncle, had treated him had both horrified him and made him extremely glad that his biological father had been foresighted enough to choose his parents.

"Yes," Jean-Paul said, guessing more or less what he was thinking. "He knew better than most how cruel the world, and people, could be. He had survived two murder attempts, and faced a serious psychic attack. He had both experienced and witnessed prejudice and injustice. But he was still a fairly optimistic person; a sweet, kind, witty and charming boy, with a dazzling smile. And he had yet to see, and to understand, exactly how cruel the world could _really_ be." He raised a hand to forestall Clark. "I do not say that to denigrate what he had been through before, because that was awful in and of itself. As I have said, he had already experienced petty cruelties, and murderous viciousness. But…"

"But?" Clark asked.

Jean-Paul sighed, frowning. "It is not easy to explain," he said. "Especially in a second language." He drummed his fingers. "One way to put it is that what Harry faced before, and what he would face until after Easter this year, they were like the trials of a hero. "Until shortly after Easter, his adventures were more like something out of a novel, or a fairytale. The threat was more physical than mental. Of course, there is overlap – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, among other things. Do you follow me?"

"I think so," Clark said, frowning thoughtfully.

"Good. Of course, complicating things is the way his aunt and uncle treated him, as a nuisance at best, a disgusting freak at worst. That has done lasting damage to his sense of self-esteem. Additionally, years of having to suppress his emotions, to avoid punishment and stay beneath notice, led to an unfortunate habit of bottling up his anger – which he had far more of than anyone, even he, realised."

"That's…" Clark began, troubled.

"I know," Jean-Paul said quietly. "It is horrible." He was silent for a moment. "But under the love and affection of his father, uncle, his godmother and his grandparents, among many others, he blossomed. He became more confident, more assertive, more comfortable in his own skin, and after a period of fearing it, in his ever growing power. He learned to manage his temper. And he grew wiser, too – at the height of the Battle of London, he was offered the chance to have everything he ever wanted, even his mother returned from the dead, the power to make everything right. But even though he wanted his mother back more than anything else in the universe, he saw the cost, understood that it was a ploy, and rejected it."

"But that's not the end of the story, is it?" Clark said.

"No. No, it is not," Jean-Paul said. "I was by his side at the Battle of London, and it showed several sides to him. One moment, he was a young man, wise beyond his years. Another, he was a dashing hero, bantering with his friends and family as he fought monsters and triumphed. And on another still… he was a little boy who wanted his mother. But there was also another side."

He was silent for a moment. "It is no great secret that Thor was shot with an enchanted bullet by a HYDRA. It nearly killed him. One thing that is not known, however, is that just before that happened, Harry's school was attacked by HYDRA. A friend of his, a younger girl he had been trying to protect from bullies, was killed. He attacked them head-on, and though he defeated many of them, he was killed in the process. As to how he came back, that is another story, a complicated one, relating to his mother. But when he did… I was not present, so I am not sure if it was him or his mother that was in control, but whichever one it was obliterated the HYDRA strike-force. His father, and his godmother, managed to stabilise him after that. Then, his father was almost killed, and HYDRA tried to take him and Jane Foster, his father's girlfriend – they were out for a family dinner. And Harry snapped."

"I saw the footage," Clark said quietly. "I know what happened next."

"Then you might have some idea of what that other side is like," Jean-Paul said. "All of Harry's rage, compressed and controlled, into something cold, ruthless, furious… and sometimes savage. It is a side to him that does not appear often. I have seen it only twice, heard of it only once more, and it only appears under great strain – and usually, after something terrible has happened to those he cares for. The first time, it was his father's near-death experience, though his own death and the death of a dear friend contributed, and the crimes his target had committed. The second time, was different. It was a bit less controlled, a bit more wild, and after the way in which he was tortured, used to do things that would drive another man or woman insane, I can hardly blame him." His expression tightened, mask slipping for a moment as his eyes flashed with anger. "And the third time," he said, tone carefully controlled. "His target was a monster, a vampire, that had ripped Uhtred's eye out, and large chunks of flesh, drained him of much of his blood, and nearly killed him. Harry responded with dismemberment."

"Is he, Uhtred I mean, all right?" Clark asked, seriously worried.

"Uhtred is fine," Jean-Paul said. "Thank you for asking. His healing abilities and medical treatment mean that he is physically perfectly well. Even his eye is growing back, though slowly." His fists clenched and unclenched a couple of times, slowly, belying his calm tone. Clark noticed and reached over, taking a hand.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

Jean-Paul looked down at the hand in some surprise, before looking up at Clark and smiling a warm, fond smile. Clark wasn't sure, but there might have been a tear at the corner of his eye. "I am, _mon cher_ ," he said. "For the most part. And much of that is because of friends like you. Thank you."

He stood up and looked out the window of the barn thoughtfully. "Harry is many things," he said. "As all of us are. He is a little more complicated than most, though. He is sweet, kind, and reaches out to those who are lonely. He is brave, noble, and utterly loyal to family and friends. He is witty, charming, and unfailingly generous. He is thoughtful, clever, and sometimes surprisingly wise. Chivalrous and courageous, he never saw an innocent whose cause he would not take up." He chuckled wryly. "In truth, mon cher, he has all the virtues of a Knight of the Round Table, which can be both remarkably endearing and extraordinarily irritating. But."

"He's got his bad points too," Clark predicted, correctly judging Jean-Paul's inflection.

"Yes. He has his vices as well," Jean-Paul said, graver now. "He is secretive, self-blaming, and arrogant in his habit of acting alone. He is startlingly impulsive, stubborn to the point of madness, and self-sacrificing to the point of being almost suicidal. He is temperamental, his blood as hot as the fire he wields, yet he is also capable of being cold, calculating, and manipulative. Sins against himself he forgives easily enough, but at the same time, he is ruthless, if not merciless, towards those who harm or threaten those he cares for. His experiences have marked him, scarred him, and darkened him."

He turned back to Clark and shrugged. "If I had to sum him up in one word, _mon cher_ , it would be 'complicated'," he said. "But that would not cover all of him. As simply as I can put it, he is a good person. The scars on his body and mind, they are fading. Wisdom has not come easily to him, but it is coming. His anger and impulsiveness have been tempered. He still has his problems, his temptations, and no shortage of inner demons, of course." He smiled a wry smile at Clark. "But with the possible exception of you, _mon cher_ , I cannot think of anyone who does not."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that," Clark said quietly.

"Perhaps," Jean-Paul said. "We all have our struggles. Yours, I think, is identity. You are not sure precisely who you are and where you belong. While you have always been Clark Kent of Kent Farm, you have always been different, always had doubts. Of course…" His gaze fell on the two blanket-wrapped crystals beside Clark, which Clark had shown him earlier. "Now you know something of where you came from, who your birth parents were, you have a whole database about the world you came from. This, _mon cher_ , seems to make both of those things easier and more difficult at the same time." He eyed Clark pointedly. "It does not help that you have so far refused to take a closer look at that database Alison Carter gave you."

Clark fidgeted. "I," he began, before frowning and standing up sharply. "So what?" he snapped. "That world I came from, Krypton, it's gone, and so is everyone who lived there. Everyone except me. So why should I learn about it? It doesn't even exist any more. What's the point?"

Jean-Paul didn't say anything, just regarded him steadily. Then, he shrugged. "Fine," he said.

"Fine?" Clark echoed, surprised and suspicious.

"It is your past, and your affair," Jean-Paul said calmly. "So therefore, it is your choice. I cannot make it for you, and I do not feel like playing devil's advocate for one side or another."

Clark, who had been gearing up for something of an argument, just stared, slack-jawed.

"As your friend, _mon cher_ , my only concern is that you do what makes you happy," Jean-Paul continued. "Whether that is learning about your people, and their world, or leaving it for another day, or even forever. I have no preference." He met Clark's gaze. "This, _mon cher_ , is entirely up to you."

Clark's eyes narrowed and his hands clenched into fists. Jean-Paul's expression remained unchanged as he held Clark's gaze. Eventually, Clark looked away, sitting down with a thump.

"When Mrs Carter told me I was the last, it didn't really sink in," he said quietly. "Not at first. She focused on my birth family, my birth father, and the way she told it… I just thought that my birth family was dead. And I'd kinda expected that. Then, a few days ago, it really hit me. I'm not just a kid with weird powers, or even 'just' an alien. I wasn't 'just' different. There was no one like me, not in the world, not in the whole universe." He looked up, eyes wet, expression utterly heartbroken. "I'm the last," he managed, choked. "There isn't some big alien family, let alone world, of people like me, because I'm not just an alien who got lost – I'm an alien who's going to go _extinct!_ I'm the _only_ one left! And that means that I'm… that I'm alone."

His face crumpled and he sat down again, shoulders shaking with silent sobs. Jean-Paul sat down beside him and gently pulled him into a hug. He said nothing, letting Clark's tears pour out until there were no more to come. Once he was sure that Clark was done, he pulled out a handkerchief and handed it to Clark, watching as the younger boy mopped at his damp face.

"And you think that if you see this database, see all that you have lost, everyone that you have lost, that it will only feel worse?" Jean-Paul asked softly. Clark nodded tightly, and Jean-Paul sighed sadly. "And here I thought I would not see a crueller fate visited on someone, anyone, like us," he said softly. "But even Harry has the comfort of his parents' worlds being intact, and even, rare as demigods are, others like him. You do not, and that is a terrible burden."

He slipped an arm around Clark's shoulders. "But you are not alone," he continued firmly. "Not truly. You have your parents, who love you dearly. You have friends, who also love you – I am one of them. Your experiences, of being a young person with powers, yes, they are rare. But they are not unique. In that respect, at least, there are many others like you, who would welcome you. Harry is one of them. He has not come over to say hello solely because he thinks you are safer and happier this way. He would be over here in a heartbeat if he felt it would make you happier." He paused. "Well, unless it was dangerous. To you." He waved a hand. "You understand my point."

Clark cracked a small smile. "I think I do," he said.

"Good," Jean-Paul said, returning the smile, before looking graver. "I will be honest with you, because you deserve that much," he said. "I could suggest that you open the database anyway, accept the hurt, but carry on – preserve and honour the memory of your family, of your people. I cannot say, however, that it will fill the hole in your heart. I cannot say it will ever be filled, because I cannot imagine how it ever could. It will continue to hurt, and that hurt may never fade. But, _mon cher_ , I can promise that you will never have to face it alone."

There was a long silence. Then, Clark smiled again, this one a little brighter. "Thanks," he said quietly, and he looked at the two crystals, expression more considering this time. "I need to think about it. But if I do, when I do…" He looked up at Jean-Paul in mute appeal.

Jean-Paul smiled gently. "You have my number," he said. "Just call, _mon cher_. I will be there." He stood up. "And now, I bid you goodnight." He glanced over at the Kent house. "Though I would greatly appreciate it if you explained at least in part to your parents why you have been crying. I fear that if you do not, your father may jump to the conclusion that I have upset you, and I would rather not be knee-capped on my next visit."

Clark grinned. "No promises," he said, as Jean-Paul vanished in a storm of golden lightning and a pair of rolled eyes.

OoOoO

Clark was not the only one who had been face to face with a potentially painful part of his past. In the case of Hermione Granger, however, a good couple of thousand miles away, she was entirely unaware of it, and the other party present much preferred that she remain so. So, she remained blissfully ignorant of this particular secret – her parentage, instead knowing her biological mother, Wanda Maximoff, as nothing more than her friend's beloved godmother, the Sorceress Supreme, and most recently, her teacher in chaos magic. And those things, it might be said, were quite enough to be going on with.

Hermione, had she known, would probably have disagreed strenuously with such news management. But as it happened, she did not know, and was mostly preoccupied with learning about the strange and dangerous form of magic that she had an unavoidable affinity for.

As Wanda had explained to her, chaos magic was like normal magic in that once manifested, sooner or later it would always find a way out. Hermione's had manifested in an incident less than a year before when her frustration at not taking immediately to wandless magic, while Harry took to it like a duck to water, had manifested in an explosive burst of chaos magic that meant that the Lake now not only had a giant squid living in it, but also an orca whale. Apparently, it was keeping the Grindelow population down.

But while it had been largely dormant since then, as Wanda had explained, 'largely' was not 'totally'.

"It's already appearing in the little things," she explained. "For instance, I know very well that teenagers grow and change very quickly in many extraordinary ways." Her expression turned wry. "I still dimly remember my own teens, much to general surprise. But one thing that does not normally change, if you'll forgive me pointing it out, is the size of certain features."

"Certain features?" Hermione asked, puzzled.

"Your front teeth have shrunk," Wanda said simply. "They were a little prominent before, and I'm sure that you heard all the nasty jokes imaginable, because teenagers can also be right little shits at times."

"They've shrunk?" Hermione repeated, stunned, then stared in disbelief at the mirror Wanda conjured.

"They have," the older woman said. "And that, to me, is more than a little worrying. While it was a fairly benevolent change as these things go, changes made to your body by chaos magic are rarely so benevolent, and it's even rarer that when something goes wrong, it can be fixed. As I'm sure you well know, there are reasons why Transfiguration is so carefully taught, and why various forms of shapeshifting are so hard to master and so carefully regulated."

Hermione nodded seriously. "There have been fewer than a dozen registered animagi in Britain in the last century," she said. "Elsewhere, in other magical traditions, particularly wandless ones, sometimes they're more common, but…"

"It's still a very risky process," Wanda said. "Though one that can be achieved at an astonishingly young age by a sufficiently intelligent and determined witch or wizard. Minerva, Professor McGonagall, became an animagus at 17 with the help of Albus Dumbledore. James – Thor, rather, and his friend Sirius Black, became animagi before they turned 16, without outside aid." Her lips thinned. "They also helped Peter Pettigrew to do so." She shook her head. "It risks permanent partial transformations. Other methods of shapeshifting, more closely related to water magic and the method through which some supernatural entities such as the Fae take on animal form, have their own dangers. Chaos magic, in its own way, is the worst in its risks if internally directed. Cancer is one of the relatively lesser dangers – don't worry, you're clear. I've checked."

Hermione breathed a sigh of relief, before adding, "And if I may ask, what about the relatively greater ones, Ms Maximoff?"

Wanda's expression hardened. "Dissolving," she said, and when Hermione blanched, smiled a slightly strained reassuring smile. "Relax. Your gift was nowhere near that well developed."

"But when I turned a _chair_ into an orca, _permanently_ …"

"That was one spike," Wanda said firmly. "When your abilities manifested. It happens a lot when unusual powers first manifest. Harry, for instance, managed to reach Asgard with a psychic cry for help when his abilities first manifested – though, granted, they had a little jump start. Even so, he didn't have anything like that level of power until very recently. In fact, I'm not sure if he could do it even now. And his cousin, Jean Grey: when she manifested her psychic powers, the disruption was felt worldwide, and only recently have her powers caught up to that level." She smiled slightly. "My abilities also made quite a mess when they first emerged, as it happens."

Hermione looked a little relieved, but still rather nervous. "So, it's not going to be a one-off, then?" she asked, sounding like she was holding out a hope that it might be.

"In terms of being that powerful?" Wanda said. "No, I'm afraid. That pretty clearly indicated that you're going to be pretty strong, once you've mastered your abilities. In terms of being entirely unconscious and out of control?" Her grass green eyes gleamed. "Not if I can help it."

That discussion had both made Hermione warier of the practicalities of her newfound gifts – a feat in and of itself, as none of the books on the subject had been especially encouraging – and relieved about learning it. After all, she was in the hands of a woman who even her detractors acknowledged as the most accomplished chaos mage in centuries. She was certainly the sanest.

She had also had to confess to being a little in awe of her teacher. It was true that she had become relatively used to meeting all sorts of famous, even legendary figures. She was, after all, a student of Loki himself, who was the uncle of one of her closest friends, she was on familiar terms with the Avengers, and she'd become almost used to the legendary Doctor Strange and his disquieting habits of casually defying the known laws of magic and if he was feeling particularly mischievous, appearing right behind one's left ear. However, 'relatively' was not 'totally', and Wanda Maximoff was a remarkable figure in her own right. The first new Sorcerer or Sorceress Supreme in over four centuries, she wore the mantle with utter self-confidence in her own judgement, power, and ability.

She was also, as Hermione had found, a good and patient teacher. A little brusque and distant at first, as if trying to keep herself carefully removed from Hermione, like a more distant Professor McGonagall. But as time passed and both student and teacher adjusted, she quickly warmed up to her student. She was also not in the least fazed by the fact Hermione didn't take to chaos magic immediately, as it was completely against her natural inclinations.

"I had problems too," she said candidly. "The direct inverse of yours, I'll admit. If anything, I was too comfortable with chaos magic, and had trouble grounding myself in order and reality." She laid a hand on Hermione's shoulder. "You're doing well. If anything, this disadvantage will be an advantage in the long run – to practise chaos magic not just effectively, but safely too, you need a firm grounding in reality." She smiled slightly. "Think of it as paying it forward, laying the ground-work."

And indeed, sooner rather than later, Hermione was becoming more and more comfortable handling chaos magic, and doing the basics; disruption, ignition, and generation of static electricity – though directing it was a work in progress.

These lessons, for reasons of practicality, general safety, and the comfort of Hogwarts itself, which Did Not Like chaos magic (and for good reason), took place in the grounds. Accordingly, Hermione was rather surprised to see Ron appear from near the forest, with the former Professor Cassidy. Ron, she noticed, looked tired but grimly pleased, while Cassidy looked… regretful? She couldn't quite tell.

"Ron?" she said. "What are you doing here?"

Ron opened his mouth, likely to retort that he could probably ask her the same thing, before spotting Wanda and the shape of Hermione's inevitable response, and grudgingly closing it. "Training," he said defensively.

"I was showin' Ron a few moves I didn't get the chance t' teach him last year," Cassidy said.

Hermione, recalling that this was not the first time she'd seen Ron arrive in the Common Room, looking both scruffy and tired, folded her arms and shot both of the red-heads a sceptical look.

"Private lessons, Sean?" Wanda asked mildly.

"Yeah," Ron said defensively. "I asked, and he – Professor Cassidy – said it was okay." He directed his gaze at Hermione, defensive expression turning into a scowl. "Yeah, I'm having private lessons. Same way that you and Harry are. Have you got a problem with that?"

"No," Hermione said, taken aback. "I just…"

"You just what?" Ron snapped.

"Well, I need to learn about my chaos magic, because it's dangerous and I need to know how to control it," Hermione said. "As for Harry… well, Harry has a lot of abilities to master. And an apparently never-ending list of enemies."

"Tell me about it," Wanda muttered, while Sean chuckled softly.

"What are you getting at, Hermione?" Ron asked, eyes narrowed.

"Well… I was just wondering why you're learning this sort of thing, Ron," Hermione said. "I mean, it's not like you'll ever…" She trailed off, words fading into an ominous silence. Both Wanda and Sean winced. As might be gathered, Hermione had just made a poor choice of words.

"It's not like I'll ever what?" Ron demanded.

"Nothing, Ron, I didn't mean," Hermione began.

"No, you meant it," Ron said angrily. "You meant it all right. It's not like I'll ever be what? Able to fight? Able to stand up for myself? Be able to actually do _anything?_ "

"Ron…"

Wanda made to step in, but stopped as Sean's hand settled on her shoulder. "Let them have this one out, Wanda," he said. "I'm thinkin' tha' it's long overdue."

"You don't get it," Ron said. "I've had to watch you and Harry get more and more powerful – you with wandless magic and now chaos magic, and Harry with whatever new power he's got this week. I can't keep up. But I can live with that." He jabbed a finger at Hermione. "What I can't live with is Harry, now you, treating me like I'm an idiot who doesn't know which way up his wand goes. Like I can't protect myself, or decide for myself, what I want to do."

"We don't think that, how can you think we think that? And what do you want to do, anyway?" Hermione asked, confused and upset in equal measure. "Fight with Harry?"

"No. Ye want revenge, don't ye, Mr Weasley?"

Both Ron and Hermione jumped, having seemingly forgotten that they were not alone. They both turned to Cassidy, who was now regarding Ron shrewdly.

"I didn' put it together at first," the older man continued. "An' I should have done. When ye said tha' ye wanted to learn more about how t' defend yerself, it seemed reasonable enough. After all, as has been mentioned, oh about a million times, y' best friend is a trouble magnet without equal. Better ye know something about defendin' yerself up close than nothin' at all." His expression softened. "This is about yer father, isn't it, lad? Ye want revenge for what HYDRA did to him."

Ron didn't answer, but his silence spoke volumes.

"Oh, Ron," Hermione said, in exasperation tinged sympathy.

"I don't want your pity!" Ron snapped at her, the tips of his ears red with anger and embarrassment. "And if you don't want to teach me any more," he continued, whirling on Cassidy. "I'll find someone else!"

"I never said tha'," Cassidy said, raising his hands placatingly.

"Well, you were going to," Ron snapped.

"I don't think he was, Mr Weasley, but he would have been right if he had."

Ron spun to face this new verbal line of attack, like a wolf at bay, and met Wanda's cool, calm gaze.

"So, what, I don't deserve to know anything about how to fight?" he demanded.

"Less 'deserve', more 'should'," Wanda said. "I don't have any authority to prevent you from doing so. But if you're solely focused on taking revenge on HYDRA? I think it could be dangerous. A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing; all the more so when coupled with obsession." She regarded Ron. "You want revenge for what happened to your father, and no one here blames you for that. Both Sean and I have been in your shoes; Voldemort was responsible for my mother's death. He also personally killed several of my friends, including two of my best friends, and tried to murder my godson, who he'd just orphaned, and who he has repeatedly tried to murder since. The fact that those two friends respectively came back from the dead twelve years later and ascended to a higher plane of existence is, as far as I am concerned, a courtesy detail."

She folded her arms. "We have both also seen, and experienced, what hunting for revenge does to you. My father is Magneto, you might have heard of him. As Sean could tell you, having witnessed it first-hand, it was his neverending obsession with getting revenge that drove him insane. It twists you, it poisons your soul, and ultimately? It can end up turning you into the kind of monster you were hunting in the first place. Believe me, I know. I've come close to going down that path once or twice myself, even when I had my father's example to warn me. Harry's walked the edge of it too, as I think he's told you, and more than once." She nodded up at the castle. "Just up there, only six months ago, his friend Luna Lovegood was killed, and he went after the HYDRA squad that killed her. And it got him killed. Revenge is like a sword without a hilt – it'll cut you too, and deeply."

"She's right, lad," Cassid said quietly. "After my wife was murdered, I wanted revenge too. Oh yes, I wanted revenge. An' it almost destroyed me. See, it's more than just somethin' that'll hurt ye too, it's an addiction. An' once ye get a taste for it, it never leaves. Not completely." He shrugged. "Of course, ye probably don't want t' listen t' either of us. Can't blame ye for that – I know that I wouldn' have, tha' I didn', care for any warnings or advice when I was in the same position. But there's a practical side to things: ye're not going to be able to take on HYDRA alone."

"I know," Ron said, expression stubbornly set. "I want to join SHIELD. And I want to be ready when I do."

"Join SHIELD?" Hermione echoed, surprised.

"They're the ones who hunt HYDRA," Ron said. At three somewhat surprised looks, he grudgingly added, "Carol suggested it."

Hermione frowned, but before she could reply, Wanda laid a hand on her shoulder. "Is that really what you want, Mr Weasley?" she asked.

Ron nodded.

"And you won't try and hunt them down until you've joined SHIELD and been fully trained?"

Another, more grudging, nod.

Wanda regarded him carefully, then looked up at Cassidy, who shrugged slightly. "Then there are worse things than learning how to handle yourself," she said. "And I'm sure that Sean would be happy to train you."

"Aye," Cassidy said, before eyeing Ron pointedly. "Though I'd appreciate it if, next time, ye gave me th' real reason first."

Ron flushed, this time with embarrassment. "Sorry, Mr Cassidy."

"Then I bid you good day, Mr Weasley," Wanda said. "I'm sure that you and Hermione will have a lot to talk about later, but for now, I need to have a word with her about her homework." She smiled faintly. "As I'm sure that your teacher does with you about yours," she added, before nodding at Cassidy, who returned the nod.

"But," Hermione began, as Wanda piloted her away.

"It's his choice, Hermione," Wanda said quietly. "One he's old enough to make, one he has a right to make."

"But he's making a mistake, you said it yourself," Hermione insisted anxiously.

"I know," Wanda said. "But you won't get anywhere by telling him that he mustn't do it. If anything, that will only make him more determined, to think that he must do it, and ignore anything that tells him otherwise. A grief counsellor or a therapist might help, but that would require Mr Weasley's cooperation. More likely, he would resent it and become even more stubborn."

She shook her head. "No, I think that this is something that will need to work itself out. The best that can be done for the time being is to make sure that he doesn't hurt himself, or anyone else, learning self-defence, and that he doesn't go charging off on some ill-conceived quest for vengeance. Sean will keep him from hurting himself or anyone else, though I'm going to have a word with Minerva – I'd be extremely surprised if he wasn't also trying to learn some serious combat magic, and I've got a pretty shrewd idea who he'll be learning from." At Hermione's inquiring expression, she added, "Sirius Black."

"Harry's godfather?"

Wanda nodded. "And one of the most dangerous combat wizards of his generation," she said. "With a certain distaste for the rules, and a habit of not thinking about consequences. I'll have a word with him too, see what magic he's teaching Mr Weasley – the worst that's likely to happen if he makes a mistake with his new martial arts skills is a broken bone or torn ligament. A mistake with the kind of magic that he'll be looking into could have much more serious consequences. Still, it should keep him occupied."

She looked thoughtful.

"Carol's suggestion that he should try for SHIELD was also helpful in that respect, actually. SHIELD don't take applicants below 18, as a rule," she said, before her expression darkened. "MI13 might try and poach him, because I'm certain that Wisdom will be keeping an eye on him, and he's more likely to relax age requirements to fit the Wizarding coming of age at 17. But either way, it'll give him a goal, not entirely revenge related, that should keep him busy for the next few years. And maybe Sean will be able to coax him away."

Hermione frowned. "I can't pretend to support him, though," she said. "Not in this. I mean, yes, I understand why he wants justice for his father, of course I do. And if that was what he wanted, then yes, course I would. But what he really seems to want is revenge, and if I'm afraid that even if SHIELD train him, if he goes after HYDRA, he won't think and he'll…"

"Do something incredibly pig-headed and get himself killed?" Wanda asked, then smiled sadly. "Welcome to my world, Hermione. Welcome to my world. Though I have to admit, Harry has been getting better in that regard recently." She sighed at Hermione's expression. "My advice? Make it clear that you don't agree with what he's doing, but that it's his life and his choice. Then just leave it, because that is a wound that will not get better if you poke at it."

"So, I should just do nothing?"

"Sometimes that's the best thing to do," Wanda said. "And often, it is also the hardest. There's no easy answers to this one, I'm afraid."

Hermione sighed. "I suppose there aren't," she said.

OoOoO

Other members of the Weasley clan had been mulling over what to do with themselves. Ginny however, was doing so for a different reason to Ron. While he knew exactly what he wanted to do, her mind, by contrast, was in turmoil, to her great distress.

"A knut for your thoughts, Miss Weasley?"

Ginny looked up, somewhat startled at the interruption, and even more startled when she saw who was doing the interrupting. "Professor Dumbledore, sir," she said, hurriedly wiping her eyes. "I..."

"Would not be out of bed at this time without excellent reason, I am sure," Dumbledore said serenely.

Ginny started. "It's that late?" she asked. Since it was winter, the sun set early and made gauging time in the late afternoon and evening a matter of guesswork. "Professor, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to."

"I completely understand," Dumbledore said. "You had the look of someone wrapped up in their thoughts. Unlike many of my colleagues, I have always considered this a good thing." He smiled, eyes twinkling. "Better a head so full of thoughts that the rest of the world fades into the background than no thoughts at all." He sighed. "Alas, Mister Filch does not take quite such an understanding attitude, so I will walk you back to Gryffindor tower."

Ginny couldn't help but laugh at this. "Thank you, Professor," she said, as she stood up.

"Not at all, Miss Weasley," Dumbledore said, his expression becoming grave. "Though I must wonder at what thoughts drive you to such anguish, even to tears."

"I'm fine, Professor. It's nothing, really," Ginny said.

Dumbledore looked at her over the tops of his half moon spectacles. "Miss Weasley, I have been teaching since before Sergeant Barnes and Captain Rogers were born. In doing so, I have gained something of an insight into the adolescent mind," he said. "And for all your many talents, I do not believe that lying is yet one of them."

Ginny flushed.

"And in my experience," Dumbledore continued. "'I'm fine' and 'it's nothing really' are generally signs of quite the opposite. A problem shared is a problem halved, after all."

Ginny bit her lip and said nothing. She couldn't tell Professor Dumbledore about this. She couldn't tell anyone, who knew how they would react! Badly, probably, and with good reason. It was unnatural, after all. Besides, he wouldn't understand: how could she possibly explain to him why Diana's smile set butterflies fluttering in her stomach.

"I also understand that there are some things that a young woman might not want to talk about with her headmaster," Dumbledore said. "So I will not press you on the subject."

"Thank you, Professor."

"However, I would leave you with a piece or two of advice," Dumbledore said. "You would do well to speak to Lady Braddock and perhaps to ask Harry to put you into contact with a friend of his, a certain Mister Beaubier. They will both understand your problem and help you come to terms with it. I also think that your friends might be more understanding than you think, or even hope."

Ginny's eyes widened, and her breath hitched in astonishment and horror. He couldn't know! She might not have much ability with mental magic, but she was sure she knew enough to know when someone was pushing at her defences, let alone going through them. But she hadn't felt it, and he _knew_. How could he know?

Dumbledore smiled at her surprise. But it was a slightly sad smile. "You are not the only one who has passed through these halls with this problem, Miss Weasley," he said. "It is one I have personal experience with."

Ginny's eyes widened even further as she heard that and they stopped in front of the Fat Lady. "Professor, do you mean that -"

"I mean that my door is, metaphorically speaking, always open, Miss Weasley," Dumbledore said. "Good night."

OoOoO

The day of the First Task dawned, with the entire school buzzing – as it had been for the past few weeks – about just what the First Task would be.

Harry, for his part, ate his breakfast in a thoughtful mood. He nodded and replied politely, if briefly, to all wishes of good luck and last minute offers of advice from his fellow students, many of whose excitement overrode their pre-existing caution around him.

"You don't seem nervous," Hermione said, almost accusing.

"Hmm?"

"I said, you don't seem nervous," Hermione repeated.

"Lay off him, Hermione," Ron said impatiently. "Harry's confident, yeah, and why wouldn't he be? He's easily the best Champion. The others don't stand a chance. And yeah, that's right, I said it," he added, as a few Hufflepuffs stalked past, glaring.

"It's not just about power, Ron," Hermione retorted. "Skill, strategy, luck… they all count."

"And you think that Harry isn't skilled?"

"No, I just don't think that the other three Champions are idiots!"

"Ron. Hermione," Harry said, in a quelling tone. "Please. Not now."

The other two blinked at him, then eyed each other, before subsiding, grumbling. While they hadn't been explicitly on the outs with each other, Harry would have been hard pressed to miss a certain tension between them these last few days. What had caused it, he didn't really know, though thanks to the tone of some of Hermione's pointed sniffs and the fact that he'd seen Ron going through a couple of aikido katas in an empty classroom at lunchtime, a shock in and of itself, he felt that he had a pretty good idea. He also had a very definite idea that he didn't want to get in the middle of it.

"I'm not going to underestimate any of the other three Champions," he said. "I'm more powerful than they are, yes, even with my psychic powers bound. Yes, I've got a lot more experience of this sort of thing… probably. I don't actually know what the task is, but odds are pretty good I've done something like it before. And yes, I do know magic that they don't." He shot Ron a pointed look. "But they know magic that I don't, too – most of the advanced magic I know is wandless. In a duel, I'd be confident of taking any two of them, probably even all three because they wouldn't be able to work together. But it probably isn't going to be a duel – and even if it was, it only takes one well-placed attack to ruin anyone's day." He stood up, breakfast finished. "So I'm confident, yes. But I'm not expecting to stroll through it, especially since I don't even know what 'it' is."

As it turned out, after the four Champions had changed into suitably official school robes, – Harry's and Cedric's lined with their respective house colours, a process which helped prevent any attempts to sneak in anything other than their wand, 'it' was partially revealed. Namely, the four of them were lined up on a jetty on the edge of the Lake. They stood in awkward silence as the other students filed out into the stands, while the Judges and Director Wisdom conferred. It was a silence which, perhaps inevitably, Harry broke.

"If this involves swimming, I am going to be very unhappy."

"You don't like swimming?" Cedric asked, a little surprised.

Harry's expression soured. "Until the summer, I couldn't," he said, and at three incredulous gazes, shrugged defensively. "What? I never really had the chance or the need. Hogwarts doesn't do swimming lessons, and at the muggle school I went to before I came here, my fat prick of a cousin and his friends liked to try and drown me."

"So… can you swim?"

"Well enough," Harry said, glowering at the misty Lake. The temperature had been steadily dropping, and the students had been awakening to thicker and thicker films of ice on the Lake's surface, which took longer and longer to dissipate in the weak winter sunlight, to the point that a big freeze was predicted before Christmas. "Just forgive me if not I'm particularly enthusiastic about the idea."

"If zhat is ze task, zhen I can see your point," Fleur said, now regarding the Lake with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

"I vould not haf thought that the cold vould bother you," Krum said, having taken one look at the Lake and snorted in mild derision, as if to say, 'you call this cold?'

"Cold, I don't mind. Cold is bracing, clears the mind," Harry said. "Wet, I can live with." He glowered at the Lake. "Cold and wet, I don't like. At all."

"I'm sure it won't be that bad," Cedric said cheerfully.

Harry and Fleur both looked sceptical. Krum just shrugged.

Before the silence could get too awkward, again, Bagman cheerfully bounced over, followed by Wisdom and Betsy, the latter of whom was carrying a box that Harry recognised.

"Good morning all," Bagman said. "So, you've been wondering what this First Task is."

"However did you guess?" Harry asked, as deadpan as possible.

Bagman, apparently impervious to sarcasm, simply chuckled and carried on. "You'll be glad to know that the Task is not _in_ the Lake," he said. "In fact, it is _under_ it."

"Under?" Cedric asked, surprised.

"Indeed," Bagman said, sounding excited. "You will be taken to that island, over there." He pointed to an island far out into the Lake, which at the distance they were at, looked more like a blob. Harry, having flown over it a few times, remembered that it was surprisingly large, lightly forested, and had some strange ruins on top, like the remnants of an old fort. "At the top of that island," Bagman continued. "Is an ancient fort."

"Which has a passage leading down under the island, right under the Lake, where there's a set of caves and catacombs probably containing all sorts of traps and unpleasant creatures?" Harry guessed.

Bagman stared at him for a moment. So did the other three Champions.

"What?" Harry said defensively. "I've been through this sort of thing enough to have some idea how it goes."

Fleur and Krum stared at him in disbelief, before looking at Cedric, who sighed and nodded.

"Besides," Harry continued. "Last time I went under the Lake, that was more or less how it was – though it was also under the school, and it was a chamber containing a giant basilisk and the sort of memory of a teenage Voldemort, both of which tried to kill me."

Fleur and Krum looked at Cedric once again. Once again, Cedric sighed and nodded, as if to say, 'yes, really'.

Harry, meanwhile, shot a quizzical look at Bagman, who'd cringed nervously at the mention of Voldemort's name. "We're not going to have to face either of those, are we? Because I'm not sure which is more annoying; a giant snake slithering around moaning about how much it wants to kill people, or teenage Voldemort's creepy obsession with yours truly and his delusions of grandeur."

"Um, well, no," Bagman said, somewhat wrong-footed.

"Good. I try to keep Voldemort encounters to one per year, and after beating him up at the World Cup, I'm hoping not to see him for another nine months," Harry said.

Bagman just stared at him for a long moment, before visibly gathering himself, the wind having been taken rather out of his sails. "Well, ahem, anyway. Harry's guess is, actually, well, rather accurate," he said. "There is a passage, leading deep under the island and under the Lake. At the bottom, there is a room, and four paths leading off from it. Each of you will take one path, and along it, you will each face a number of challenges and trials. Among these trials is the risk of getting lost, so be careful. At the end of each path is what you must retrieve: a magic ring!"

"What do you mean by 'magic'?" Harry asked suspiciously. "Because I've already fought for my soul against a demon-god once this year, and I'd rather not make it twice."

Cedric's sigh, this time, was decidedly long-suffering.

"Hardly anything so dramatic, Harry," Bagman chuckled, having regained some of his brio. "No, as far as this Task is concerned, they simply light your way back out. They're important for the next Task, but that's another story." He straightened up as Betsy stepped forward and began attaching bracelets to each of the Champions. Harry, naturally, got two, restraining his psychic power.

"Now, each of you is being attached with an enchanted wrist-band by Lady Braddock, which will tell us where you are, and what state you are in," Bagman continued. "And in one case, to restrain certain psychic abilities. If you become dangerously injured, a retrieval team will come and get you. If you get utterly lost, or you have some other reason for not being able to complete the task, simply press the button on the side three times in a row, a retrieval team will come and get you. You will receive your ring afterwards. However, that does mean that you will have failed the task and will receive very low scores as a result."

"Time limit?" Krum asked curtly.

"None," Bagman said. "You have all day. However, the faster you finish, the better you will score." He reached into a pocket and pulled out a wooden ball, with four small holes in it, that floated in the air before them. "Now, if you will each insert your wands into a hole –" He shot a slightly suspicious look at Harry, who remained admirably poker-facedd. "Once all four of you have done so, this portkey will take you to the starting position. Good luck!"

With that, he departed, leaving the four Champions once more, who all shared a look, before inserting their wands into the portkey. One flash of blue light and a feeling of being yanked along by a hook to the stomach later, they landed with a jolt on the island, surrounded by crumbling ruins, overgrown with spindly, frosty trees and dark mosses. Before them was a deep, wide hole, with four stone staircases carved into it, leading down into the pitch black depths.

"Well," Cedric said, after a moment. "I think I'll second that. Good luck, everyone."

There was a round of sober nods, then, as each Champion picked a staircase, Harry muttered, "And I really hope that we don't need it…"

 **And that, my friends, is where this chapter ends. A bit of sweetness, a bit of seriousness, a bit of conflict laid down for the future, and oh yes: the First Task has begun. And it's very different. While it's still a fetch-quest of sorts, it's less derring-do in the open air, more of a dungeon crawl, a descent into the Mines of Moria type of thing. I didn't want to just run through the numbers on this one, because Harry would quite literally walk over any normal dragon with relative ease. Also, to be frank, it would be downright boring just to repeat canon.**

 **No, this one's going to be rather different – a few similar themes, of course. It's still getting a significant Plot Coupon. But the way in which it happens, what will be faced… it'll be different. Oh yes, it'll be different. Which since I've been binging on Tolkien, particularly the** _ **Silmarillion**_ **a.k.a. the bigger, badder prequel to LOTR (parts of which make Game of Thrones look soft and cuddly) recently, means that you should be very worried… *cackles***


	41. Chapter 41: Of Dungeons and Dragons I

**Right! Sorry, ladies and gents, that this took so long – job-hunting is a nightmare. And though I am making some progress, it's rather diminished my writing ardour these last few weeks. Also, I got a bit side-tracked when I actually got around to writing in the first place. On the upside, though, it is a bit longer than usual.**

 **Anyhow, here we have the First Task beginning in earnest, though with a relative limit on the number of monsters – there'll be more of those (many more) in the next chapter. For the time being, it's mostly Harry wandering around darkened catacombs, getting increasingly bored, wet, and thanks to the latter, annoyed. Oh, and hitting an enchantment that does something very unexpected. Still, right up until the end, it seems to be going well, and Harry's even learned something… and then it all starts to go wrong. Because Harry's involved, and because this is how things always go.**

 **Sounds like fun? Well, take a look. It's all here, ready and waiting.**

 **PS: Oh, and on the arc title? While I've been trying to keep to the two-word title theme... I just couldn't resist.**

 **Guest: ****_Neither Morgan nor Dresden is particularly inclined to divination (and can you really see Harry and Morgan getting along? I can't – Harry would dislike him on principle). Wanda, on the other hand, has something of a talent for it, thanks to her probability related powers, and Strange is the greatest Seer alive… when he feels like sharing anything._ **

The tunnels were dark. That was Harry's first thought, and while he would freely admit that this was a fairly prosaic observation, it was both true and utterly inadequate to demonstrate just how dark they really were.

After all, the night sky, even deep in the Forbidden Forest, had stars, or the Moon, to give the surroundings a bit of a tinge. As a result, one could pick out shapes fairly easily.

But this darkness was different. It was a darkness that had not known light for hundreds, if not thousands of years, and as a summoned light hovered before him, Harry got the definite sense that it resented his intrusion.

"Well tough," he muttered aloud, voice whispering down the descending tunnel. "I'm here, and I'm not leaving."

The only answer he received was his own voice, echoing back at him with an almost malicious questioning twist on the last word. Other than that, the only sounds were the occasional sounds of dripping from the walls, and breathing, from Harry, who'd silenced his feet to ensure that whatever was down here didn't hear him coming.

To stave off boredom, he looked around at the tunnel walls. It didn't take a genius to realise that they were artificial – or at least, if they'd ever been natural, then they'd been definitively smoothed and reshaped since. They were also going steadily downwards, deep under the lake.

How deep, he didn't know exactly. At one point, he stopped to try and get a kind of depth sounding via earth magic, to figure out how far down he was. In truth, he wasn't expecting much – the technique was adapted from a telekinetic trick he'd used only a couple of times before. As it was, the response didn't give a helpful answer with the metric system, ball-parking at 'a long way down and getting further with every footstep'. It did, however, helpfully point out two things. First, he was well under the lake. Second, the tunnel was ending, and there was an absolutely huge empty space up ahead.

Since this meant a change of scenery, Harry didn't object to this at all. At first, when he emerged from the tunnel, this change was highly relative, as his conjured light only extended a few feet in front of him. Then, as if drawn by a magnet, the light shot upwards, far above, quickly vanishing into the all consuming darkness.

The moment it slipped Harry's control, he reacted. Dropping low, sweeping both arms out and unleashing a white-hot wave of fire ten feet high, igniting centuries, if not millennia, of dust that was driven before him in a blinding, burning cloud of embers by a sudden gale, he darted off to one side, into the shadows, tense and with a very sharp and entirely non-magical combat knife he'd brought at Bucky's advice – 'just in case'. And, ready for anything, unblinking, unmoving, he watched.

After about a minute, as the fires began to die down somewhat, it became very clear that nothing was going to leap out from around or above him and express a ravening desire to eat his face. Instead, something much stranger was happening: the light from the fires was rising upwards, just as Harry's conjured ball of light had, rising like golden mist, faster and faster. And as they rose, they illuminated snapshots of the grand chamber, one that was approximately the size of the Great Hall. Eventually, they seeped into the ceiling, collecting in clumps, clumps that gleamed like a starry night.

Harry only had a few moments to admire what that light revealed, however – grand vaulting, a forest of columns that were twined with what looked like stone ivy – before he was interrupted.

It wasn't by anything particularly loud, it had to be said. But when all is silent, even a whisper is like a shout. And a trickle of water is like a torrent. Especially when you're a powerful demigod, have all your available senses keyed up, and know that it's about to become one, at which point there is only one appropriate response.

"Oh for fuck's sake."

OoOoO

Buried deep under earth and stone, under water and ice, was a pool. It was large, deep, and inky black, its surface utterly undisturbed. Above was a dome of shaped rock, threaded with crystalline veins through which streamed a strange half-light that illuminated a gravelly, crystalline bank. Some of the creatures that lived within that pool, growing older and stronger, paler and stranger, used that bank as a place to rest, to nest, or even just to bask in the strange twilight.

All was still. All was silent.

Then, very suddenly, it wasn't, as a blinding flash of white-light was followed near instantaneously by a vast eruption of water from the pool and billowing cloud of steam. A few moments after that, a figure stalked out of the pool, squelching with every step. As he did so, he ignored the steam that should be rights have parboiled him, several nasty cuts, and the deathly pale shapes that started floating to the surface of the disturbed pool.

As he did, a low stream of angry muttering could be heard.

"This bloody pit, this bloody task, this _bloody_ tournament…"

After a few steps, he stopped and seemed to focus, before water suddenly flew off him in a burst.

With that done, Harry Thorson looked around to establish that there were no immediate threats and then, with the expression of one in a thoroughly foul mood, vigorously rubbed his hands. Said hands glowed with an orange heat, illuminating his surroundings and bringing colour back to his cheeks.

"And of course, I got the water trap," he muttered sourly. "Not the big, ugly monster, not the spike pit, or the illusion maze, or whatever else they've put in this _fucking_ maze, but the water trap. A giant hammer of freezing cold water. Complete with giant ice-cubes." He touched his cheek, grimacing at the blood from a slowly closing scratch, and glanced at the bodies in the water. "And mutant grindylows." He sighed irritably. "Just another fucking day at the fucking office."

With that done, he examined his surroundings in earnest. The domed area he was in was definitely constructed, and though he was no architect, it looked more or less on the same lines as the earlier – now flooded – chamber he'd been in. Simpler, though, Harry decided, more practical. This wasn't an area that had been intended for show. Maybe intended as a place to siphon off excess water into? Or perhaps another source for the flood trap he'd encountered earlier?

"Or maybe," he said aloud. "It's a place to siphon intruders off into. And maybe feed them to the Grindylows."

He took a few more paces towards the way out, a short tunnel which rather saved Harry the trouble of trying to find a non-loadbearing wall and blasting through it, the former being a task that would take much longer than the latter. Something, though, wasn't right, and he stopped, frowning, before kneeling down and scooping up a handful of grey sand, letting it run through his fingers. Except it wasn't sand.

"Ash," he murmured, conjuring a small, continuous rush of wind, like a hairdryer, and aimed it at an angle, downwards. It quickly became clear, amidst a lot of dust and coughing, that the deposits ran a good three feet down – and after that, the ash had hardened into something more like rock. "Ash," Harry repeated, frowning and looking around at the beach, which extended for a good hundred feet on either side. "And lots of it." He paused for a moment, then, raising his voice, said, "If it turns out I'm standing on top of a volcano, I am _not_ going to be happy."

There was, predictably, no reply other than the echo of his voice, Harry turned his attention to the way out, sighed, and stalked out. Normally, he'd have been more stealthy, but rightly considered that stealth had gone at the window along with a significant number of grindylows. In any case, stealth wouldn't have achieved much, as Harry quickly found.

The tunnel led into a vast cavern, a great chasm, that far overshadowed the Great Hall like chamber Harry had entered originally. In fact, Harry thought, somewhat dumbstruck as looked up into the stalactite stubbled ceiling, and down into the pitch black abyss from which the sound of rushing water emanated, then and on both sides into the deeply shadowed distance, it could have swallowed that chamber whole.

Hell, it could probably have swallowed the entire school whole – or at least, Harry inwardly amended, the outside of the school. He increasingly suspected that Hogwarts, like many other enchanted objects and places, was rather larger on the inside than the outside.

After a couple more moments of astonishment, Harry shook himself and began to scan the cave in earnest. Unlike previous chambers, there was no sign that this one had been carved out by anything other than natural forces. It was all natural, in its origins, it seemed to be totally natural.

Of course, this didn't count the small outcrop he was standing on, and the intricately carved bridge of silvery stone. Reaching out across the vast gap to another outcrop on the other side, it presumably led to another part of this vast underground complex.

Or at least, it had.

The bridge had been shattered, the middle three-quarters or so of it somehow destroyed. And as Harry inspected the near end of the bridge, noting the way it was smooth rather than jagged and combining it with the ash back in the previous chamber, he had a nasty suspicion of it how it had been done.

Of course, he mused, it could be nothing to worry about. This was just evidence of a volcanic eruption, or maybe some other kind of giant explosive molten hot blast, that had happened centuries or even millennia ago, with suspicious precision to destroy a very large and on closer inspection, enchanted, bridge, sending ash and dust boiling up the tunnels to settle in the chambers beyond.

It also occurred to him that he had no idea who'd actually carved out these caves. He remembered, vaguely, from his grandfather's stories that the Last Great Frost Giant War had been fought up around here. The Earth related parts, anyway. But this cavern didn't look or feel particularly Asgardian, not in design or in enchantment. Human magic, maybe? Or maybe Faerie? Possibly Avalonian?

He set the question aside for the time being, remembering that, of course, he still had to find a bloody magic ring, which was somewhere in a vast system of caves, catacombs, and rivers, that seemed increasingly likely to be part of a hopefully dead volcano, which had probably been inhabited by something violent and powerful that was also hopefully dead. And he had no clue where to go next.

He could, he supposed, make his way across. Hell, maybe he'd been intended to be washed down here, and this was a test of how he – or any other champion who'd picked this route – could handle the prospect of crossing this chasm without a broom.

For one of the other three, he had to admit it would be an interesting challenge. For him, it would be fairly easy, presuming that there wasn't some enchantment or the upper shadowy corners of this great chasm were full of giant bats or something, which would be annoying. The bands that restricted his psychic powers just tied them up inside him, meaning he could still use them on himself, and fly should he need to.

But if he headed across and it proved to be another dead-end – or worse, another water trap or something like that – then that would be a lot more time wasted.

Therefore, he needed more information. And to get it, well. There were a few methods, and in the spirit of practicality, Harry decided to try the simplest method – extending his magical senses. Strictly speaking, it was actually the second simplest method. The absolute simplest method would be to use the Sight, opening his third eye and gazing upon the world around him in all its unvarnished horror and glory, with whatever he saw burned indelibly upon his mind and soul. That, however, was rather likely to leave another scar on his psyche, should there be more unearthly horrors around.

Or rather, he thought, considering that since there was inevitably going to be some sort of unearthly horror around, simply extending his senses would be less likely to leave another scar on his psyche, which some days felt like it was being held together by spit, string, and staples. As he mused on this, a memory floated into the forefront of his mind, of late nights and lazy mornings, and a warm presence beside him in body and in mind.

"Spit, string, staples… and one or two other things," he said to himself, lips twitching in a slight smile.

The words echoed back to him again, and he sighed, again.

"And now I'm talking to myself," he said. "Again. Which probably means that I'm going to go mad – again – if I don't get out of here soon, probably out of sheer bloody boredom. And no one wants that. I've only just got my brain back in reasonable shape again…"

Shaking his head, he carefully performed one last check around him, using all his ordinary senses, all of which were at least a match of Steve or Bucky's, his mystical senses, and all the training he'd had drilled into him about threat detection. Once he was moderately satisfied that something wasn't immediately going to jump out at him and eat his face, he sat down cross-legged on the outcrop and closed his eyes, breathing in a slow, measured rhythm.

Slowly but surely, the physical world fell away, from the feeling of ash-covered stone beneath him and the deceptively gentle cold breeze that caressed his face and hair like icy fingers, to the sounds of rushing water from the deeps and the smell of cold, damp infused, and almost totally still air around.

Harry would be the first to admit that he wasn't someone you'd think would be good at meditation. He thrived on acting, on doing rather than sitting still. However, the fact was that long before Harry had developed his current abilities, or even known that he was anything other than an ordinary boy, he had had to learn how to sit still, how to be quiet, and how to relax in dark, dank and usually uncomfortable places. His lessons since then, some taught and some through bitter experience, had further taught him patience, focus, and more constructive forms of emotional control than repression.

In other words, while he wasn't an expert, it didn't take him long to centre himself and pour his focus into his magical senses.

To any outward observer on the mystical plane, it would seem as if Harry was glowing with power, power that grew and grew, until suddenly it flowed outwards in a silvery wave as delicate as a spider's web. That spider's web of magic stretched outwards, through all three dimensions, and even a little into the fourth – for after all, magic and time have an interesting relationship, and one cannot be the apprentice of Stephen Strange without learning a little something about time magic.

It quested upwards, towards the hills above, mountains broken and smoothed, and the cold and crisp free air. It quested outwards, through tunnels and corridors, through pools and pits, slipping through the great halls of a place that had once been a fortress and a home. In doing so, it touched ancient enchantments and memories, impressions so strong that they had survived the ages in the form of oft maddened shades. Some were broken, mere remnants left behind. Others carried enough bite to send surges of power, of warning through the spider's web of magic that jolted Harry, spasming his muscles and lashing at his mind.

Even at the remove of using magical senses, rather than searing clarity of the Sight, touching such spirits was risky. Even at this remove, even at this distance, it would have risked madness, for most. These were ancient entities, products of terrible battles long ago their agony, their rage, and their despair capable of driving many mages utterly insane.

Harry, however, had more than just seen insanity, and more than just Seen it too. He'd experienced it.

He had had the powers of chaos in his hand, and the fires of the Dark Phoenix running through his veins – one had sought to twist his mind and reality with it, while the other would have set his soul aflame, and with it, begun a fire fit to burn the cosmos to ashes.

He had memories buried within him, memories of his body being used for months as a puppet, murdering, torturing and destroying, using his powers in ways that went against everything he believed in while he was helpless to stop it, making his worst nightmares a chilling reality.

He had died, and even though he had come back, the sensation of two blades slicing through his flesh and tearing apart his heart and the creeping coldness of death had seared themselves into his mind, one psychic scar among many.

In other words, Harry had already seen what insanity had to offer. And he hadn't been particularly impressed the first time.

Of course, it would be wrong to say that everything Harry's thoughts touched was dark and ominous. There was brightness and joy too, better things; the reassuring coolness of the Lake, and the silvery-blue auras of the Merfolk, flitting around far below the filmy ice that covered the Lake's surface, with a webwork of enchantment preserving a degree of warmth in the deeps like double glazing on a window; the large, yet somehow friendly presence of the Giant Squid, lazily swimming near the shore; the energetic yet chaos tinged presence of that Orca whale that Hermione had – somehow – accidentally created from a chair with an outburst of chaos magic last year; there was also the Durmstrang ship, whose complex cat's-cradle of multi-layered enchantments had Harry 'staring' in fascination for a full minute, carefully feeling his way around it, marvelling at the interlocking spellwork, hundreds, thousands of enchantments – some designed to resist deep sea pressure and cold, others to aid passage through spirit world short-cuts – all melding together into one smooth, coherent whole.

Really, it astonished Harry that he hadn't noticed it when he'd been playing 'look how much I can bench-press with my brain' on Halloween. Then again, he supposed, he hadn't exactly been looking for it.

And there was more; the crowds, bundles of excitement, anticipation, a whole mixture of emotions, fierce and bright – if they'd been lights, each would have been indistinct, and Harry would have been blinded. And among them, his father, who stood out more than anyone else, his presence burning like a star. Harry smiled briefly, before assessing the crowd as a whole. One consistent feeling that he noticed was a little bit of boredom – which he had to admit, was only fair considering that they didn't have a good look at what was going down below. All they could see was, well, the Lake's surface, which wasn't the most riveting sight in the world.

Before Harry could muse on this further, though, his senses touched something else, something that quite literally took his breath away: Hogwarts. If the Durmstrang ship had been a cat's-cradle, then this was a forest, a forest of living stone, thrumming with power and life. And the school was definitely alive; when she sensed him, she gave what Harry supposed was the equivalent of a friendly wave. Harry shook his head slowly in awe, even in his half-tranced state.

He'd known that Hogwarts was alive for a while, but sensing it like this, sensing the life and the sheer _power_ , the unbelievable _complexity_ , spells woven in a way that would seem haphazard if they hadn't seemed so neatly tied together… if he wasn't very much mistaken, Hogwarts was at least as strong as the Mountain Spirit that had powered him and the others up at Easter – and from what he knew now, for a _genius loci_ to get that powerful, it had to be either ancient or sitting on a bucketload of raw magic. Or both. And while Hogwarts wasn't exactly ancient on a geological timescale, over a millennium of magic had sunk into the very bones and bedrock of the school.

For a moment, Harry stopped to enjoy the metaphorical view, before turning his attention back to his prospective path. It was almost disappointingly clear that it led to the ring – he could sense the passage of the witches and wizards who'd arranged the spell-traps, obstacles, and the placement of the ring. It wasn't much; even if he'd had full access to his psychic abilities, psychometry was more Maddie's field than his, and what he did sense was more like faded footprints.

But those faded footprints, a trail of glimmering gold that led down the tunnel, down into something that set his hair standing on end. An enchantment, and a strong one. It wasn't of a kind that Harry had come across before, either – at least, not through these senses. Still, it didn't seem like anything he couldn't handle, if faced carefully. And beyond that… bingo. Or at least, Harry assumed it was 'bingo'. He could feel an entire room humming with power, power that felt new.

Certainly, he thought as he stood up and shook himself back to the present, stretching comfortably, it was a lead. "Right," he said to himself. "Let's get this over with."

Then, without further ado, he took a couple of steps and leapt into the void.

OoOoO

"So, how long is Harry going to be down there again?"

Hermione suppressed a long suffering sigh. "He'll be down there as long as he's down there, Ron," she said. "And no, I don't know how long that is going to be. Why don't you ask Sergeant Barnes?"

Ron scowled. "I did," he said. "He said more or less the exact same thing."

"Then why ask me?"

Ron's scowl deepened, and he huddled up under his robes and the jumper beneath. "Because I thought you'd know _something_ ," he said. "You always do."

Hermione opened her mouth to give Ron a piece of her mind, back-handed compliment or not, on the lack of logic inherent in expecting that she would know more about this Task than a man who'd been in on the planning stages. Before she could do so, however, she was interrupted.

"I would imagine that Harry is quite some way in by now."

Both Ron and Hermione practically jumped out of their seats as Thor settled in beside them. While Loki was the Odinson renowned for stealthiness, Thor, for all his size, was no slouch in that department.

"You know where he is?" Ron asked eagerly.

"Not exactly," Thor said. "Though Tony has a fair idea of his location, and the locations of the other Champions, thanks to the bands on them. As do MI13, come to that," he added, nodding down at Wisdom, who was consulting with the Headmasters, Betsy, Cassidy, and a few of his more senior personnel. "But that does not say exactly where they stand in relation to the rings."

Hermione paused as Ron subsided, disappointed, and looked at Thor with a hesitant expression. "Um, Thor," she said. "Just now, I –"

"Felt something with your mystical senses, something brushing against your aura?" Thor finished with a raised eyebrow.

Hermione blinked. "Um, yes," she said. "Exactly, actually."

Thor nodded. "I felt the same thing," he said. "It was Harry, extending his senses."

"But aren't his psychic powers bound?" Hermione asked, frowning.

"They are," Thor said. "However, like you – and like any other magical practitioner, or even any other human to a very limited extent – he has a sense for the mystical. His senses are stronger than yours, partly because he is stronger than you are, but mostly because he is much more practised in them – as far as I understand it, the skills related to psychic senses are transferrable."

Hermione frowned, but nodded. "What was he doing?" she asked.

"Looking for whatever he's looking for?" Ron suggested. "I mean, I don't know what kind of tunnels he's in, but I've been under the school before, in the Chamber of Secrets. That was weird and dark enough as it was; and that wasn't a maze."

"You are exactly right, as it happens," Thor said, and rested his chin on his hands thoughtfully, gazing at the Lake. "Though Harry is reaching a little further than he would need to, and in all directions, by the looks of things." His expression darkened slightly. "And such a wide reach will be detected by more than just you, Hermione, or I."

"What do you mean 'more'?" Hermione asked warily.

"Some ancient horror from the dawn of time, probably," Thor said, almost entirely unconcerned. "Or something else that Voldemort has arranged. He did not have Harry added to this tournament simply for the fun of it." He smiled wryly. "And even if he is not going to make a move, it is simple fact: when Harry is involved, there is always 'more'."

"Which is why you're here," Ron said, before glancing over at a red-clad figure standing by the Lake shore, gaze fixed on the island into whose depths Harrry had descended. "And Mistress Maximoff."

"Well, I was hoping to have the chance to watch my son take part in some kind of school contest, as I am sure Wanda was too," Thor said. "But among other reasons, yes."

There was a long moment of silence, as all three stared out at the Lake.

"So… you think some ancient horror will turn up?"

"It is likely."

"Right. Uh. Is it bad if I want it to turn up soon?"

"Ron!"

"What? It's freezing out here, and it's _boring!_ "

"And you want some ancient horror to attack Harry because you're _bored?_ "

"Well, not really. But you heard Thor – it's going to attack him anyway, so it's best for all of us if it's got out of the way quickly."

The only reply was a disgusted sigh of, _"boys!",_ and laughter like the rumble of thunder.

OoOoO

Harry, meanwhile, was making his way steadily down yet another tunnel. It had been less than difficult to make his way across the gaping chasm, and with his magical senses slightly extended, he could follow the trail left by the witches and wizards who'd arranged the maze and the ring without stopping to double-check every five minutes, even considering the fact that he'd changed direction at least five times. In fact, he was almost certain that he was in a steadily descending spiral.

To his mild disappointment, there didn't seem to be much in the way of any further traps or challenges. Well, except for one thing, one thing that he could sense about fifty yards ahead of him. It was an enchantment, invisible to normal sight at first.

It also, as Harry found, didn't respond to any of his more conventional attempts to disrupt it.

"What are you?" he murmured, stepping forward slowly, carefully, to get a better sense of it. "An illusion? A psychic trap? Or something more conventional?" Raising his arm and twisting his wrist, he stepped forward. "Let's have a look at you… _Reveleo._ "

The space in front of him seemed to hiccup, with something appearing briefly, before vanishing again.

"Oh no you don't," Harry said, eyes narrowed, and repeated the spell, tones of echoing command and power infusing his voice. _"Reveleo!"_

This time, the space didn't just hiccup, but shifted dramatically, with what looked like a cloud of silvery mirror-shards appearing in the air in front of him. Harry frowned as he examined it. "Hmm. Definitely a psychic component." He smiled wryly. "Meant to show me a nightmare, maybe? Or trap me an illusion? Eh. Bring it on."

And with that, he stepped into the silvery cloud.

OoOoO

"Well. I'm not sure what I expected, but it certainly wasn't this."

Harry's remark echoed down what had, until a few moments ago, been a tunnel. Now, it was a smooth spherical chamber, the walls of which glittered with the silver mirror shards of the strange enchantment he had stepped into. And speaking of stepped into, at first glance, it would seem that he was standing on thin air. All in all, he thought as he slowly revolved on the spot to take everything in, it was kind of like standing inside Cerebro. Or a giant disco-ball.

"What the hell is this supposed to – _ack!_ "

The room had begun to whirl, cohering into a smooth silver mirror. Then, a mere instant later, it collapsed in on Harry, swallowing him up into a silver pool, which stretched out into a giant mirror, floating in the darkness with Harry trapped within. Before he could even react, though, the mirror began to fracture again, but this time, Harry felt as if he was fracturing with it, as if something was tearing apart within him.

Reaching inwards with a snarl of effort, Harry tapped into his magic and managed to spit out a disruption hex. Red lightning crackled over his body for a second, before the silvery covering shattered, exploding outwards, taking on the form of the Cerebro like room once more, as Harry dropped to his knees, catching his breath and reorienting himself. The whole thing had taken less than five seconds.

"You'll be all right," a familiar voice said. "It takes us that way at first, every time."

Harry's head snapped up, his expression into one of wary disbelief, and his hands into positions of mystic defence. The speaker was tall, and as far as could be discerned through the simple dark grey robes, leanly built. In his right hand he held a plain staff of ivory pale wood. He had dark hair that fell to his shoulders, with white locks in a fringe that partially covered a lightning bolt scar, and emerald green eyes full of knowledge, hard-earned wisdom, and a sense of wry amusement. In other words, give or take a hairstyle, he was looking at himself.

Another person might have freaked out, lashed out, or even run. Harry, though, cocked his head, folded his arms, and raised his eyebrows.

"Well now," he said, as he looked at himself. "This is different."

"We tend to say something like that every time, too," his counterpart observed. On closer inspection, he was older. By how much, Harry couldn't exactly say. After all, his father – _their_ father – was fifteen hundred years old. Yet, if he shaved, he didn't even look thirty. And then there was the fact that Harry didn't actually know how he'd age, or if he would age at all. Still, he thought, it was clear that his counterpart was older than he was, by at least a decade and a half.

"So this has happened before," Harry said, frowning, a frown that deepened as his gaze swept his surroundings. "Or… is always happening now?"

That got him a raised eyebrow. "You're familiar with temporal mechanics, then."

"Thanks to a little bit of Doctor Strange and a lot of _Doctor Who_ , yeah," Harry said, still examining his surroundings whilst also keeping an eye on his counterpart. "And you're not my future self, are you? Or at least, not my absolute, definite future self."

The other eyebrow joined the first, and his counterpart looked impressed. "How did you deduce that?"

"Easy; first, I know a bit about time magic and temporal mechanics, including the whole thing about possible futures," Harry said. "Second, that would be the simple answer, and nothing in my life is ever simple."

That got a chuckle, and a nod. "Fair enough," his counterpart said. "And you are correct. I am… well." He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "Without a deep memory scan, I can't say for sure, but I think that the point of divergence between the two of us has already passed." At Harry's puzzled expression, he added, "I am, from your point of view, an alternate version of you. If I may use the metaphor of a road, the path that you would have had to take to become me branched off some time ago. Our paths run in parallel."

"But you're older than me," Harry pointed out.

"Yes," his counterpart agreed, and smiled a faint, sad, wistful smile. "Good gods, just look at you," he said softly. "You're so _young_. It must all be so new to you… you've got so much to come."

Harry's eyes narrowed, and he studied his counterpart on more levels than just the physical. While his magical senses weren't the most refined in the world and his psychic ones were still bound, he had the advantage of knowing himself well enough to identify the differences. "You're not just a decade or two older than me, are you?" he said, after several long moments. "Your aura, your power: it's stronger, more disciplined than mine. And… more mature. It's more like dad's."

"No," his other self said. "I am not. I am… well. Let's just say that I look good for my age, if I do say so myself." He smiled wryly. "As you might have guessed, while I am from a parallel timeline, it is running ahead of yours." Noting Harry's expression, the smile saddened a little. "And yes, to answer your unspoken question… barring unnatural intervention, we will have an Asgardian lifespan. At least."

Harry took a deep breath and nodded. "I half expected it," he said. "Anyway, I can brood about that later. The important thing right now is that because of this spell, we're somehow able to communicate. Also, is there anything I can call you? I'd go with 'Other Harry', but that's taken."

That drew a chuckle from his counterpart. "Reasonable enough," he said. "I have had many names, as you will in your turn. For the time being, however, you can call me Nathan."

Harry's eyes narrowed. "Nathan. As in Nathan Milbury?" he asked. "Nathaniel Essex?"

"As in opposition to everything Essex stood, and stands, for," Nathan said calmly. "As in redeeming a perfectly reasonable name from the taint of a true monster." He shrugged. "Besides, if I was to restrict myself to names that Essex had not used, then even in my timeline alone, I would be left with a very small selection to work with. He is an ancient creature, and has used many aliases through the ages."

Harry frowned, but nodded, grudgingly conceding the point.

"To save other questions, for brief context, I am from a timeline where I was adopted by Wanda after the events of our First Year."

"With Voldemort and the Philosopher's stone?" Harry clarified.

His counterpart nodded. "Wanda discovered my psychic gifts, and under her tutelage, among others, I ultimately learned to merge them," he said. He ran a thoughtful eye over Harry. "Your psychic gifts, bound as they are, seem to be relatively well developed, though less refined than mine were at your age. By contrast, your Asgardian nature is actually more developed than mine was at your age."

"Dad got his memories back fairly early in Third Year," Harry said. "During the first Quidditch Match, with the Dementors."

"Ah," Nathan said, drawing out the syllable and nodding as if this explained everything. "Interesting. I didn't meet my version of dad until I was a few years older than you are; correspondingly, my Asgardian abilities remained largely dormant until then." He rubbed his jaw. "Now, as for your theory about this spell being what allows us to communicate, well."

He raised his staff and slowly swept it in front of him, like the stroke of a paintbrush. And as it passed, the silvery sphere of cracked mirrors glowed, golden energy emanating from every crack.

"Hmm," he said.

"Hmm what?"

"I cannot be certain," he continued. "This is, you see, your party."

"My party?"

"It is spell in your timeline, affecting you, opening a connection from your timeline to others," Nathan explained. "I was meditating when I noticed this." He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. "Still, as far as I can tell, I think the answer to your question is both 'yes' and 'no'."

Harry raised an eyebrow and opened his mouth to say something snarky, before pausing. "You think that I affected the spell," he said.

"That and a number of environmental factors," Nathan said, nodding. "The walls of your reality are rather thin – recently broken, I think, by chaos magic." He eyed Harry. "And patched up again by the same?"

"I worked with what I had," Harry said defensively.

"And don't mistake me; considering your age and the circumstances, you did a very good job," Nathan said. "But it has had the effect of weakening the walls of reality, making it easier for something like this to reach through." He examined Harry. "You also have a touch of chaos about you, a blessing – ah, I perceive, Wanda's blessing. I have one as well. And the embers of Phoenix fire – which is only to be expected, I suppose, considering where you appear to be in your timeline." He looked up again, drumming the fingers of his right hand against the staff. "And there's also something off in your timeline, a temporal disruption in your future. I am afraid that I cannot discern the details."

"I'll add it to the list," Harry said dryly, and Nathan chuckled.

"Yes, if I remember correctly, your life is quite busy right now," he said. "Even allowing for the differences between our realities, of course."

"Busy," Harry repeated, and snorted. "Yeah, you could say that." He looked around. "So, what you're saying is that the walls of reality – my reality – are thin, cracked, and something's going to go seriously wrong with time at some point in my future, which is affecting my present. Additionally, there's my Phoenix fire, and Wanda's blessing. Then I walked into this spell, with all my power ready to go – as much as I can wield, anyway – and it sort of… amplified me? Projected me?"

"Partly correct," Nathan said. "The nature of the enchantment has a good deal to do with it. It was intended as an illusion, or rather to trap whoever encountered it in an apparently endless hall of mirrors, combined with a certain disassociative effect. Essentially, it was intended that you would have felt as if you were separated from your body, before being confronted with thousands upon thousands of versions of yourself, and the challenge of trying to figure out which one was truly you."

Harry blinked. "That…"

"Is a much more sophisticated piece of spellwork than you were expecting, and potentially capable of troubling you far more than you were expecting," Nathan said, with a knowing expression.

"To say the least," Harry admitted, thoughtful and wary. Previously, he'd thought that this Task would be fairly easy, that it would be as simple as following the trail to his ring. This enchantment, though, had him rethinking that. It wasn't the specific enchantment that had him wary; he could get out of it quickly enough, what with knowing more than a few things about illusions and psychic tricks, and if all else failed, having the option of the Sight. No, it was what it represented: this was an enchantment targeting his strengths. If there were other enchantments of similar sophistication further ahead, ones that didn't play to his advantages… well.

"As the old phrase has it; 'Pride goeth before a fall'," Nathan said, following his train of thought.

"Yeah," Harry said. "I learned that one the hard way." He grimaced. "Though clearly, I needed a reminder."

"Considering that you stopped to study the enchantment first, I would argue that you did not require much reminding," Nathan said fairly. "And the enchantment is one that plays to your advantages; I think it is fair to say that if it had not, you would not have been so confident in stepping into it." He smiled faintly. "Certainly, you put more thought into it than I would have at your age."

"Since you're me, I'm not entirely sure how to take that," Harry muttered, before nodding decisively and meeting Nathan's gaze. "Okay, fine," he said. "This has been very enlightening, and on another occasion, I would love to ask you all sorts of questions – and some of them might not even be about how to beat Surtur, Thanos, and the various other no doubt spectacular eldritch horrors that I'm doubtless going to run into soon. But I know enough about the borders of reality to know that this probably shouldn't be happening, that it's probably risking dangerous side-effects, and, annoying as it is, I've got a Task to finish. So. How do I get out?"

"A good question," Nathan said. "However, before you do, I think it is important that you take a closer look around. This spell was designed to trap you in an endless panorama of mirror images of yourself. Now, altered by your very nature, it has fractured. And it offers you something else: knowledge."

Harry raised an eyebrow. "What kind of knowledge?" he asked.

"Work it out," Nathan said calmly. "I did, in my turn, and I'm not going to spoon-feed you. As we both know better than most, you have a perfectly serviceable brain when you use it. Indeed, without being too egotistical, I would say that you have the capacity to be just a little bit brilliant."

"Well, as long as you aren't being _too_ egotistical," Harry muttered, frowning up at the dome of fractured images. It took him a few moments. Then, his jaw dropped.

"And the penny drops," Nathan said.

"I… that…"

"Is a glimpse of the multiverse," Nathan said, nodding. "Normally, it would take decades of study to reach this stage of your development – without a guide, anyway."

"It took you that long?" Harry guessed, taking renewed note of Nathan's staff and aura of vast, disciplined power, putting it together with the allusions his counterpart had made about his age and his clear knowledge. The man himself grinned.

"Of course not," he said. "I'm a version of you, after all: I cheated."

Harry couldn't stop a grin of his own as he looked back up at the mirrors. "So, each of these images," he said. "They're showing other universes?"

"Other possibilities," Nathan said, nodding. "Roads not taken. Or at least… roads not yet taken."

Harry shot him a very sharp look, and received a mild one in return. "All the things that I can see, they could still happen?"

"Some," Nathan said. "While the divergence points for some have already passed."

"Then why can I see them?"

"This is the multiverse. Merely to view it, your mind has by definition passed outside conventional time and space," Nathan pointed out.

"Fair point," Harry said, frowning.

"Furthermore, time is not strictly linear, even within your own reality," Nathan continued. "Expand the view to the multiverse as a whole, and the sheer infinite majesty of creation… frankly, you should count yourself lucky that you're seeing anything relevant."

And indeed, Harry had to admit, he was.

In the nearest fragment, he could see himself, but in his late-twenties, in silvery-white armour like the suit that Sirius had transfigured for him on Halloween, with a red cloak like his father's flowing out behind him, and a longsword at his hip as his hands swept through the air, redirecting a vast energy blast. He was standing back to back with a blonde woman about the same age, tall, well-built, and with bob-cut hair. She was wearing a suit like Steve's, and wielding a shield like Steve's, but both had gold in place of white: Carol. They were moving together with the smooth synchrony of long practise, and more than that, he realised with a start as he saw the warm, fierce smiles and the flickered glances: they were happy, having fun.

And they weren't alone, either. While Harry couldn't see clearly what they were fighting, he recognised most of those with them, even from the briefest of glances; Uhtred, in his full growth now, with an impressive beard, wielding his great-axe with nonchalant ease and deceptive grace; Diana, likewise fully grown, radiant with both beauty and power, wearing a red enamelled breastplate and close fitting leg armour in shades of steely blue and leathery brown; Maddie, steady, confident, eyes and tattoos aglow with power, wearing a grass green armoured long-coat and suit, accented with copper; a blur in black and white, surrounded by a storm of golden lightning that could only be Jean-Paul; and a figure who looked astonishingly like Harry himself, albeit short the green eyes, scar, and white forelocks.

He was more powerfully built than Harry himself, wearing a suit of close-fitting navy-blue armour, with red boots, belt, and cloak – no, not a cloak, a cape – that swept out behind him, and a symbol like an 'S' within a diamond emblazoned on his chest. This, Harry supposed, was the person who Jean-Paul had befriended in Smallville, whose name, if his cursory research was anything to go by, was almost certainly Clark Kent. Did this mean that he was inevitably going to reveal himself? Or was that just a possibility?

Putting this aside, Harry also noticed two figures that he didn't recognise – one, a young man in a tight-fitting red and blue suit (had there been a special on red and blue dye in this timeline or something?), with huge, blank, and expressive looking white eyes. Another, a young woman with blonde hair, also in red and blue, with a red cape trailing behind her, moving in a blur. A third, a shooting star, no, a person made of flames, shooting overhead, leaving behind them a blazing, unmistakeable symbol: The Avengers' encircled 'A'.

In the next, a version of him was meditating in a floating lotus position in a vaguely familiar candle-lit study, a very familiar red cloak swirling around him. Indeed, after a moment, Harry did a double-take: aside from the figure's scar, slightly heavier build, and the fact that his white hair was in his fringe rather than just above his ears, he would have thought that he was looking at Doctor Strange.

Mildly disturbed, he looked to the next, and saw a version of himself with an arc reactor like Tony's set in his chest. His counterpart was in the midst of summoning a suit of red and silver armour to him with a gesture and a spoken spell, letting it wrap around him mid-step before leaping into the skies.

The next was rather puzzling at first glance – it was him, a version of him, a few years older than he was now, taking a hot shower. Harry was about to break off and ask what possible relevance this could have, when the door of the shower opened and the showering Harry was suddenly not alone.

Instead of yelping indignantly at the sudden cold draft, and frantically covering himself up after being disturbed in the shower, or being engaged in a sudden fight for his life as an assassin attempted to murder him while he was naked and theoretically defenceless, the version of Harry turned and smiled, brushing wet hair out of his eyes. Harry followed his counterpart's gaze, and let out a strangled squeak. Because the person who was joining his counterpart in the shower was a) naked, b) apparently expected, and most importantly of all, c) Carol.

After a stunned moment, Harry whipped his head around and his gaze away, covering his eyes, his face bright red, his expression one of total mortification. After a few moments, he dared to dart a glance up at Nathan, whose eyes sparkling with amusement, looked like he was trying very hard not to laugh.

Harry opened his mouth to explain, or ask a question, before closing it again and shaking his head sharply. Instead, his cheeks still burning, and trousers still uncomfortably tight, he tried to put the image out of his mind by looking at the next fragment.

To his relief, it was decidedly grimmer, but a great deal less embarrassing: a burning forest, in places scoured to the bedrock, surrounded by the blazing blue-white flames of an uncontrollable, unnatural inferno. In a clearing under a smoke-choked sky, two figures clashed; one was a version of Harry, hardly any older than he was now, dressed in a tattered, battered combination of red leathers and the ruins of silver-white armour, wielding Curtana with speed, skill, and lethal intent.

The other's identity was unclear. He was about the same height as Harry, maybe a little taller, and possibly a little thinner; the eerie fire-blackened bronze and green armour, embossed with an indistinct serpentine shape, covered him from head to toe, making it hard to tell. He was wielding a heavy looking longsword – and doing it badly, from what Harry could tell, favouring his wounded left side from which red blood was trickling.

Others were less action packed, and certainly less grim.

The next one that caught Harry's eye seemed to be a vision of Nathan's world: a version of himself – again, more or less the same age as he was now – floated in a lotus position, limned in gentle golden light, meditating under the supervision of a version of Wanda. Surprisingly, alongside him was Hermione, also meditating, but limned in crimson light instead.

"Is that –" He began.

"My world," Nathan confirmed.

"And yet there, you look my age," Harry pointed out. "Despite being at least a millennium older than me."

"That isn't a view of my relative present," Nathan said calmly. "Remember the point about being outside time and space?"

"Ah."

"Though in the interest of full disclosure, I was meditating just like that," Nathan added.

Harry nodded slowly, then raised an eyebrow. "Why is Hermione meditating with you and Wanda?"

"She has a gift for chaos magic," Nathan said. "As I presume she does in your world." When Harry nodded, frowning, he added, "And Wanda Maximoff just so happens to be the world's premier chaos mage, in my reality and, I presume, in yours. Who better to teach her?"

Harry looked suspicious. "There's more to this, isn't there?" he said.

"In my experience, that is true of everything," Nathan said.

Harry glared at him. "That is incredibly vague, deeply unhelpful, and just a little bit annoying."

"I know. I'm rather proud."

Harry glared at him for a few moments, then rolled his eyes. "Well, I assume that you're not together, or something weird like that," he said. "If you were, you wouldn't have any real reason not to tell me."

Nathan inclined his head in acknowledgement.

"Which also leads me to think that there _is_ something more, something you're not saying, something that you _know_ for absolute certain applies to my world as well," Harry continued.

"Well," Nathan said, with a faint smile. "You do have the capacity to be just a little bit brilliant."

"I'm not sure whether that's meant as a compliment, or a boast."

"Both, actually. It's a skill that comes with age. And with quite literally talking to myself."

"Right," Harry said. "Are you going to… no, wait, you aren't, because you aren't going to spoon-feed me."

"Well, I was, but if you'd prefer me not to, then that's fine with me."

"Wait, what? You were going to tell me."

The smile turned into a smirk. "Not a chance."

Harry glowered at his older counterpart. "You bring a whole new meaning to the concept of self-hatred," he grumbled.

"I'm sure," Nathan said, still smirking. "In any case, you'll figure it out soon enough."

The next two were bemusing, but less suspicious; one was a version of Harry that was perhaps a couple of years older than he was now, with some surprising differences. He was a little thinner, maybe a little shorter, in full Hogwarts robes, still wearing his glasses, and without the white locks in his fringe. He also seemed… happier? No, Harry thought, that was the wrong word. Easier, perhaps, less shadowed by experience.

"That version of us has walked a very different path," Nathan remarked quietly. "Easier, in some ways, and harder in others. While he has not faced the trials that you have, that I did, he also has not had the same love and support that we have."

"His powers are still dormant," Harry said, after a long moment. "He… he doesn't know who he is."

"He doesn't know all of who he is," Nathan corrected. "But yes. It hasn't all changed for him, the way it has for you, the way it did for me. I would not say that ignorance is bliss, but –" He stopped and smiled sadly. "I think you know as well as I that it has its benefits."

Harry nodded silently, watching as his alternate self walked along with Ron and Hermione, who were engaged in one of their usual friendly arguments. The view shifted, to himself on a broomstick, playing for the Gryffindor Quidditch team – and not just playing for it, leading it. And kissing…

"Wait, what?!"

"Yes, that's Ginny," Nathan said, sounding amused.

"I, I don't see her that way," Harry said, bemused. "I mean, yes, I suppose she's pretty. But, hell, in my world, I'm setting her up with someone else."

"Who?"

"Diana," Harry said. "Who, unless it had escaped your notice, is a girl."

Nathan raised his eyebrows. "Are you now?" His tone turned dry. "I still don't see why you're so surprised. I'm sure that you're perfectly aware by now that bisexuals exist."

Harry rolled his eyes extravagantly. "Yes, funnily enough I'd realised that," he said, exasperated. "My point was just that, well…" He waved his hands irritably.

"Your actions towards, and views of, Ginny in your reality are pretty well opposed to this other reality," Nathan said. "Not entirely, of course."

"How do you mean?"

"I presume that you don't hate her."

"Of course not, why do – oh," Harry said, and rolled his eyes again. "Hate and love are opposites. Yes, very clever."

"I try," Nathan said. Then, he shrugged. "This is a different reality. You, and she, are different people. And besides: she's pretty, intelligent, brave, and fiercely determined. All traits that, in my experience, various versions of us find attractive. Furthermore, she also has a far better understanding than most of psychic and psychological trauma."

"True, I suppose," Harry said, rubbing his jaw in vague bemusement. "Honestly, her being like that was why I thought she'd do well with Diana."

"Good enough reasoning," Nathan said, nodding.

Harry, meanwhile, stared at the image for another long moment. "Gods, he really has no idea, does he?" he said eventually. "Sometimes, I wish I was just normal – well, normal like that."

"Which isn't very normal at all."

"It's more normal than having my inner monologue become an outer monologue because I'm weird and a spell malfunctioned, punting my brain into the multiverse."

"Touché."

"Thank you," Harry said. "But other times… well, frankly, it's better to know than not to know. Ignorance just leads to you getting screwed over in the end. And I have to admit, my life is more interesting like this. But above all…" He folded his arms and regarded the image of his 'normal' counterpart. "I have family. People I love; dad, uncle Loki, Jean, Maddie, Jane, Pepper, the Avengers, and…"

"Someone blonde whose name starts with C?" Nathan suggested dryly.

"I, wait – oh, is that something else we have in common?"

Nathan smiled enigmatically. "Perhaps," he said. "Or perhaps I just have over a millennium of psychic experience on you and she's near the top of your mind."

Harry glowered at his counterpart for a moment, before moving on. This one was less startling, in the subject matter: a version of Harry who looked to be in his early forties – which, with an Asgardian lifespan, led to Harry supposing that this version of himself was probably closer to three thousand years old than anything else. He was standing on what looked like a balcony of Asgard's royal palace, dressed in comfortable looking formal robes, with a golden circlet on his head.

"So. I'm King of Asgard in this one."

"Crown Prince, going by the clothing," Nathan corrected, running a critical eye over the formal wear.

Harry opened his mouth to comment further, before stopping dead. Because this counterpart chose that moment to do something that left Harry dumbfounded. He looked up, met Harry's gaze, and winked.

"With a few tricks up his sleeve, as you can see," Nathan continued, without missing a beat.

"I can see," Harry said, blinking, gaze moving on. The next was a less pleasant sight; the version of Harry there was palpably older, dressed in black combats, and a savage scar, pale with age, marked his right cheek. He looked bitter, pale, and made of sharp-edges, as if carved from ice. The most disturbing thing about him, though, was his eyes: cold and hard as chips of green stone, they swept his surroundings, a well-appointed mansion, set up for what seemed to be a fancy-dress party.

After a moment of examining one of the partygoers, Harry revised his view of the garb of those present – not fancy dress, but almost uniform… albeit a uniform that was extravagant in terms of design and embroidery and minimalist in terms of actual material, heavily leather based, and about two centuries out of date. The people wearing the uniforms obligingly did not move for examination – and judging by the blood trickling from their noses, eyes, and ears, they would never be moving ever again.

"The Hellfire Club," Nathan supplied, tone grim. "A faintly ridiculous, but harmless organisation on the face of things, and a very dangerous, very nasty one when you dig deeper. However, for the most part, their power is institutional, economic and political. And even the ones with personal power…"

"Aren't a match for one of us," Harry said quietly, as he watched his alternate self, moving with smooth professionalism, double-checked the available exits, before setting a fire and departing, vanishing beneath his invisibility cloak in the process. "They wouldn't even have stood a chance."

"No," Nathan said. "No, they wouldn't have."

Harry watched the rising fire for a few moments, before sucking in a deep breath and tearing himself away. "Okay," he said. "Not that I don't appreciate looking at all the could-have, would-have, probably-might-not futures on offer, but how many more are you expecting me to look at? And is there any particular reason why?"

"Just two more," Nathan said, nodding at two fragments that were side-by-side. "They are, in many ways, mirror images of each other."

Harry, grumbling under his breath, followed his gaze. The first one that caught his eye was, in many ways, like the fragment before: dark, harsh, and lit by a growing inferno.

Unlike the one before, though, the location was somehow familiar. After a few long moments, Harry recognised Asgard, and the palace, beneath skies blackened with ash. Or rather, he recognised what was left of it, which wasn't much – it looked as if it had been simultaneously seared and blasted, reduced to an outline, a mere shadow, of its former self. The view panned through the molten rubble, which was intermittently streaked with reddish-black stains, stains that took Harry several moments to recognise with a sickening lurch as blood. And there was more, things that seemed familiar: here, the remnants of a tapestry that had once hung in an antechamber near the palace's great hall. There, the shredded and scorched remnants of a book that Harry thought might have belonged to his uncle.

And worse was yet to come, as the view drifted into the throne room, now burned black and strewn with drifts of ash and globules of molten metal. Some artefacts had survived almost intact.

A golden spear, snapped in two, might once have been Gungnir. The shattered pieces of two mighty shields, both red and blue, one with white, one with gold. A scarred, crumpled thing that might once have been a helmet, its mask ripped off and hurled into one of the few walls still standing. A skull, cracked from heat, human-shaped but too large to be human. The pieces of what looked like a bow and a pair of bracelets. A leather-bound handle attached to what looked like a piece of shattered stone, meanwhile, was unmistakeable as having once been Mjolnir. And set above them all, on a scoured, stony dais, was the throne of Asgard, the pre-eminent symbol of royal power. It was melted, scarred, but intact and unmistakeable.

And so was the figure who sat in it. He was dressed in a coat that was the red of dried blood. His trousers were as black as the depths of space. Emblazoned on his chest was a simple symbol, of a bird with wings outspread, burning with the white-heat of the heart of a star. That same light, merciless and all-consuming, emanated from the figure's eyes, and from his mouth, drawn in a cruel, mocking, insane smile, tearing open an inhumanly proportioned, but still horrifically familiar face. As Harry watched, the view began to draw back, and his counterpart's shoulders began to shudder, rising and falling in sharp, jerky motions.

That view revealed what was behind the throne, what was illuminating the blackened wasteland: a vast column of smokey-red flame that towered up into the darkened sky, before branching off, above and below, in separate directions. Nine separate directions, Harry realised, feeling sick, as his counterpart, King of the Ruins, Lord of the Burning Wastes, threw back his head and laughed like a maniac, cracks of empty white light spreading further and further across his face. And all the while, Yggdrasil burned endlessly in the background.

Finally, Harry managed to tear himself away, stumbling backwards, retching. blindly taking the offered arm for support, then angrily shoving it away when he realised that it was Nathan's.

"What. The. Hell. Was. _That?!_ " he snarled.

"I think you know perfectly well what that was," Nathan said quietly.

" _Then why the fuck did you show it to me?"_

"I didn't," Nathan said.

"… What?"

"I didn't show it to you," Nathan said. "Or rather, out of the infinite multiverse, I didn't choose that universe, or any of the others, to show you. You did."

Harry's eyes narrowed. "You said that I should count myself lucky that I'm seeing anything relevant," he said.

"And you should," Nathan said. "Not many people can, when viewing the multiverse for the first time, both stay sane and subconsciously select relevant parallels."

"I've tried insanity, it's overrated," Harry said dismissively. "So, I subconsciously selected these universes."

"Yes," Nathan said. His voice turned dry. "You would almost think that your subconscious was trying to tell you something. Several somethings." His eyes danced with amusement. "Including some which I think that you'd rather not have shared."

Harry went bright red again as his memory presented him with a crystal-clear image of _that_ universe, and an inconvenient part of his brain started idly comparing that image of Carol from _that_ universe to Carol in _this_ universe, in her sleepwear of a t-shirt and a pair of his boxers. "I hate my subconscious," he mumbled, as his trousers got tight again.

Nathan looked amused.

"And speaking of," Harry continued, eyeing Nathan. "If my subconscious is trying to tell me that I have issues with self-hatred? It's behind the times." He glowered. "And giving me new material."

"No," Nathan said. "As you say, that's self-evident. And tiresome. Certainly, it's one thing from my youth that I _don't_ miss." His expression turned wry. "Along with the overactive libido. Which, incidentally, is part of your subconscious, whether you like it or not."

Harry glared at him. "You weren't the one just shown a possible future –"

Nathan raised a finger. "It is not necessarily a possible future in your timeline."

"You're the one who said that these alternate universes were relevant," Harry retorted. "That means that it's either a possible future in my timeline, or close enough to make little practical difference."

Nathan smiled slightly and inclined his head. "That much is true," he said. "But consider – would your subconscious simply show you something like this just to torture you, or to warn you?"

There was a long silence.

"That wasn't meant to be a difficult question."

"If you were asking anyone else, it probably wouldn't be."

"Good point," Nathan said. "But seriously: think about it."

Harry frowned, then nodded. "Fine," he said. "So, it's a warning."

"A warning that comes with an alternative," Nathan said. "In case you had forgotten, there were two universes remaining for you to view. You only saw one."

Harry blinked, and turned back to the remaining fragments, ignoring the Dark Phoenix one.

This one was… different. It wasn't as eyecatching as its darker counterpart, not by a long way. And yet, once it had Harry's attention, it held it with a subtle, inexorable strength.

Harry's counterpart, though dressed as a Phoenix host, wasn't performing any obvious great deeds, making any grand gestures. He wasn't fixed in any particular colour of Phoenix garb, either, to Harry's surprise. As far as Harry had known, Phoenix hosts were pigeonholed as green, red, and white. Green hosts handled healing, red hosts handled destruction, and white hosts – until now, just his mother – were transcendent.

Yet, this version switched between the three with apparent ease; in Green, he was reaching out to take the hand of someone indistinct; in Red, this time looking entirely human, with the phoenix merely emblazoned in gold, he was facing down an army of grey figures on a frozen tundra with a determined expression on his face; and in White, he was holding something bright and broken looking, which managed to be both tiny and utterly colossal at the same time, as if physical size was a mere matter of opinion, while wearing an absorbed, gentle expression as he put it back together.

Whereas the previous universe had been a savage and open display of hatred, despair, and terror, mixed in with a merciless lust for power, this one invited the viewer to look closer. And when they looked closer, they saw the opposite of each: love, hope, and courage, bound together with something that Harry could only call...

"Selflessness."

Harry looked up sharply. "Selflessness?" he repeated.

Nathan nodded. "Selflessness," he said. "It is, I would argue, the key difference between those two realities; between any Phoenix and Dark Phoenix, come to that."

"I thought that love and hate were the difference," Harry remarked.

"They are," Nathan said readily. "Love, true, real love, is patient. It is kind. And above all, it is selfless, because it is putting the needs of another before yourself. Hatred, on the other hand… hatred is selfish. Even if you hate someone for what they've done to someone else, it is still about how they have done something that offends _you_. A Dark Phoenix is inherently selfish – it is all about what _they_ want, what _they_ desire, even if they delude themselves otherwise."

"Like Surtur," Harry said quietly. "And… like me." He eyed Nathan. "You don't look surprised."

"It was easy enough to deduce," Nathan said quietly. "Your reaction to that particular possible reality was a fairly large clue. And I am, after all, you. I remember how I thought back when I was your age, and even though our lives had already taken different paths, I doubt were _that_ different." He nodded. "To answer your unspoken question, yes, I did struggle with the Dark Phoenix when I was your age; both within, and without."

Harry smiled slightly. "Any tips?"

Nathan looked thoughtful. "Do what is right, rather than what is easy," he said. "But also remember to enjoy life, to be happy."

"I'm looking for advice on wielding a fundamental force of the universe and fighting an ancient cosmic abomination that misused a bit of that same fundamental force of the universe, while also avoiding becoming a cosmic abomination myself and destroying everything and everyone I love. Could you be the tiniest bit more specific?"

Nathan chuckled. "I could," he said. "But this isn't exactly something that comes with an instruction manual. It is a matter of instinct, and intuitive judgement." He shot Harry a meaningful look. "And I think we both know that that should suit you fine."

"So, your great advice is 'don't worry, be happy'?"

"That's part of it," Nathan said. "I would also say that you should think on the other parallels your subconscious chose – it did so for a reason."

Harry frowned, but didn't disagree.

"And the fact is, to understand the Phoenix, you need to understand life, to see what makes it worth living. Surtur doesn't understand that. He also doesn't understand how to do what is right rather than what is easy." He reached out and took Harry by the shoulder. "Above all, you should trust yourself. Your judgement is good. Yes, there is darkness in you, but you know it is there, and you know how to face it. Harry… you worry about becoming a monster. But what you don't grasp is that is precisely why you _won't_."

"So… if I stop worrying, I will become a monster?"

"Stop worrying? Probably not. Stop caring? Yes. But you won't."

"And how do you know that?" Harry asked, eyebrow raised.

Nathan's smile widened into a grin. "Self-confidence," he said, and his eyes glowed white-gold. "Now," he continued, as Harry blinked in puzzlement. "You'd better be going." And he drew his hand back, and struck Harry palm first in the torso. The silvery fragments of the world around them collapsed once more around Harry, and before he could establish which way was up, they exploded outwards into a cloud of shimmering stars, which faded like mist in the morning sun. And in a matter of mere moments, Harry was left alone in the now empty tunnel, with much to think on.

"Self-confidence?" he muttered. "Self… oh. Okay, that's both sweet and terrible." He paused, then chuckled wryly. "Seems pretty fitting."

And with that, he at last continued down the tunnel, on the path to the ring he sought. At first glance, not much had changed. But if one looked closer, they might see perhaps a lighter spring in his step. And if they thought about it, they might see it for what it was: the mark of something subtle, and difficult to perceive… yet powerful all the same.

OoOoO

The footsteps of the four champions echoed throughout the twisting tunnels, reverberating through the stillness of the perilous pools, bring sound where there had been silence, and causing attentive creatures to prick up their ears and wonder at this new invasion of their domain.

Some, like the mutated grindylows of Harry's brief acquaintance, thought of little more than the prospect of food, of fresher meat than usually found its way down into the depths. Others, sensing a threat, scuttled away into the deeper shadows, fleeing even the relatively feeble lights that these champions brought with them. But others still… they sensed more.

Far below in the darkest deeps, where natural light never reached and winter fled in the summer months, in chambers of cold, dead air, never moved or warmed by living breath, things stirred in their long sleep. As they did, an ages long silence was broken by the rasping of metal on stone.

They did not hear the champions, for they were beyond even the thinnest remnants of echoes from above. They did not need to, for they had long since passed the stage of needing any sense so prosaic as hearing.

They sensed power.

They sensed life.

They sensed _prey_.

 **Welp, that ain't good. That ain't good at all. Which, of course, means that Harry is going to be performing a rescue mission, to his irritation – but not surprise. Once, of course, he finally gets his hands on that wretched magic ring that he was sent down for in the first place. And that's just the start…**

 **Still, at least he's learned a thing or two, from his alternate self. Sorry if that part was a bit confusing (in between being hilariously embarrassing for Harry). Part of it is me rambling, part of it is 'Nathan' being intentionally vague, and part of it is because the multiverse, particularly from the somewhat strange perspective that Harry's being given, one not especially anchored to linear time. It's intentionally ambiguous. And to be frank, I had to have Harry talk to** _ **someone**_ **, even if that someone is another (older, wiser, even snarkier) version of him.**


	42. Chapter 42: Of Dungeons and Dragons II

**Well, this one took a little longer than planned. I was hoping to put it up last night, because this one involves spirits and the dead, and 'tis the season, after all. But 'twas not to be, even though I did manage to get through most of what was left. This one really has dragged for some reason. Job-hunting etcetera hasn't helped, but this chapter really has been a pain. I do hope that it isn't reflected in the quality.**

 **Anyhow, this chapter is the penultimate one in this arc. The next chapter is the big ending piece. I'm trying to keep it short, because we all know that given the chance, my arcs stretch out more or less forever, even if they're only meant to last a day in-universe, and I want to get things moving.**

 **This is also a relatively lighter chapter, with a fair dose of horror (naturally), but also showcasing a more confident Harry in situations that can best be summed up as capital-T Trouble. He's got a bit of a swagger about him now: not only is he powerful, but he's more comfortable with it. He knows his limits, yes, definitely – he's learned those the hard way. But the flip side of that is he knows how high those limits go. He's also comfortable with danger, in a way that most people, even brave people, aren't (which sometimes disturbs the people around him).**

 **This is also the point in this arc when we start really seeing how dangerous Harry is, even without much access to his psychic powers – after all, he's no lightweight with his magic and he's using what he's got far more intelligently than before. It also helps that we can see him relative to the other champions, who're powerful practitioners in their own right, and as a result, we start to see just how much Harry blows the curve. That, in turn, is why the second half of this chapter is from Cedric's POV, so we get a look at Harry from the outside.**

 _ **So, a few readers have wondered if Nathan is a reference to Cable, and I'd like to clear up a couple of things:**_ _ **he is and he isn't. I know, not especially helpful. However, I should explain that Nathan is a nod to the influence that Cable has had on my conception of COS' Harry. However, he's also heavily influenced by Nate Grey (who, further complicating matters, is an alternate version of Cable), specifically by Nate's 'Shaman' period – which he looks to be returning to with next year's Age of X-Man, which has me bouncing up and down in excitement. Of course, Cable's gone through similar periods, and they were an influence too. I also threw in a bit of Gandalf and Dumbledore, just to mix things up.**_

 _ **In short: yes, he's based off Cable, but only partly.**_

When he reached the ring chamber, Harry was in a rather mixed mood. Part of it was that he was mulling over his discussion with Nathan, his counterpart, and what he'd seen. Some of the things worried him, some inspired him, and some, he predicted with increasingly red cheeks, would come back to embarrass him. Another part of it, though, was that the Task so far had been more challenging than he'd expected.

The water trap and the mutant grindylows had been more irritating than anything else, but the Mist of Infinite Mirrors (what Harry had dubbed the enchantment that he'd accidentally twisted to contact Nathan and the multiverse. The alternatives had been 'Cosmic Disco-ball of Doom' and 'Magical Mist of Me') had been rather more dangerous. Or at least, it would have been had he not accidentally twisted it. If he hadn't, well. He was confident he'd have got out of it pretty quickly, but it would definitely have caught him off-guard. For one thing, it was far more sophisticated and, frankly, dangerous than he'd expected.

Even with that in mind and a more cautious attitude, he'd still had to deal with a number of other tricks and traps: the stone turning to quicksand beneath his feet and trying to swallow him up, impossibly deep extending roots leaping like serpents out of the wall to bind and trap him, and a miniature labyrinth seeking to confuse him and lead him around in circles.

Any one of them by themselves wouldn't have slowed him down much, but put together? They were a challenge – especially since Harry couldn't just blast his way out, for fear of bringing the tunnels, pools, and whatever else was in these deeps down on his head.

While at times this prospect was actually somewhat appealing, just for the sake of being able to really and truly cut loose, give his power its head and tear his way out, there were a few other small matters to consider.

First, the other Champions. If he destabilised this underground structure, he could hurt, cripple, or even kill them.

Second, if he ripped apart these catacombs beneath the Lake, then it would affect the Lake. Which was inhabited, by a Giant Squid and an orca that had never done him any harm, and a tribe of merfolk, who could also be added to the least of innocent potential casualties. And who knew what other knock-on effects there could be?

Third, as he was acutely aware, he wasn't invincible. He was stronger and faster than any ordinary human, even than many super soldiers – and when he had his psychic powers confined to his body, using what Bruce had dubbed 'Tactile Telekinesis', he could boost his physical abilities well into the superhuman range. However, this would mean sweet fuck all if he had several million tons of water, mud, and rock dropped on his head, along with who knew how many probably malfunctioning enchantments. It could be genuinely dangerous to him, never mind anyone else.

Oh, and they'd probably mark him down for it.

This prospect didn't particular bother him, by itself. Emerging from the depths, covered in mud, and having to explain why he'd accidentally drained the Lake, on the other hand, very much did. It would be embarrassing.

So, he had to be more careful, which in turn increased the challenge. On one level, he was actually reluctantly enjoying it, precisely because it was challenging. On another, he was still annoyed that he had to take part in the first place, and anything that delayed his getting this task over and done with was definitely _not_ appreciated.

So, a grubby, somewhat battered, and watchful Harry found himself entering the ring chamber. It was lit by a faint, almost crystalline watery glow, and all the sounds of nature, from water drops to ripples of swimming creatures to the shifting of rock and earth, seemed to merge into a gentle hum.

"So," he said aloud. "What next? A horde of insects? Mud golems? A ticking crocodile?"

His words echoed around the empty chamber, with a large pool that verged on being a small lake, harmonising and merging with the background hum. It was rather similar to the one he'd first fallen into after being caught in the water trap. That said, Harry mused to himself, it seemed to be short of a few things. Soon-to-be electrocuted mutant grindylows, for example.

Instead, it had something else: a small island, barely more than five feet across. On it was a plinth, and on that plinth was a ring.

An incautious person might have gone straight for the ring, by whatever means they could muster. A more cautious person might have advanced slowly, steadily, while keeping an eye out for trouble.

Harry, however, stayed exactly where he was, straining first his mundane senses, then his mystical ones. He was looking for the stone in the fruit, searching for the trap encompassing the bait, and waiting for the other shoe to drop. Mixed metaphors aside, he was expecting something.

And in time, he got it.

"You know," he said eventually. "I'm actually a little disappointed. The earlier mental trap, now that was good – it threw me for a loop, even after I accidentally warped. In fact, speaking as a telepath with some experience in that department, I'd go so far as to call it a work of art."

He shrugged. "Of course, it probably wouldn't have held me long. Not because because of my raw power, as such, but because I've been down that road before. I've fought for my metaphorical life with one of the strongest psychics ever to exist, and most of it involved avoiding or getting out of psychic traps. One slip-up, and all of it would come down around my ears. That was followed by a couple of days of constant physical and psychic torture by an immortal sociopath. A few weeks ago, I had to play mind and illusion games with Dracula himself."

He folded his arms and swept his gaze around the chamber. "What I'm trying to say," he said. "Is that I'm not that easily caught, or impressed. And if a trap that sophisticated wasn't going to get me, then do you _really_ think that a bit of magic _singing_ was going to get me? Honestly, I'm almost insulted. Now, if you could please stop with the creepy humming? It's starting to annoy me."

The sounds did not so much shut off as break up, no longer harmonising into a single tone.

"That's much better," Harry said. "Thank you. Now…" His gaze drifted around the room. "I've got a couple of questions for you. First, who are you? Second, are you going to try and stop me from taking that ring?"

There was a long moment of silence. Then, a soft, whispery voice, like a dozen streams flowing in harmony, spoke.

" _We are numerous, and we each have many names. Who are you to command us so?"_

"I have a fair few names of my own," Harry said. "But I'm thinking that you're asking what I am – and I suppose there's a fair few answers to that, too. I'll keep it simple: I am Harry Thorson, and I am a Prince of Asgard."

" _An Asgardian. Yes, we see that in you. But that is not all you are."_

"My mother was human."

" _True. Your form is mostly mortal. But we sense more in you; a hint of chaos, and… something else. Smoke and flames."_

"I've been marked by powers," Harry said evenly. "I have told you who and what I am. Will you now do me the same courtesy?"

" _You speak of courtesy? You, who insulted our music?"_

"Music meant to enchant me and put me to sleep, if not lead me to drown," Harry said flatly. "I dismissed it, yes. But if you'll forgive my bluntness, if I had taken it more seriously, by treating it and you as a threat, then I would have destroyed you. And you would not be in any state to complain about my rudeness."

The light of the chamber seemed to pulse, and when the reply came, the tone was unmistakeably angry, the stream flow becoming the rushing of rapids.

" _You dare to threaten us?"_

"I am stating facts," Harry said calmly. "If I hadn't shrugged off your enchantment immediately, instead breaking through when I was nearly unconscious or nearly drowned, then I would have lashed out and destroyed you. You recognise my power, and where I come from. If you know anything about my people, you'll know that we don't tolerate mortal threats. And if you can sense anything about me, then you'll know that I am not exaggerating my power."

His eyes narrowed, and his voice hardened. "At the very least, you have launched an unprovoked attack on me. At the very worst, you have attempted to kill me. There are others in these tunnels who could have taken this path, others who would not have resisted it as easily as I have, others that I am trying to protect. While I doubt they would have died, thanks to various safeguards, your intent is clear. I, by contrast, have accurately stated that your enchantment was nothing to me, and explained what would have happened if you had actually threatened me and caught me off-guard. You claim offence, but I can claim far more."

He paused, letting the words echo and sink in.

"I don't want to claim anything. I don't want a quarrel, and under the circumstances, I think I am being very restrained. I just want to take that ring and go. If you want to give me trouble, however, then I will oblige you. I offer you a truce, for the length of this conversation. _I advise you accept it._ "

There was a very, very long silence. Then, a reply came, softer and more muted.

" _We accept your offer."_

"Thank you," Harry said, relaxing slowly, but not completely. "Now, would you please tell me who and what I am speaking to?"

" _We are Undines. I, who speak for my sisters, am called Morgen."_

"Thank you," Harry said, tone polite and measured, but still carrying a hint of steel. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Morgen. I greet you and your sisters. This pool is your domain. I wish to pass over it, and reach the island in the middle, so I may claim the ring I was sent to retrieve, and to do so in peace. Will you seek to impede me?"

There was another silence, shorter this time, before the reply.

" _We shall not."_

"Thank you," Harry said. "Now, I would like to make a couple of inquiries – these are questions that you are not required to answer. I would like answers, but if you do not wish to answer, or cannot, then I will gladly respect that. May I ask?"

" _You may."_

"Excellent," Harry said. "First, may I have someone to speak to, an avatar of some kind at least? It's a small thing, I know, but it's more pleasant than speaking to the water."

At first, nothing happened. Then, the water rippled, before becoming as smooth as glass and clear as a mirror. Harry was reflected in it, and for a moment, he stood alone. Then, a figure appeared by his side. And, as if walking from a great distance away, that figure began to grow larger with every second that passed, revealing herself to be a beautiful young woman wearing only a clinging white dress. She was pale as ice, with sleek black hair and silvery eyes like a stream in moonlight, with a face whose sad, haunted expression only enhanced her elfin beauty.

At first, Harry could hardly stop staring at her, mouth agape as she stepped up and out of the water's surface. This in turn was probably the only thing stopping him from stepping forward and pledging himself to her service to help her in whatever way he could, so it was probably a good thing. As it was, after a few seconds he snapped out of it, closing his eyes and shaking his head sharply. He was not speaking to a human, or an Asgardian, or anything like that. He was speaking to a water-spirit, of a variety that tended to beguile and drown the unwary. Their singing was one way in which they did so, but it wasn't the only one – the beauty of the spirit in front of him, whether real or illusion, was just as much of a weapon as her voice, and it did not do to forget that.

Furthermore, he firmly told both his chivalrous side and his libido, the latter of which was appreciating the clinging dress, it also did not do to forget that she was not being polite out of any inherent altruism. She was a supernatural predator and the only reason she was playing ball was because he'd shut down her and her sisters' attack more or less effortlessly, and then challenged her to either play nice or take him on. She'd opted for playing nice, but if he showed weakness, then odds were good that she'd try and exploit it.

So, when she bowed, he inclined his head politely and no more.

"So," he said, voice steady, meeting her gaze. "I don't know much about your people, and that's on me. All I can say is that I've had a lot to learn and have been very busy. But so far as I know, your people favour lakes, rivers, and seas in the open air. So why are you in such an isolated pool so far away from the sun?"

" _We were called here in an age long past, drawn down our rivers, down under the earth by a greater power than our own. We did not wish to come, but its will… we could not overcome it, not even all of us together. We have called to our sisters and our brothers, our mothers and our fathers, even to our Queens, for help, but they do not hear us."_ Morgen's voice turned bitter. _"And so we are trapped in this stale and stagnant pool, as we have been for years uncounted, slaves of this ruin's master."_

"Who has you kill anyone who comes here?" Harry asked, while ruthlessly squashing his nobler side's instinctive response to forget all questions, leap on the white charger, and free the fair maiden. "What about the people who came here?"

" _We were commanded to let them pass."_

Harry's blood ran cold. That implied two things. First, whatever was holding the Undines was awake. Second, it wasn't just some supernatural predator defending its territory, albeit a dangerously powerful one – it was smart, too. "I see," he said out loud. "Very well. Then I offer you a bargain, Morgen, and your sisters. I promise to defeat or destroy whatever being binds you to this place – and if I cannot, I will make sure it is done."

" _A bold promise for one so young,"_ Morgen mused, stepping closer to inspect him. Harry didn't respond, save to narrow his eyes and do his best to ignore the fact that what looked like a stunningly beautiful girl in nothing more than a clinging white dress was a) within two feet of him, b) regarding him with undoubted interest. _"And the Princes of Asgard are justly famed, for their power, for their battle-rage, and for never breaking their given word. But the young, no matter how powerful, often rashly make promises that they cannot keep."_ She tipped her head thoughtfully, considering him. _"Yet your scars, earned in battle, tell a different tale, as does your restraint. You are young, but you have been tempered."_ She nodded. _"Speak your terms, young Prince."_

"First," Harry said. "I want a guide."

" _To lead you to the surface?"_

Harry shook his head. "The ring will do that," he said. "And even if it doesn't, I can find my way out. At worst, I can blast my way out. I want to find the others, the ones who're searching for their own rings. I want to protect them, and there's something strong, smart and malicious down here. I need to keep an eye on them. I want a guide who can help me do that."

" _And your other conditions?"_

"When I free you, or have you freed, you swear never to enchant or drown another mortal, save in self-defence," Harry said, steel re-entering his voice. "To save time, let me make it _crystal_ clear that his condition is _not_ negotiable. If, after you are freed, you're ordered to do so by one of your Queens, or anyone else, tell them you gave your word and to take it up with me. And finally, I want you to tell me everything you know of the power that binds you, and any other spirits and guard-creatures it has at its disposal."

Morgen's eyes had narrowed at the second condition, before developing into an outright glare. Harry, however, was unmoved, folding his arms and meeting her gaze. After several long moments of weighing it up, she nodded curtly.

" _We accept,"_ she said. _"For the promise of our freedom, you shall have a guide and all the information that we have and you desire of this labyrinth and its master. And when you free us, we swear that shall never enchant or drown another mortal soul, save in self-defence."_ She turned back to the pool, and from it emerged wisps of softly glowing silvery mist, which formed briefly into the form of a young woman, near identical to Morgen, before settling as a ball of glowing mist. _"Our sister, Mari, shall serve as your guide."_

Harry paused a moment, noting the wording of the last point, before nodding. "Excellent," he said, before almost sauntering through the air over to the island to pluck the ring from its pedestal. He waited for a few moments for a last trap, but nothing was forthcoming. Instead, the ring in his hand, a simple gold band, began to glow, and when he slipped it onto his right index finger, it shrank to fit. He examined it and smiled a wry smile.

"One ring to rule them all," he muttered. "And hopefully, one ring to find them."

"Now –" He stopped suddenly, as something cold and dark brushed against his senses, making his spine crawl. Normally, he'd have dismissed it as another of the sad, mad fragmented echoes of spirits that he'd touched earlier, whose darkness and madness hadn't especially fazed him. They'd been like brushing one's hand through unexpectedly chilly water. This, though, was a different kind of cold, a cold that sucked the heat, the life, from all it touched, and a different kind of darkness, active and malevolent.

"Okay," he said. "First thing's first: what the hell is that?"

OoOoO

The Task, Cedric thought, had most definitely not gone to plan.

Or to be exact, it had gone to plan, up to a point. He had fought his way through traps and pitfalls, even the occasional monster. What felt like most of a day later, of being battered from pillar to post – sometimes literally, cold and covered in mud, he'd got hold of the ring he'd been meant to find, a gold band inset with amber. He had then turned and, shivering but triumphant, set about following his ring out.

Except it hadn't turned out like that. He'd headed up into a tunnel full of deep shadows, ones that perversely seemed to get deeper and more ominous the further in he went, sucking the warmth out of him, getting colder with every step. His warming charms had only worked briefly, then rapidly got weaker and weaker, as if they were being drained away. Then, something huge and unseen had smashed him to the ground, a large hand as cold as death had caught the back of his head as he struggled, and then… nothing.

Now, he awoke with a splitting headache, and was caught between several competing instinctive reactions. First, the instinct to sit up, groan, and carefully rub the back of his head, and considering how he'd ended up there, then the instinct to bounce up with wand in hand and spells on the tip of his tongue, and then the instinct to freeze and give no indication he was conscious so he could listen in on what was going on.

Normally, this mental conflict would have led to an entertaining flailing spasm as his body was caught between three conflicting signals and decided to compromise on 'embarrassing flop'. This time, however, he found very quickly that he couldn't move. His entire body, from the neck down – no, from the nose down – was locked in place. He could still feel his body, in a detached, numb fashion, and from that he could tell that he was lying on some hard, solid, probably stone surface.

With that feeling and what he could barely see at the bottom of his field of vision, he could also tell was how he was dressed. His robes had vanished, and had been replaced by some strange armour, which was leathery and coldly metallic by turns. A long pole-like object lay beside him, and it might have been a spear. If it was, however, Cedric thought, then it was certainly the strangest designed spear he'd ever seen – not, admittedly, that he'd seen many. Something else, a short sword or a long knife, lay at his hip, alongside what he recognised with a flood of relief as his wand.

It was about this point that he realised two things, which poured a tidal wave of cold water on his relief.

First, he couldn't blink. His eyes had been open since he'd come to, and now that he thought about it, he was pretty sure that they'd been open before that too.

Second, and most importantly, he wasn't breathing.

After several moments of acute panic, panic enhanced by his inability to open his mouth and gulp air, or even move, it sunk in that this did not seem to matter. He wasn't dying. Or at least, he mused somewhat grimly, his physical state wasn't changing. It was entirely possible that he could already be dead, and somehow still anchored to his body, a strange sort of semi-ghost or revenant. Another person might have lost themselves to panic.

However, Cedric Diggory was a very practical young man, and well used to the weirdness and occasional outright horror that followed Harry Potter around like a faithful owl. Of course, part of him noted that technically, it was Harry Thorson these days, and that if one had seen Harry grow and change over the last couple of years, even from a relative distance, it wasn't too hard to spot the difference – though it was considerably harder to pin down where that difference really began. The Match of the Raining Ravenclaws, perhaps? Or maybe after the previous Easter, when Harry had returned with a whole new suite of strange and unearthly powers, under what at the time had been very tenuous control?

Inwardly, he shook his head. That wasn't relevant. What was relevant was that he'd encountered weirder and, arguably, more horrifying things than this at Hogwarts. Less personally horrifying, admittedly, but not entirely different, he realised. His current situation was reminiscent of what he'd seen and heard of the students who'd been petrified by the basilisk. Except, of course, he was awake during it. Even still, it was a significant relief. Now, he had a comparable experience to work from.

With that done, he now set to working on just how much he could sense, running through all five senses. Touch wasn't telling him anything new, except that the numbing sensation seemed – he wasn't totally sure – to be getting stronger, and that it was bloody cold. Taste told him nothing other than that his mouth had a bit of his blood in it and that he'd have a prize-winning case of morning breath when he finally was able to open it again. Smell was a bit more helpful, even though he couldn't exactly breathe: the occasionally damp and dank earthy smell of the tunnels was present here, but less so, replaced by a certain staleness in the musty, dusty air. Wherever he was hadn't been open to the public, or to anyone, for a very long time.

Sight was rather more helpful, though, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, revealing that he was in a large, columned and vaulted chamber, like some kind of giant crypt. While they were staring straight up at the ceiling, he could still – barely – catch a glimpse of his upper-body on the edge of his field of vision, confirming his previous assessment of what he was wearing – metal armour, ornate, but practical looking. He also caught glimpses of other figures, lying on stone biers that were, he presumed, the same as the one he lay on.

He tried to move his eyes, straining to roll them even the slightest nanometre in one direction or the other, and at first found nothing. He strained further, and still, there was no movement. But there _was_ something, something unclear, the faintest lessening in resistance. Determined, he poured all his energy, all his will into fighting the enchantment, just on his eyes, just enough to move them in their sockets. And slowly, oh so very slowly, like a rolling stone slowly picking up speed, the resistance began to fade. After what felt, to Cedric, like centuries, he finally managed to twitch his eyes a millimetre to the left. Shortly after, a full centimetre. And then, after that, it was relatively short interval until he had his full range of ocular motion to work with.

Had he been able to, he'd have cried in relief, and unashamedly so, while panting with exhaustion as one who has run a marathon, for it took about as much out of him. As it was, he couldn't, and he wasted no time, flicking his gaze from side to side. Immediately, on identical biers about six feet apart, he saw Krum, and beyond him, her signature silvery-blonde hair standing out, Fleur. They were armoured like he was, though Krum had what looked like a war-hammer resting beside him. Neither seemed able to move, and after he watched them for some time, Cedric wasn't clear if they were even conscious. So, eventually, he rolled his eyes the other way. There lay more biers, more armoured figures, a line that vanished into the darkness.

Then, in his peripheral vision, he saw something move. Instinctively, he froze, as the figure glided towards him along the line of biers. At first, considering its size, relative silence, and a pervasive, soul-chilling cold that it brought with it, perceptible event through the numbing effects of whatever enchantment he was under, he almost thought it was a dementor. But dementors wore ragged dark hooded cloaks.

This creature, though cloaked, was wearing armour just like that which he'd been forced into – though, from what little Cedric could tell, this was both more ornate and more battle-scarred than his own. And what he had at first thought was a cloak was, in fact, a combination of the deep shadows and the curtain of long, lank dark hair around the creature's head, which concealed its face. It had a short spear-like weapon across its back, almost identical to the one Cedric had beside him, and a short sword.

Then, it turned to look at him, the curtain of hair parting. And for the first time, Cedric was grateful that he was frozen, that whatever spell he was under stifled his reactions, because what he saw was horrifc.

The first thing he saw, that he could identify, were the eyes. They were, at first glance, human eyes. But at a second glance, they were anything but – gleaming with pale and somehow blurry light, like mist in the night, there was something deeply eerie about them.

Their light illuminated the frozen, mummified face, framed by a curtain of lank, stringy, moss-like dark hair, from which almost all of the flesh had melted away. Left behind was a sheet of pale, leathery skin, stretched taut over sharp, jutting bones. The lips had retreated, offering glimpses at a mouth full of sharp, dry, yellowed teeth; not quite fangs, and all the more disturbing for that. It was a gaunt, nightmarish visage, one that could never have been mistaken for anything alive.

It seemed to scrutinise him for a long moment, being particularly interested in the ring on his finger, before slipping around him with only the faintest rustle of clothing and clink of armour, only audible this close to, examining him from multiple angles. Cedric fought every instinct imaginable to follow it with his newly freed eyes, not knowing how it would react and not wanting to know either.

Eventually, it decided that he wasn't of interest, and moved away into the darkness. As it did, Cedric tried to imagine what the hell it might be. It couldn't be an inferius, or a zombie, since it showed signs of independent decision-making ability – along with the mummification and glowing eyes. Maybe it was one of those horrifying undead monsters that he'd heard rumours of, ones that fit the muggle stereotype of flesh-eating monsters?

But no, that still didn't fit. It wasn't readying him or the other two to eat, not going by their arrangement. It almost seemed like a sentry, capturing intruders, not dissimilar to some of what he'd learned about Egyptian tomb guardians. And, as he thought with a nasty shiver – metaphorical, by and large – those tomb guardians tended to mete out nasty and ironic punishments. Such as making one a part of the tomb's defence system.

But they weren't in Egypt, and this wasn't a tomb… was it?

Before he could delve further into troubled speculation, something registered on the last sense: Hearing.

It began as a soft, yet rasping sound, like silk over gravel, one that made Cedric's spine crawl, so strange and inhuman that he didn't at first recognise it as speech. Even without being able to angle his head to get a better sense of the direction of the sound, he could tell it was coming from the darkness his undead observer had vanished into. And while he couldn't understand the words, he recognised enough to know that the same verse was being repeated over and over again, in a rhythmic chant that was taken up by more voices just like the first, in a rough circle around him, Fleur and Krum.

As the voices harmonised, shifting from chant to an eerie song, one that Cedric somehow found he could understand as it filtered through the enchantment.

" _ **Whosoever disturbs our sleep,**_

 _ **Shall join us in the frozen deep.**_

 _ **Iron and steel shall become rust,**_

 _ **Flesh and bone shall turn to dust.**_

 _ **But with us forever they shall stand,**_

 _ **Their souls bound by serpent's brand,**_

 _ **Cold shall be their sleep under stone,**_

 _ **Until our Lord shall reclaim his throne."**_

With every word that settled into place with the leaden finality of a lowered coffin, the temperature dropped, the soul-chilling cold that the creature which had examined him carried with it returning and pervading through Cedric's entire being on a far greater scale than before. Mist gathered over him, over them, and began to settle on their bodies.

As it did, to Cedric's horror and increasing panic, he found the numbness in his skin and limbs increasing, his eyes suddenly impossible to move once again, and this time, not all the will in the world could even begin to shift them. It felt like he was shifting into a dark, cold and utterly still sea, one that would swallow him whole and leave only another frozen sentry behind. And nothing he did could prevent it.

Then, from out of nowhere, an echoing voice spoke, with authority and power.

" _No. The time for sleeping is_ _ **over**_ _."_

And with that voice came sudden roar of wind, a gale that tore the settling mist to nothingness, leaving behind the smell of flames, wildflowers and sunlight and a small, but pervasive feeling of warmth. The singing stopped, and there is whisper of cloaks and faint clinking of armour as the singing creatures whirled towards what Cedric was willing to bet was the source of first disturbance of air in this tomb for centuries, a beacon of gold and silver light that lit up the vast crypt.

"One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them," the voice said. It was no longer echoing and authoritative, but insouciant and increasingly familiar. "One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness… bind them? Could do with a bit of work. It's a classic, granted, and pretty appropriate to this situation, but that ending isn't quite right. Darkness unbind them, maybe? And I'm not so interested in the ruling part."

It was Harry, and Cedric wasn't too proud to admit to a surge of pure relief. Partly because if Harry was down here, it was because he'd figured out that something was wrong and was coming to help, possibly with _other_ help following, or he'd been stalking one or all three of the other champions and was now stepping in.

"So," Harry continued, tone still deceptively casual. "You're undead, that much is obvious. What kind, I'm not exactly sure. Wraiths, maybe? No, you look too solid for that. Revenants, perhaps? Yeah, that's more like it, but still not quite the right term… ah-ha! I know what you are! You're barrow-wights!" There was a pause. "Even though this isn't really a barrow. Or maybe it is – a really, really, _really_ big one." And if Cedric had to guess, going by the flicker in the shape of the light in his peripheral vision, he'd have thought that Harry was shrugging. "It doesn't matter."

Then, Harry's voice turned cold and hard, in a way that Cedric had only previously caught glimpses of – and in retrospect, was very glad of that fact.

"It doesn't matter," he repeated. "Because you have three of my friends there, three people who are my responsibility. You will release them to me, unharmed, and you will do it now. If you don't, I will destroy all of you. And please do not mistake me: this is not a threat, or an opening act in a negotiation, it is a statement of fact."

The reply, perhaps inevitably, was not one of meek compliance. Instead, the wights let out a synchronised inhuman shriek, like an alarm call, one that seemed to reach down inside Cedric and force him to sit up, dismount from the bier, take up his weapons, and get into a defensive stance. He tried to resist, and going by what he could see out of the corner of his newly mobile eyes, so were Fleur and Krum – it was something about the eyes. But all it did was slow their movements down, making them clumsy rather than smooth and efficient.

Furthermore, they were not the only ones standing. The entire row of armoured figures, more wights in various degrees of mummification, were standing, armed, armoured and dangerous. Not counting Cedric himself, Fleur, Krum, and – after a quick count – the dozen wights that had already been active, there were at least a hundred, maybe two, maybe more. What with the depth of the darkness, and the size of the crypt, it was impossible to tell, even with the light Harry was throwing off.

And he was throwing off a lot. In fact, if Cedric could have, he'd have gaped. Occasionally, he'd caught glimpses of Harry's other nature, in the form of glowing eyes (usually gold, sometimes solid white), coupled with an aura of heat, a smell of wood smoke, and something more… indefinably inhuman. He'd also heard stories about how, when really pushed, Harry's entire body seemed to radiate golden flames, being sheathed in them, features defined by subtle differences in shading, eyes blazing with silvery-white power.

Now, though, what was standing in front of him bore only a passing resemblance to humanity, let alone to Harry. It, he, was a tall figure, like a statue carved of gold and silvery-white flames so bright that Cedric could barely bear to look at him, so fierce that even from a good fifty yards away, surrounded by the heat-swallowing cold of the wights, and wrapped in sensation numbing enchantments, it was like standing in front of a furnace.

He also seemed utterly unintimidated by the serried ranks of dozens of undead monsters, who were armed to the teeth and possessed of uncanny and unknown powers, which Cedric thought was a bit overconfident, even for someone with Harry's extraordinary reputation – and that wasn't considering that some of these wights might be witches or wizards, and that only half of Harry's vast abilities were actually available for him to use at the moment.

As it happened, though, it wasn't overconfident at all. Because as Harry's burning form shifted in front of their eyes from an avenging angel incarnate to a smaller version of the vast golden-white phoenix he'd unleashed at the World Cup, attacking the left wing of the wights' formation with what seemed to be total abandon, he sensed a presence behind him, a figure melting out of the shadows. The enchantment on him forced his body to react, faster by far than he'd ever moved in his life, too quick to even begin to try and resist, spinning and bringing his glowing spear in a lethal thrust at chest height.

It should have skewered the figure behind him. He was moving at speeds barely visible to _his_ eyes, let alone anyone else's, striking with power beyond any mere human, and the delay in his reaction time had been practically non-existent. Cedric, horrified, expected to feel the spear punching through flesh and bone.

But it didn't.

Instead, the figure spun away from the blow with nonchalant ease, grabbing the spear and jerking it past him, while driving his heel into Cedric's chest, sending Cedric staggering back and plucking the spear from his hands like an adult taking a twig from a child, while the free hand gestured at him – almost like an after-thought – wrapping him in crimson-red chains drawn from thin-air. All of that had happened in a split-second, in one graceful, flowing move. Then, without pausing, holding the spear like a quarter-staff, he snapped it up to block an overhead sword stroke from Fleur.

For a horrible moment, Cedric thought he'd missed the other blade that was coming in low, seeking to stab up through his stomach to his heart, and tried to shout a warning. But though he couldn't, it didn't matter. With a mere whisper, the second short sword flew to its sibling as if drawn by a vastly powerful magnet, dragging her arm with it. As she was pulled off-balance, the butt-end of the spear snapped up into her jaw, leaving her insensible on the floor as he dropped to one knee to avoid a sweep of Krum's war-hammer that would have burst his skull – or at least, anyone else's skull – like a melon.

As Krum staggered, the force controlling his body plainly not expecting to have missed and not met resistance, he thrust upwards, an open hand jab that presaged a short, sharp blast of wind that hit Krum with a neat uppercut. Rising, he stepped forward as Krum staggered, and though Cedric was increasingly certain that the enchantment on them would allow them to crumble granite in their bare hands, he twisted the war-hammer from Krum's hands with no more effort than if it had been the leg from a freshly roasted chicken.

The entire fight, Cedric would later estimate, took no more than five seconds.

Then, the figure, taller than Krum, reached out and grabbed his head in a vice grip, index and middle fingers resting on the temples. There was a flare of golden light, and then Krum stumbled, but with the figure's help, stayed on his feet. And it was Krum. The enchantment was gone. Cedric didn't know how he knew; perhaps, he thought in retrospect, it was the sudden tinge of colour in Krum's skin, his wincing at the blows he'd taken, the twitching of his face into different expressions, his movements becoming more human and imperfect, or the way his eyes came into focus, or perhaps all of them put together.

The figure looked him in the eye, before nodding in satisfaction, putting a finger to his lips to indicate that Krum should stay quiet, before turning to the semi-conscious Fleur and ministering to her the same way. She jerked back into full consciousness with a start, and immediately scrabbled for her wand, before freezing, eyes darting around, sharp and looking for threats.

She shot a questioning look at Harry – for the figure could only be Harry, who'd somehow managed to sneak over in the chaos he'd created – and Krum. It was tinged with both reproach and respect in Harry's case. Then, she turned to Cedric himself, opening her mouth to say something, before reconsidering, and starting at a flare of light and the unearthly shrieks coming from most of a hundred yards away: Harry's firebird construct was keeping the wights occupied, and shepherding them away, it would seem. She didn't need an indication to need to stay quiet, and after a murmured exchange in what Cedric thought must be French, Harry stood up and strode quickly and quietly over to Cedric, repeating the same treatment.

The precise sensation, Cedric would later recollect, was hard to describe. The best way he could put it was that it was like a hot drink after a cold day, except that the heat flowed instantly and equally through his entire body, sweeping away the enchantment that had bound his body with the implacability of fierce sunlight melting ice, leaving only water to drain away.

"Well," he managed to say. "I thought something might go wrong. But I didn't think it would be –"

"Like this?" Harry suggested, and shrugged. "I did." He paused. "Well, I didn't exactly predict the small army of undead warriors."

Cedric shot him an incredulous look. "The small army of undead warriors you snuck through unnoticed," he said.

"Yes," Fleur said, wand drawn. "How did you do zhat?"

"And are ve going to stay for long?" Krum asked, eyeing his surroundings with both a raised wand and considerable unease.

"Not long," Harry said. "And how? Classic bait and switch – make a bright light and a big noise, and sneak in the back while everyone's looking the other way. Works on people and undead abominations. And if that doesn't work…" He waved a hand behind them and to the left, summoning a ball of light. A good half dozen of the wights were littered on the ground. All of them had been decapitated in what had apparently been total silence. "Stick with the classics."

then drew his wand as he saw a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, firing off a blasting curse at the armoured wight charging in near silence, eyes ablaze with unearthly power and malice. A blasting curse of that power would have reduced one of the stone biers to gravel, but all it did was slow the wight down, making it stumble and denting its armour, which flashed on impact. A savage cutting curse from Fleur, which swept up like an invisible sword, scoring a six inch line in the floor before slicing up and cross the creature's body, did little more than scratch and strike sparks from the armour. It seemed to touch the creature's face, Cedric thought, slicing down to the bone, but it was hard to tell in the darkness, for the monster did not even blink.

"Undead magic resistant warriors," Harry corrected mildly, as if there wasn't a undead armoured monster that carried a preternatural cold with it, that reeked of dark magic, less than ten feet way, which had shrugged off two powerful curses as if they were nothing. "Time to send a message." He swapped the spear from right hand to left, then raised his right arm and sighted down it, extending his index and middle fingers like a gun. "Oh, I'd look away if I were you," he added, apparently as an afterthought.

Cedric stared at him as if he'd gone mad, then raised his wand, preparing the best spell he could to at least slow this thing down and save his fellow student. While, he admitted to himself, it was probable that Harry was up to something, he wasn't always predictable. Thus, it was best to be prepared; just in case he really had suddenly morphed from efficient warrior, frighteningly powerful mage, and cunning planner into a suicidal moron.

The monster, five feet and closing, opened its mouth to let out a triumphant shriek.

But whatever either would have said, it was drowned out in a flash of light like a miniature sun, banishing every shadow in a place that had not seen the sun in a thousand years, and the accompanying roar, fit to shake the foundations of the Earth.

As that roar faded, the agonised screams of a hundred wights emerged undimmed, shrieking their pain at the light that was their bane, and their fury at both that pain and the one who brought it. And through the ringing of his ears and the flashes of light in his eyes, Cedric saw the remains of the wight that had charged them clatter to the ground, its head obliterated, along with much of its upper body, armour and all. The remains were twisted, melted and burned by exposure to heat of unbelievable intensity.

Its slayer, Harry, stood tall, and all signs of mischief and casual demeanour were gone. In their place was the stance of one ready to explode into hideously lethal action at less than a moment's notice, and hard expression of tightly leashed blazing fury.

" _Now that I have your attention,"_ he said, into the sudden silence, once more in that echoing voice of power and authority. " _A couple of minutes ago, I made you lot an offer: you let my friends go, unharmed, or I destroy you. You didn't let them go, and I demonstrated on several of your number that I can easily destroy you. However, my friends are unharmed."_

Cedric, who could feel the beginnings of some prize bruises in both torso and back, wasn't quite so sure about that. Harry, though supposedly he couldn't read minds at the moment, flickered him a brief, wry smile of acknowledgement, before his expression hardened again.

" _And I am feeling…_ _ **generous**_ _,"_ he continued, the last word carrying a mocking edge. _"So, if you swear to let us pass, freely, then I will spare you. What say you?"_

For a moment, the darkness remained silent. Then, there was a clatter, like several dozen suits of armour being vacated at once.

"They haf surrendered?" Krum asked sceptically.

"Somehow, I doubt it's going to be that easy," Cedric found himself saying.

And to his eternal regret, he was right.

For an eerie chant began, from what sounded like all around them. Cedric recognised its effects immediately; the numbing enchantment of before. But the spell before had been subtle, designed to send him and the other champions into a sleep that they would never awaken from, their bodies and souls bound to act as guards for some nameless horror, while their minds screamed fruitlessly within. It had been a slow and steady conversion, one that Harry had interrupted.

But this was neither slow where that had been as a light, ever-thickening blanket of snow, this was like an avalanche. A vast psychic weight of cold malice bore down on them, as the shadows thickened, swallowing the light Harry radiated. Were that not enough, the temperature dropped still further, frost forming on every surface, including Cedric's own skin, with warming charms providing only a small respite.

 _Give in_ , the cold seemed to whisper, in a lulling sound like dead leaves in a breeze. _Cease trying to shoulder a weight that no mortal could hope bear. Close your eyes, and accept the darkness, accept the cold. Let them flow inside you, and wash away all your worries and fears, all your pains and disappointments. Forget what was, what lies above, it no longer matters. Let us carry you back onto your stone bed, and sleep, sleep in endless peace; free of time, free of sorrow, free even of death._

For a moment that felt like an eternity, Cedric was almost, _almost_ , tempted. Then, his buckling knees snapped back upright.

"No," he said out loud. It was a weak, mumbled gasp, frozen lips unsealing themselves to say it, but the follow up was louder, as he thought of all the things that made life worth living: Quidditch, magic, sunshine, food, drink, his friends, his parents, _Cho_.

" _NO!_ " he half-screamed, full of defiance and desperation. "I _won't_ sleep! I want… I want to live! I _do_ live! _I am alive!_ "

And with that shout, there was a sudden flare of light and heat, a burst of white hot flames, followed by a voice full of fierce pride.

" _Yes. Yes, you are."_

He turned, painful with a neck that had been half frozen into place, and saw Harry, Fleur, and Krum. Fleur and Krum were struggling, but like Cedric, seemed to have fought through. Harry, meanwhile, seemed almost untouched by the assault. Steam rose off him from sublimating ice, and the darkness danced around him, seemingly unwilling to get too close. Then, he turned and looked into the darkness.

" _They all are,"_ he said. _"And because of that, you fear them. You try to trick and coerce them into giving up their lives, because you're afraid of them, of what they represent. You're not alive, you're a hollow parody, a pathetic copy, of life and the living, and you know it. You fear life. You fear the warmth of the sun and the light of the stars, the rush of the wind and the voices of the living. You fear it, and you hide in the darkness, you and your master, whoever or whatever he or she is. I don't know and frankly, I don't care."_

His eyes shifted from green to burning golden flames, and he raised the staff, starlight bursting forth from intricate carvings on the staff and blade, light that made the darkness scream and recoil.

" _You were wrong to refuse my offers of mercy. You were right to fear the living."_

The light burned brighter, forcing the darkness back into flickering shadows behind great columns and into distant corners. And as it did, Harry gestured with his raised spear, and the furious light condensed into living flames, taking the shapes of three firebirds; one gold, one amber-red, and one blue. Each, though, had incandescent white eyes, and each sighted a target.

" _And when whatever's left of you reaches your master,"_ Harry finished, voice rising to a roar. _**"Tell him who sent you!"**_

Then, the three phoenixes exploded outwards, hunting screams echoing around the crypt, and Harry brought the spear came down, butt-end first. There was a flash of light bright that all darkness was banished and all light swallowed, and an explosion so loud all other sound was drowned.

And when light and sound both faded, the crypt was empty once more, now in truth rather than image. For there was nothing but ash, cooling metal, and cracked, cherry-red stone left behind.

OoOoO

"Well. That was dramatic."

These were the first words that Cedric had managed to say in five minutes. Or at least, he estimated that it had been five minutes. While Harry had taken a moment to cover his eyes, and presumably Fleur's and Krum's as well, to protect them from the bright flash, the shockwave of sound had knocked them to the ground and left them stunned.

Under the circumstances, Cedric felt that he didn't mind this too much, just being glad to be alive. However, he hadn't been totally pleased to find that the wind of flight rushing past his face was not a dream of playing Quidditch, but in fact reality, a reality in which Harry was flying unaided with enviable grace and speed. This by itself would not bother him too much, as while he would admit he envied Harry that ability, he admired it more than anything else. What bothered him was the fact that he was being dragged through the air by magical ropes like a child's first toy balloon.

"Sorry about that," Harry said mildly, stopping in midair. A small white light that was hovering ahead of him stopped as well. "Can you walk? Or, better, run?"

Cedric grimaced, closed his eyes briefly, and shook himself. "Yes," he said, then glanced at Fleur and Krum who were coming out of their respective dazes.

Harry eyed him for a moment, then nodded, waving a hand sharply. The magical ropes vanished, and all three of them dropped. Cedric braced himself for impact, but found himself landing lightly on the stony floor. Before he could take more than a moment, he found himself yanked to his feet by Harry.

"No time to waste," the younger boy said briskly. "Any questions you have, ask them on the move. Oh, and this is Mari. She's an Undine, a water spirit, and I made a deal with her and her sisters to find you and get us all out in exchange for freeing them of a nasty binding keeping them down here."

The white light, which flickered briefly into the shape of a young woman, bobbed deliberately in mid-air. Cedric, a gentleman to his core, bowed slightly in response. "Um, delighted to meet you," he managed. "But… are we being followed by those wights?"

"No," Harry said, pulling Fleur and Krum to their respective feet, eyeing them for a moment and satisfying himself that they were focused, stable, and ready to move. "That would require there to be any wights left, and Mari assures me that those were the only ones."

"You destroyed _all_ of zhem?" Fleur broke in, astonished.

Even Cedric, who'd seen Harry in full flow on several occasions, was shocked. Just one of those wights had shrugged off one of his better curses, after all, as well as one of Fleur's, and she was no lightweight. Then again, he mused, Harry had also nonchalantly blasted its head into vapour, as well as having dismembered at least half a dozen other wights in absolute silence, and broken the enchantment on Cedric and the other champions with almost dismissive ease.

He'd also blasted the Entrance and Great Halls to rubble barely six months ago, and had only become more powerful since. Even with his psychic powers supposedly leashed (and Cedric was sceptical of that, considering the way in which he'd broken the enchantment), compared to that… perhaps a hundred or so undead wights in enchanted armour just didn't rate?

"Yep," Harry said, tone deceptively casual. He was wary, Cedric could tell. But of what? If a small army of wights didn't faze him – for Merlin's sake, they hadn't even made him _sweat_ – what was down here that did?

"They were a mix, I'll give 'em that," he continued. "Some human – a mix of muggles and mages there, some Sidhe, a few Avalonians…" His expression hardened. "And a few Asgardians." His wry smile returned. "Honestly, though, I'm almost disappointed."

"Disappointed?" Fleur asked, incredulous.

"Yeah," Harry said. "I had undead monsters on Halloween. You'd think they'd mix the themes up a little, wouldn't you?"

"If they are gone," Krum said. He was watching Harry carefully, and Cedric remembered the conversation the two of them had had, when Krum had suggested quite plausibly that Harry had been transformed into the unwilling successor to the Winter Soldier. "If they are gone," he repeated. "Vhy must we hurry?"

Instead of replying, Harry raised a hand suddenly, head cocked, and the other three champions fell into an uncertain silence. And for a long moment, that was all there was.

Then, a gust of air came up from the depths, coupled with a rumble that seemed to come from the very depths of the earth, resonating in their bones.

Cedric turned to Harry. "Earthquake?" he asked quietly.

"I'm not sure," Harry said, just as quietly. "Though, I do have an idea."

"Which is?"

Before Harry could answer, the ground beneath them began to shake, as there was huge grinding, rasping scrape from below.

"Which can wait," Harry said, a little manic urgency creeping into his voice. "You wanted to know why we need to hurry, Krum? Because there are things that live in the deep places of the world, things that have – largely thanks to me – been waking up, and those wights weren't among them. No, they, you see, were just the guards. Their boss is going to be much bigger, much badder, and most probably very pissed off. Now, if you want to talk, please do – but run first."

The other champions didn't need much encouragement to run after that.

"You're avoiding a fight?" Cedric asked, running as fast as he could manage, in between rasping breaths. He was not unfit by any means, but little enough of his daily routine, aside from walking around Hogwarts, included cardio, and he'd been through a lot today. Krum, always vaguely ungainly on the ground, was keeping up, but struggling. Fleur, surprisingly, was faring best of them, maintaining a swift and steady pace. Maybe it was related to her Veela heritage, he thought.

"Contrary to my reputation, I don't always charge straight in," Harry said dryly. He was holding the easy, floating stride of a professional runner, and in truth, seemed to be moving at more of a jog than anything else. "Especially not underground, on unknown terrain, with innocents potentially caught in the crossfire." He shot Cedric a serious look. "I don't know what's down here. Mari and her sisters don't know either, and believe me, I asked. They just know that it's big, it's bad, and it's absolutely bloody ancient. It's also, and I mean no disrespect when I say this, completely out of your weight class."

"But you are going to fight it?" Fleur interjected.

"Yes," Harry said. "Which, before you ask, is why I made such a big spectacle of destroying those wights – hopefully, it should make whatever's coming focus on me and me alone." He nodded at the pale light that led them on through the twisting tunnels. They had had to double back a few times – the tremors were coming at an increasing rate, and rock falls had blocked them off. "I owe Mari and her sisters their freedom, and fighting this monster, which is binding them down here, is likely the best way to get it." He paused. "By the way, Mari, if I'm right, we should be right under the entrance chamber?"

Mari bobbed. _"You are correct_ ," she said.

"Good," Harry said, slowing. "Then this is what we're going to do. I've already activated all of our emergency beacons, did it while you were unconscious. You should meet emergency personnel in the chamber or as soon as you get out. Tell them to get everyone clear."

"And you're just going to fight whatever this is alone?" Cedric demanded. "Harry, I know you're strong, but you've only got half your powers!"

Harry smiled, eyes dancing with mischief, a little wariness, and a lot of excitement. He wasn't afraid, not in the way that Cedric would happily admit that he was. Having been almost killed and transformed into an undead sentry, then told that something far, far worse was waking up beneath them, so vast and powerful that it was shaking the entire underground complex, would have that effect on a person, as it did on Fleur and Krum.

But not on Harry. No, Cedric thought, a little disturbed, Harry wasn't afraid. If anything, he was actually _enjoying_ this.

"A couple of little secrets, boys and girls," he said. "First, just because I don't like to use it as much, and I'm not as subtle with it, doesn't mean that my magic is any weaker than my psychic abilities. Second, these bands?" He raised a wrist and tapped the silver, bird inscribed band on it. "They don't turn off my psychic powers. They just prevent me from using them beyond my own body. It's why I could only break the mental enchantment on you when I was touching you. I've still got all that power… it's just turned inwards. Which means I can use it to supercharge my body." The smile turned into a smirk. "Which means that while I'm not going to be winning any arm-wrestling contests with the Hulk, I'd still have my arm afterwards if I tried."

The smirk faded, replaced by something more serious and somehow… anticipatory. "And you're making a couple of mistaken assumptions."

"What are they?" Cedric asked.

"First, that I'm planning to pull a Gandalf," Harry said. At several uncomprehending expressions, he sighed. "I'm not planning on standing and dying nobly to buy you lot some time to get out. I'm going to buy you time to get out, and should I need it, get some help. Dad, Dumbledore, Doctor Strange, MI13's stupidly powerful Helicarrier, they're all there if I need back-up."

"If?" Fleur asked, incredulous.

Harry smiled again. This smile, however, was wicked and dangerous, with a fey light to it that was mirrored in his eyes. "And we come to our second assumption," he said. "That you actually know how powerful I _really_ am."

This would have been an excellent line to close with.

Fate, however, had other plans, as the motley group stumbled into a vast, probably circular cavern. It could only be said to be probably circular as most of it wasn't visible in the darkness.

"Vhere are we?" Krum asked, frowning.

"Not the entrance chamber," Cedric said, looking around. The walls were high, and strangely ridged, with separate bands roughly as thick as an oak tree was tall.

"Our guide," Fleur said, angry and frightened, whirling on the spirit that Harry had dubbed Mari. "Where 'ave you taken us?" she demanded.

" _I… I do not understand."_

"It's not Mari's fault," Harry said, gaze darting around the vast room, shifting out of focus as he used the other senses bemused and much more ominously to Cedric's thought, worried. "Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuckitty-fuck! We've been _mazed_. But how?"

The reply came echoing up from the darkness, resonating through the stones and into their bones, in an impossibly deep and cruelly amused voice that seemed positively designed to reach in and press every button marked 'atavistic terror' and 'oh shit'.

" **Because, little thing,** _ **I**_ **willed it."**

And as that terrible voice echoed through the stones, the stones of the arch they'd came through, one that had stood for thousands of years and probably could have stood for thousands of years more, collapsed in a groaning, crumbling roar, filled with a landslide's worth of stone.

As the dust settled, Fleur and Krum immediately looked around wildly, wands drawn, looking for the speaker, Cedric, terrified as he was, looked to Harry, who Mari the spirit had dived behind with an understandable muted squeak of fear.

But Harry, astonishingly, didn't seem particularly fazed, either by the voice or the landslide that had followed.

Instead, he cracked his knuckles, rolled his shoulders, and looked around at the others, as if marking where they were. Then, he sighed a matter-of-fact sigh.

"All right then. Looks like we'll be doing it the hard way."

 **Welp, that ain't good. That ain't good at all. The monster has emerged, the dashing heroes are trapped, and once again, one of Harry's plans collapses down around his ears, because he's more or less the avatar of 'things fall apart'.**

 **But just what is this creature? Why is it in this ancient cavern/fort thing? How long has it been there? What does it want now? And how much property damage is Harry about to do? (Answer: a lot. Seriously, a lot.)**

 **Well, the answers to that will come next chapter, where this arc will culminate, with a lot of very big bangs, a considerable amount of awesomeness, a bit of** _ **sturm und drang**_ **, and a sprinkling of AC/DC. For now, this is me, signing off.**


End file.
